The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Written and Narrated By: Jon Ronson
Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
Ronson’s hilarious take on psychopathology
What starts as a hunt for the enigmatic sender of an enigmatic package, hurtles Jon Ronson on a hunt to discover what motivates us, what makes us past too-weird. What, in fact, makes us psychopaths?
He visits well-known nutbags; he visits psychologists and psychiatrists; he visits professors; he visits law enforcement. And through it all, the man is hilarious. Because with Jon Ronson, a little bit of knowledge is just fodder for his neurotic grist mill. Soon, he’s seeing psychopaths everywhere, especially after he learns Bob Hare’s checklist, the psychopath test, and how it can be applied to everyone under all circumstances.
Whenever he interviews someone, not even just the psychopaths, he’s thinking of factors that can be ticked off on the test. EVERYone is a psychopath, and he starts spazzing big time in his own inimitable style.
While The Psychopath Test was criticized a bit for not going deep enough in its investigation, I think for the layman looking to get a foot in the door, it’s a fun jaunt into the whole deal. You start wondering if the disease is the bad part, or maybe it’s the cure.
Plus it has Ronson’s fantastic writing style. When he hunkers into an institution that paints its walls a jaunty yellow in an effort to seem warm and friendly for the children who go there to be tested, he says it’s “like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.” I’m sorry, but I just eat that up.
And the way he relates dialogue! It’s fraught with hemming and hawing, uncomfortable silences, and desperate attempts to pacify some pretty high-strung people. Because, as it turns out, people who work with psychopaths, and the psychopaths themselves, have a tendency of taking things really quite seriously.
This is a short audiobook but with Ronson narrating it himself, it’s a golden, golden book. I snorted and guffawed; I got the heebie jeebies at times; I got peeved at people’s attitudes. Ronson can swing you along a big, long spectrum, all in his short books.
I strongly recommend giving The Psychopath Test for a good laugh, a wry look at a serious subject, a sobering thought every now and then.
God, I love Ronson!
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