The Converted

Inspired by a hit of Ecstasy, a 32-year-old white supremacist shows up at a Manhattan human-rights organization and declares himself an ex-piece de Aryan resistance. Vincent Nolan, the title character of Francine Prose‘s second novel, A Changed Man, which she discusses Monday at Rockhurst University, could go about his transformation in any number of ways. But he decides to do the American thing — turn his apostasy into a career move (see Brock, David).

Prose has created an unusual character in Nolan: an extremist who is not extreme. Look past his SS thunderbolt tattoos and shaved head, and he’s just a working-class Joe who has made a few bad decisions.

“There’s a lot of white supremacists in the country,” Prose tells the Pitch. “But there’s thankfully not that many reported incidents of beatings and murders by white supremacists.” Her Nolan might’ve preached white revolution, but he really just drank beer, watched TV and whined about the Jewish media. Call him an armchair Aryan.

Not long after declaring to his new friends at the World Brotherhood Watch Foundation that he wants to help them “save guys like me from becoming guys like me,” Nolan becomes the group’s media darling. He’s aware of how his story fits within the confessional TV talk-show format and how ephemeral his fame is likely to be. Someone who never really had a career now suffers career anxiety; that, along with a highly unlikely romance, provides much of the story’s tension. What Prose’s book isn’t about is racism. It has more to say about how jealousy and power struggles exist in any organization, no matter how lofty its mission.

“I wanted to look at … the way people’s complexity coexists with their desire to do good,” Prose says. “In every kind of group I’ve ever been around, there’s little judgments about status, little twinges of envy, little anxieties about one’s own place in the hierarchy, from CEOs to secretaries. That’s part of human nature.”