As it is my goal to read the books that Mary Gaitskill critiques in Somebody With a Little Hammer before I read her chapters, Cockroach was this week's book of choice. I finished it in a day while hankering down at a coffee shop after work and it was a fascinating read - not because of the prose or the intriguing stream of consciousness, but in watching the Kafka-esque devolution of the narrator, his sanity, and the plot around him.

Some people love this piece in how the author experiments with unreliable perspective and his nihilistic approach to the world around him, while others loathe this piece.  I try not to read reviews before writing my own, but in this case I saw people arguing that Cockroach was grotesque, that the unnamed narrator is an egocentric and psychotic thief with an unhealthy relationship with woman and an antisocial attitude that leads to his downfall.  I believe that this piece can be both: that we can admire the experimentation and the modern "man or monster" dichotomy that Hage has poked holes at while also despising the narrator as a character - but not the novel itself.  

Personally, I saw the narrator not necessarily as a "character" or an individual, but as a vessel in a vent piece in which Hage can dive into the underworld that is the Montreal immigrant community, the deep seated traumas of war and the many ways it manifests, the fetishization of an "othered" culture by those too privileged to experience the same, the status quos of society and the madness that comes with being trapped in a cage of ones own making.  While I haven't read Hage's other work (De Niro's Game), I found this one to be both interesting and a bit of a let down: one that was strong in the beginning and dissolved into nonsense by the end - but not in a way that brought the narrator's disheveled mental state to the forefront that it deserved.  It was a good read, an interesting read, but not as powerful as I had hoped.