Eye of a Fly is a novel by Justin R. Smith. It follows Ernest Wentworth, a slum-dwelling autistic teen in
The '60s, during his first year of college. Other characters include his drunken, emotionally abusive father Harry, his mother Patricia, his artistically talented but emotionally troubled younger brother Warren, his outgoing ten-year-old sister Tiffany, and Annie, a brain-damaged girl with whom he falls in love.
Eye of a Fly contains examples of:
- Bilingual Dialogue: Ernest overhears a couple loudly arguing in Spanish and shouting death threats in English.
- Bizarre Taste in Food: Warren makes his own meals, like ice cream with mustard and hamburger with orange juice spread over it.
- Bungled Suicide: Twice Patricia has swallowed roach poison. Both times Ernest had to spend the night in the hospital while they pumped her stomach.
- Car Meets House: A car smashes into a corner pet store, destroying the cheaply-made building and killing a family on the second floor.
- Chalk Outline: While leaving his apartment building, Ernest almost steps on the body of a girl who was murdered right outside. He arrives just as the police are wrapping up their investigation. When they remove the corpse, they leave a chalk outline.
- Child Prodigy: Ernest taught himself calculus when he was eight.
- Dead Man Writing: Harry writes a letter to Ernest as he's dying of multiple organ failure, confessing how he and his gang mugged and murdered a man when he was fifteen.
- Distant Finale: As a middle-aged man in The '90s, Ernest revisits his childhood neighborhood with his wife Erika while researching for a book.
- Driven to Suicide: Warren's depression finally gets the better of him, and he drinks an entire quart of ant poison. He lingers for about a week before finally dying. Aunt Cynthia is so despondent that she commits suicide herself with sleeping pills.
- Dyeing for Your Art: In-universe example. Ernest meets an actress who eats chocolate truffles to gain weight for her next role.
- Friend to All Children: Annie works at the Day Care Center, where she does most of the childcare. She's popular with kids due to her storytelling abilities.
- Grade Skipper: Ernest skipped a grade in elementary school and was in a program that let him finish junior high in two years instead of three, allowing him to start college at sixteen.
- Gratuitous French: Ernest's Aunt Jocelyn likes dropping random French words and phrases into her sentences, because "I think français is so much more élégant than a guttural tongue like English."
- Happily Failed Suicide: When Annie was thirteen, she tried to throw herself and her baby brother off a bridge because her father planned to force her into prostitution to pay for his addiction, and she thought the whole family would be better off dead. Instead she fell down and was run over by a truck, resulting in brain damage that destroyed her ability to read and left her with regular seizures. Her uninjured brother was put up for adoption, while she was placed in an abusive foster home and later spent time homeless. Things started looking up for her after Father Maldonado took her in and let her stay and work at the Day Care Center, and now she considers the truck accident to be a gift from God because it prevented her from killing herself.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Annie pushes a little boy out of the way of a truck, then has a seizure and is hit by a car before she can get to safety.
- Inkblot Test: Ronald eagerly describes how his analyst gave him a Rorschach test, which showed him that he sees the world as a giant breast. Harry mutters, "You need an analyst to tell you that?"
- It's All My Fault: After Warren's suicide, Harry tearfully discusses how he should have supported him and not made fun of his learning difficulties.
- Kids Prefer Boxes: When Ernest was little, his mother gave him a present wrapped in red cellophane. Ernest was entranced by the way the light shone through the cellophane and stared at it all day. Then his mother ruined it by opening the present.
- Lives in a Van: Annie used to live in a car after she ran away from her abusive foster home.
- Meaningful Name: Ernest thinks it's fitting that his immigrant grandfather was born Alex Molotov. Bursts of violence are a family tradition.
- Noble Savage: Harry loves talking about the Immaculate Savage, whose perceptions haven't been clouded by contact with civilization and its fascist thought control. He thinks that even knowing how to read pollutes the soul, which makes Ernest wonder if he's afraid of polluting other people's souls by working as a writer.
- Potty Failure: After Warren attempts suicide and Ernest thinks he sees Annie cheating on him, Ernest has an emotional breakdown while walking home and becomes incapable of processing anything he sees or hears. When he recovers, he finds that he made it to his bedroom, but he soiled the bed.
- Raging Stiffie: To Ernest's embarrassment, even casual interactions with attractive women leave him with uncontrollable sexual thoughts and a visible erection, but sexual encounters leave him cold, which is why he's still a virgin.
- Sensory Overload: Ernest finds yelling painful and crowds overwhelming. Things get especially bad late in the book when he has an emotional breakdown that messes up his sensory processing, causing every sight and sound to seem painful and nonsensical before he shuts down completely and walks home in a zombie-like state.
- Sibling Rivalry: Warren hates Tiffany, for reasons Ernest can't discern.
- Skipping School: Warren skips an entire month of school. He tells Harry he spent the time playing handball by himself.
- Spiteful Spit: Ernest's Aunt Faith used to occasionally take him to church. When his antireligious father found out, he went to the church and spat at the minister.
- Stress Vomit: Ernest vomits into a toilet before his date with Annie.
- Suicide by Pills: After Warren succumbs to his depression and kills himself by drinking ant poison, Aunt Cynthia becomes so despondent that she eventually follows suit by overdosing on sleeping pills.
- Tantrum Throwing: Warren once threw a TV at Tiffany.
- True Art Is Angsty: Harry, who dreams of writing the Great American Novel, seems to believe this.
Patricia: You wrote twenty-five pages about taking a shit? That's your fucking work of art?
Harry: It's a metaphor for life, goddamn it! You strain and strain, and it never comes out the way you want.
- Wretched Hive: Ernest's neighborhood was once a fetid swamp. Now it has the highest murder rate in the US. One book describes it as "a slum as old, as desolate, as depraved as any that can be found in the land." By the Distant Finale, the crime rate has gone down and the economy has improved enough that it's actually a pleasant place now.
- Your Makeup Is Running: Ernest sees an underage prostitute with a bruise on her cheek and big streaks of makeup running from her eyes.
