The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, or Recursive Storytelling

I just finished a two day half-marathon read of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson. That's a little misleading - I'll try again.

I just finished a two day half-marathon read about an author telling the story of how he wrote the story he called The Psychopath Test. The author doesn't write about a psychopath test so much as he writes about him writing about a psychopath test. And it just gets worse. He begins with what seems like an anecdote about a book given to various academics - and it remains an anecdote! It hardly matters to the rest of the book.

So yes, there is a psychopath test, but you don't hear about it until about page 60 (of only 191), and if there was a "journey through the madness industry" then it was intereupted in the telling by so many random stories, self-recriminations, anxiety attacks, and various junk that it gets completely lost. He ends up attending this seminar about a check-list used to identify psychopaths and subsequently uses what he learns (in a three day period) to diagnose people he knows and people he meets as psychopaths. It comes across as ludicrous. Eventually he reasses the use of the test, and does some actual journalism but by then I was so lost in the recursive storytelling that I didn't care.

The only reason I kept reading were the vary sparse instances of actual journalist merit. There were some interesting stories about alternative treatments for psychopaths done with LSD in the 1960's, and there were a few interesting stories about Scientology and psychologists. Done. It could have been an under the page column in a small town newspaper. A small town High School newspaper. You'd get better prose.