Crime and Punishment, the Reader's Digest Version: "The Plan" by Sigrid Nunez

There is a rather telegraphed moment of foreshadowing in the second paragraph of Sigrid Nunez's "The Plan," the twelfth story in the 2019 Best American Short Stories collection. As it begins, Roden Jones, whose name we do not know yet nor anything about the fact that he is planning to kill his wife, is hanging out outside the Lincoln Center. He is resolving to "get more culture" once "it" is done, although, again, we don't know what "it" is yet. He is looking at the fountain and sees rainbows in the spray. "He had started to walk closer to get a better view, though, of course, as soon as he did that the rainbows disappeared."

All we know at that point is that the story is called "The Plan" and that when the main character looks closely into something, it isn't what he thought anymore. A perceptive reader is already going "best laid plans, something, something gang agley" by now.

Not too much later on, we find out it's a murder story. Not a mystery, but the psychological chronicle of a murder as the murderer plots it and carries it out, much like Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky or "The Tell-Tale Heart" or "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe. Generally, a story like this can go one of two ways: it can try to peel back the veil over the mind of the murderer, offering some insight into the human psyche through the example of a mind that is broken, or it can try to thrill or frighten us by minimizing explanations, like in Child of God by Cormac McCarthy.

If we take Dostoevsky and Poe as illustrations, we might find there is kind of a spectrum here. Dostoevsky dwells deeply on the rationale of his killer. We may not get to any final cause for Raskolnikov and why he kills the pawn-broker and her half-sister, but it's not for lack of trying. The enjoyment of the novel is in its ability to sink deep through its imaginative and sympathetic power into the mind of the killer. "The Cask of Amontillado" is not at all ambivalent about its killer's motives. It's a revenge story. "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge." It's right there in sentence number one. We apparently love this kind of story, because they can't seem to make enough movies like this. We might be a little shocked at the method of death the killer chooses, but we secretly love it. 

The same can't be said for "The Tell-Tale Heart." We get attempts at an explanation: something about the old man's eye bothered the killer. But that's not really much of an explanation, is it? We want to know why it bothered him so much. But this half-explanation defies more peeling away. It's more terrifying than no reason at all, because no reason leaves us to assume we are just missing information. A reason like that makes us think the real reason is ineffable, and that human behavior and thinking is not rational and therefore beyond our control. That's the same territory as Child of God. 

The Plan of "The Plan" 

Nunez kind of pulls from all of these models. There are plenty of attempts to give us a motive for the killer, and we get a lot of deep looks into the mind of the killer, Roden Jones. But the sheer surplus of possible explanations almost serves to leave us with none, or possibly one that isn't really all that interesting. What are the possible explanations? For most of the story, we are led to believe his victim or intended victim will be his wife, Harley. This changes at the last moment, so most of the thoughts Roden has don't really apply to his eventual target. 

1) Explanation Number One: He's just a born killer, and it was only a matter of time before he did something like this. 

He has a hard time pinning down the exact moment he decided to "subtract" his wife, and he thinks that "sometimes it seemed as if the idea had always existed." Later, as he is running down his list of reasons he wants to kill her so he doesn't get distracted, he ends with this: "And there was something else, something that had started long before he'd ever met Harley. By high school, it had already become a habit. He'd pick out a certain person because of something about her, maybe the way she talked, or the way she dressed or wore her makeup or her hair...And he'd feel a flood of venom and think, She is a candidate." 

This is the closest the story comes to going the "answer that is no answer" route. He wants to kill because it's just always been in him. He thought he'd grow out of it, but he didn't. And when he thinks about how much he wants to kill, "the wildness of his own imagination shook him to the core." This possible reading moves the story from a thriller to a horror story. The reasons people do terrible things are ineffable, even to those who do them. 

2. Explanation Number Two: He thinks Harley is in the way of him developing as a person. 

This is actually the first reason he gives himself. He is trying to keep his mind focused on "the reason Harley had to die," and the first thing he puts out is that although he is "on the verge of an important discovery," he also feels that "Harley was in the way. Her very existence was holding him back, preventing him from being who he was meant to be."

3. Explanation Number Three: His own pride dictates that he murder her. 

But he so sooner proposes explanation two than his mind overwrites it with what he claims is the real truth: "The truth was, he couldn't bear to live with the mistake he'd made, the humiliation of it." That is, he realizes he shouldn't have married her, but it would be humiliating to get a divorce, so it's better to kill her. That's narratively a lot more interesting. It would get us into ineffable territory--it's a humorous reason to an outsider to kill someone, because it's such absurd overkill to solve a small problem of embarrassment through murder. However, it's also so hard to imagine how he could actually take action based on this reasoning, we're left with a scary, inscrutable mind. But this explanation is also, like #2, wiped away as soon as it is proposed. The final explanation he gives is #1, that "he'd pick out a certain person" habit he's had for a long time. Maybe he was just born that way. 

So far, we have three explanations, none of which the killer himself is quite committed to in his own psyche, as the narrator has presented that psyche to us. Ultimately, he ends up ambivalent to what his reasons are: "She has to die because he has to kill someone, and she is the obvious candidate. He isn't going to waste a lot of time thinking about whether or not she deserves to die." 

I can think of someone who would have been really good at guessing the end of this story. It's about the same script he sees every week.  

4. The boring explanation: he's a misogynistic atheist. 

We have a number of interesting possible explanations, all competing with each other. But I'm afraid there's a much less interesting explanation that seems to outweigh them all from a textual evidence standpoint, one the killer himself isn't so aware of, but which the reader picks up on through a multitude of thoughts and actions. Roden hates women, hates them so much he's only focused on them as his targets. There are a number of passages in the book that highlight his hatred of women.

From the moment we meet him, sitting alone outside the Lincoln Center, he is worried about whether a man by himself looks suspicious. He's got the incel unjustified male martyr complex down. On the train, he and a number of other men are watching a girl's thighs as she sleeps while wearing a short skirt. She wakes up and gives him a dirty look for leering at her, which he immediately chalks up to what hypocritical whores women all are. "Wearing a skirt that all but exposed your crotch when you sat down, being outraged when men took notice--that was women." It's like I'm reading a version of men based on an angry person's Facebook page.

There are a number of other cliches. He's ashamed of having sex. He visits a prostitute. At his wedding, he is warned that women stop putting out when the wedding happens. He only dreams of killing women, not men. At a friend's wedding, he thinks about the conspiratorial nature of women huddled together.

Add to this that he is an atheist. "He was not a child anymore, the fear of God has long left him. He hadn't believed in God since he was ten years old."

Maybe I'm just a little miffed from comments of the Attorney General the other day, another tiresome "Atheism is to blame for social ills" diatribe, but I found this detail about the killer annoying. It's commonly believed that atheists are more likely to be serial killers, but it ain't true. (That last link also suggests "spiritual" people are more likely to suffer from certain mental illnesses than atheists, although Barr suggested the rise of mental illness stems from abandoning religion.)

Roden ends up killing the prostitute he's been visiting, along with the old man who is in the reception area. That's because Harley leaves him before he can kill her, and he's got to kill someone. The closing lines could have come from any third-rate crime drama on TV:

"He didn't think Marilyn deserved to die. But he didn't feel bad for her, either. She was a whore, and whores got murdered all the time. It was one of the things whores were for."

That's some straight SVU shit right there. We had three interesting possible motives, but ultimately it dissolved into the guy's a woman-hating asshole. It's fine for a character to be something other than likeable, but he shouldn't be contemptible. Someone we feel contempt for isn't scary. His motives aren't ineffable, they're just not well understood by the narrator, which is different and much less interesting for a crime story. After teasing us with a character who might be worth considering, we are left with someone who isn't frightening or challenging or thought-provoking. He's just sad.

I guess you could argue that there really are sad people like this, and that the story is just presenting a real case of a murderer. They're not people to admire. They're just sorry pieces of crap who bide their time waiting for an opportunity, justifying themselves however they need to. Maybe that's true. I don't know. I'm not an expert on serial killers. But whether it's true or not, a story about a person who barely even rises to the level of meriting my hatred makes for rather dull reading, especially when the writing resorts to a couple of cliches along the way to try rather cheaply to excite my hatred.