Christy Malry's Own Double-Entry

Just a very odd novel from avant-garde novelist B.S. Johnson. A young man, sickened by society, devises a system to even the score with others based on double-entry bookkeeping. Settling the accounts involves acts of revenge like vandalism, hoaxes, bearing false witness, bombing, and ultimately the poisoning of a city’s water supply with cyanide. Before her death, Malry’s mother utters these words to her son:

We fondly believe that there is going to be a reckoning, a day upon which all injustices are evened out, when what we have done will beyond doubt be seen to be right, when the light of our justification blazes forth upon the world. But we are wrong: learn, then, that there is not going to be any day of reckoning, except possibly by accident. It seems that enough accidents happen for it to be a hope or even an expectation for most of us, the day of reckoning. But we shall die untidily, when we did not properly expect it, in a mess, most things unresolved, unreckoned, reflecting that it is all chaos. Even if we understand that all is chaos, the understanding itself represents a denial of chaos, and must therefore be an illusion (30).

– Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973)