Bullet in the Brain

There’s a risk in being a critic: the risk of becoming blasé. Most people read a book or go to the movies to be entertained. Critics, though, read book after book or watch film after film, not because they want to, but because their readership demands their guidance. Reviewers may tire of the mediocre works they must absorb. Often, they witness the same plot repeatedly until they want to scream. In “Bullet in the Brain,” one such critic already feels exhausted by his life and the endless parade of boring books he must read and condemn. Spiritually dead, his worldview charred by embers of perpetual anger, he meets his unintentional executioner with crazed laughter.

Anders, his own life marinated in fiction, sees everything around him as poorly designed make-believe. His frustration with the ever-imperfect world spills over at the very moment his life is in peril. The story ponders how the arrogance of criticism might degrade a critic’s personality to the point of nervous collapse. To heighten tension, Wolff speculates how such a breakdown would unfold during a bank robbery. Anders’s running commentary during the bank robbery bespeaks a man who, saturated with works of fiction in his career, no longer can shut off his critical mind, to the point where he puts his own life in danger.