Books that examine devaiant behavior, mental illness, crime and criminals, etc.

July 3, 2006 1:36 PM

I've just read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Now I'm looking for other books that have a somewhat similar sort of subject matter...

I'm looking for books that actually attempt to come to grips with the derelicts, the outcasts, the mentally ill, criminals, those who don't fit in, and/or the institutions that deal with these people (successfully or unsuccessfully); books that don't treat the "criminal"/"deviant" as nothing more than a mechanism to drive the plot forward (no shallow crime/mystery novels).

In the past I've read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and A Clockwork Orange. These are a couple of examples of the sort of thing I'm looking for. Though, suggestions need not be of the same or similar style to these books or Crime and Punishment. Also, suggestions definitely do not need to be works of fiction. In fact, I would also appreciate a few suggestions for psychological/philisophical nonfiction books (or even documentaries) that delve into this kind of subject matter as well.

posted by Stauf to Media & Arts (33 answers total)

Try Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park - a little lighter but just as interesting from a russian perspective.
posted by ptm at 1:39 PM on July 3, 2006

You'd probably dig The Professor and the Madman, then. Fascinating history of the OED, as well as a riveting look into the mind of a brilliant but absolutely mad American. It's a real page-turner. Non-fiction, of course.
posted by middleclasstool at 1:39 PM on July 3, 2006

Discipline & Punish : The Birth of the Prison
by Michel Foucault
posted by j-urb at 1:43 PM on July 3, 2006

Movie instead of book, but Shallow Grave featuring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Eccleston is a great movie on the same tip as C&P.
posted by furtive at 1:44 PM on July 3, 2006

Also, I think this may be up your alley...

In the Belly of the Beast : Letters From Prison
by Jack Henry Abbott
posted by j-urb at 1:48 PM on July 3, 2006

I'm going to recommend a couple of books I was just recommending to another MeFite the other day --- Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth and Games of the Blind by Evelin Sullivan.

Andre Gide's The Immoralist is one of my favorites and is very much along the lines you've described.

Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault is a pretty good novel about a Cambridge graduate student who becomes obsessed with a deviant French novelist who is locked up in an insane asylum.
posted by jayder at 2:11 PM on July 3, 2006

Batavia's Graveyard : The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny

I loved this book, and it's non-fiction
posted by gregariousrecluse at 2:22 PM on July 3, 2006

The Devil in the White City. As a bonus, you also get a fascinating look at the 1898 World's Fair.
posted by BackwardsCity at 2:34 PM on July 3, 2006

That one is nonfiction.

For fiction, have you read Lolita? Also, you might look at Project X by Jim Shepard, which is a psychological portrait of an American school shooter.
posted by BackwardsCity at 2:38 PM on July 3, 2006

Perhaps this is too obvious, but Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground fits the bill.
posted by mullacc at 2:57 PM on July 3, 2006

Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which actually quotes from Crime & Punishment at one point.
posted by granted at 3:06 PM on July 3, 2006

Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin (epistolary novel from the POV of a mother trying to understand her son, a Columbine-style murderer).

Pretty much anything by the neo-Gothic novelist Patrick McGrath, I'd say (try Asylum).

From my usual home, the nineteenth century: Caroline Clive's Paul Ferroll (man murders wife, gets away with it), Wilkie Collins' Armadale (a wonderfully unscrupulous female protagonist), James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Gothic-cum-split personality-cum-Antinomianism), Henry James' The Turn of the Screw (are those ghosts real or not?), Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right (the titular "he" becomes monomaniacal about his wife).
posted by thomas j wise at 3:11 PM on July 3, 2006

Knut Hamsun's Hunger has more than a little of the deviant and outcast in it...
posted by hototogisu at 3:31 PM on July 3, 2006

I was blown away by In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Capote gets into the minds of the two men who killed an entire family.
posted by meta87 at 3:34 PM on July 3, 2006

Kafka's The Trial.
posted by exogenous at 3:56 PM on July 3, 2006

You might try Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schultz. (Synopsis at the link.)
posted by sophie at 4:00 PM on July 3, 2006

The Stranger by Camus.
Homecoming by Peter Handke.
posted by OmieWise at 4:27 PM on July 3, 2006

You might like to try Dostoevsky's Devils , also known as The Possessed. It deals with all sorts of mischief, criminality, and evil, as well as their philosophical reprecussions. Plus, its quite a fun read. Although it is a serious piece, Dostoevsky lets his sense of humor show a bit.
posted by honeyx at 4:34 PM on July 3, 2006

Corruption by Tahar Ben Jelloun has a sort of light treatment of what it means to be only a little corrupt when you're surrounded with high level chaos. It's very in the main character's head as he grapples with this which is what I liked about it.

I've been slowly reading The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi which is a reflection [40 years after the fact] of life in concentration camps with a specific attention to how people deal with the fluid notions of evil, criminal and right and wrong.

Disgrace by JM Coetzee is about coming to terms with the moral relativism of the frontier and the different choices that a father and daughter make [the wikipedia blurb isn't super like what I thought the book was about]
posted by jessamyn at 4:42 PM on July 3, 2006

I always thought Native Son had some interesting parallels.
posted by rbs at 5:28 PM on July 3, 2006

I have a copy of "Eccentric And Bizarre Behaviors" by Franzini and Grossberg. It's dry, but contains all kinds of detailed stuff and case histories.

Robert Ressler's "Whoever Fights Monsters", by the guy who invented the term "serial killer" and the practice of "profiling" which has sustained so much modern fiction, is a compelling read.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 6:21 PM on July 3, 2006

Welcome to the world of Russian literature. It's really addictive. Crime and Punishment is one of the most satisfying novels I have ever read twice. I am sure it is not long until I read it again.

The Devils is a difficult book, but a rewarding one. My favourite, however, is Brothers Karamazov. It has a lot of the great features of Crime and Punishment, but develops the ideas even further. Some parts of it can be read on their own. Try the Grand Inquisitor. If you like it, you might want to commit yourself to the whole book. Even Laura Bush likes it.

If you get interested in the idea of evil, try Bulgakov's Master and Maragarita. I hate to recommend it because everybody does, and it's everybody's favorite Russian novel, but still, it's just such a great read. I think I may start reading it again after I write this.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 7:11 PM on July 3, 2006

I really enjoyed a book called Daylight and Darkness in New York. Originally published in 1892, it is a "record of personal experiences by day and night in the great metropolis" by a temperance worker, a journalist, and a famous detective. Profusely illustrated. A great snapshot of the history of attitudes toward criminality and poverty in this country.
posted by macinchik at 7:13 PM on July 3, 2006

Response by poster: Fantastic guys... my book list is growing larger...
posted by Stauf at 7:16 PM on July 3, 2006

I don't know how much it has in common with Crime and Punishment, but William S. Burroughs' Junky fits the bill otherwise.

I, too, thought of Hamsun's Hunger as mentioned above.
posted by bevedog at 8:27 PM on July 3, 2006

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks fits what you're asking for. Very ... odd characters, very messed up. And, in my memory at least, it's feel is right for the other books you've started with.

I'm always careful about recommending this book to people, it's not exactly mainstream. Which I think is a good thing of course.
posted by shelleycat at 8:41 PM on July 3, 2006

The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, both by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, are both awesome books.
posted by wilful at 9:12 PM on July 3, 2006

John Steinbeck: The Winter of Our Discontent (classic slippery-slope of success/evil, etc)
Perfume - The Story of a Murderer : Patrick Suskind (story based on very deviant charc., specifically about man without sense of smell/scent)
Herman Hesse: Demian (awareness of individual/existential themes, less on crime)
posted by ejaned8 at 9:28 PM on July 3, 2006

Ripley Bogle by Robert McLiam Wilson: a novel about a down-on-his-luck college-dropout turned tramp - not in the same league as Dostoyevsky, but I remember enjoying it.
And maybe William T. Vollmann’s The Rainbow Stories: which includes tales about neo-Nazi skinheads, alcoholic vagrants, and drug-addicted prostitutes.
posted by misteraitch at 10:13 PM on July 3, 2006

The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
posted by hortense at 1:15 AM on July 4, 2006

Seconding Gulag Archipelago (read I and II and then check out Tolstoy's Resurrection), In Cold Blood, and Devil in the White City.

I'd add Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Dostoyevsky's House of the Dead (really, anything by Dostoyevsky), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Sanyika Shakur's Monster: The Autobiography of an LA Gang Member, and Machete season: the killers in Rwanda speak.
posted by jenh at 8:19 AM on July 4, 2006

Diary of a Rapist by Evan Connell
posted by londongeezer at 4:58 PM on July 4, 2006

Patrick McCabe's "The Butcher Boy" might suit you too. Also a film, but read the book first if you can.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 5:05 PM on July 4, 2006