Hello!
It’s October, one of the busiest times of the literary year for new releases, and in keeping with the spirit of the season, this month’s post features three novels that came out this year. These books are each in some way unconventional in terms of structure, and though the prose styles differ dramatically, all three writers share a heightened level of attention to the relationship between meaning and form at all levels, especially the sentence-level. There is nothing casual or offhand about the writing in these three! They also each happen to be in conversation with older texts in a way that is explicitly acknowledged through their titles or section headings.
Before we dive in, however, I want to share that my review of ‘Pemi Aguda’s fantastic debut story collection Ghostroots just went live on Friday at The Hopkins Review, and I hope you’ll check it out as a bonus, in addition to this post! Ghostroots came out in May 2024 and was recently long-listed for the National Book Award, which is especially remarkable for an indie debut story collection. The NBA long list is actually quite short; for those of you non-litfic nerds out there, only ten books were selected out of 473 entries. (James by Percival Everett, one of my picks for this month, also made the list, as well as Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr, which I covered in April’s “Spring Mix”.) There’s no paywall on web features at The Hopkins Review, and my review is more of a deep-dive than I do here on the Substack. Ghostroots is one of the best contemporary story collections I’ve read in the past few years, and if you enjoy short fiction, I hope this might inspire you to check it out!
And now, back to this month’s experimental novel trio…
Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro (released September 2024)
“(Now the difficult part. The girl at the bus station. The old man in the woods. You fleshsacks will want to look away. You must bear witness.)”
Two-Step Devil is Jamie Quatro’s second novel and third book, and it’s her best work yet in my view: a deep-thinking and heart-wrenching page-turner with sharp literary teeth. I first became a fan of Quatro’s fiction through her debut short story collection, I Want to Show You More. I was so moved by her more recent debut New Yorker story, “Yogurt Days,” on the Writer’s Voice podcast that I wrote her a fan letter, to which she very graciously replied. Though the style of “Yogurt Days” is more realist and conventional than Two-Step Devil, the story is a perfect introduction to her more fundamental strengths as a writer. Along with her taut prose, she writes especially round and deep characters and has a penchant for putting secular and religious mindsets in conversation with each other, diminishing neither and doing justice to their complexities.
Two-Step Devil feels more vulnerable to spoilers than some, so I won’t get into its premise beyond encouraging you to read the jacket copy. Let’s just say that Quatro has constructed, at its core, a fairly simple story into which she has woven intractable moral knots. I suspect I will remember the main characters and plotline far longer than many other books I’ve read because of how firmly and organically the book’s central concerns and questions are embedded in the characters’ circumstances and actions. More than any other contemporary novel I’ve encountered, Quatro has figured out how to engage age-old theological questions and highly charged political questions through an emotionally resonant (but not at all sentimental) story that resists tidy answers. It evokes for me the Biblical story of the wrestling match between Jacob and the angel: the two struggle against each other all night, and though there’s no clear triumph, one of the two will limp forever afterward.
I also admire Quatro’s bold perspective and formatting moves. The book’s four sections are labeled after Biblical books and genres, and though they do not necessarily cohere to those genre conventions (“Song of Songs,” for instance, is not written as Hebrew poetry), they raise interesting questions for readers familiar with the Biblical subtext. In some interviews, including a recent one on the 7 A.M. novelist podcast, Quatro has noted that the structure of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury was at one point a model for Two-Step, and “Song of Songs” is inspired by Quentin Compson’s section of TSaF in its focus on one crucial day in the life of its narrator. The third section, “Gospel,” takes the form of a one-act play starring the devil, also known in the book as Two-Step, and I can’t help but hear Jason Compson’s voice echoed in Two-Step’s, not as a derivation from the earlier work but in dialogue with it. I don’t think you need to be familiar with the Bible or Faulkner’s novel to enjoy Two-Step because the central arc and characters of the latter are so strong on their own, but I did love the extra dimension these intertextual layers provide.
This is one you’ll fly through reading in a weekend (or maybe even an afternoon) but still be thinking about long afterward.
James by Percival Everett (released March 2024)
“I paused, unsure of my diction, whether to speak as myself or as a slave. I made the safe choice. ‘I is, suh.’”
This book has gotten a lot of very well-deserved attention and as mentioned above was recently long-listed for the National Book Award. In this fascinating “Between the Covers” conversation, Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor propose that the best response to problematic literature is not to cancel the writer but to simply make new and better art. And Everett has done that in James. Rather than writing “against” Twain or indicting the earlier work for its flaws, Everett has responded to the limitations of Twain’s work by making an entirely new and necessary piece of art. Here, James (depicted as Jim in Huck Finn) is the protagonist of the book, and his quest to free his family and be reunited with them is the central struggle, set against his larger existential quest to express himself and find meaning in his life in a society that systematically disregards his humanity.
For me, reading this book initially felt a little like reading two books at once, as I started out reading James through the lens of my memories of Huck Finn. Fairly quickly, however, Everett had me revisiting my memories of Huck Finn through this new lens of James. Along with the many new dimensions added to James as a character, Everett reinterprets the use of dialects and integrates this into the plot in satisfying and often comic ways, adds memorable new characters and subplots, poses his own interpretations for some of the age-old Huck Finn discussion questions (e.g. whether and why Jim deliberately withholds Pap’s identity from Huck when they find his body in the floating house), and most gratifyingly, dramatically diverges from Twain’s ending. Like Twain, however, Everett exploits every possible opportunity for irony to great effect.
This is the rare book that will transcend its narrow historical moment, a gem of a contribution to the body of American literature. It’s also just a great story, well told.
God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer by Joseph Earl Thomas (released June 2024)
“Though I’m learning, however slowly, or too fast, depending on who you ask, the more appropriate role of confession, to admit more openly and more often that these things are conditionally my fault, to quit making everything so complicated, apologize, and seek redemption in the classroom, on the internet, in the bowels of the home or bottom of the river, through careful, devoted, and unceasing attention to others’ needs.”
The last pick, God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is Joseph Earl Thomas’s debut novel, set in a hospital emergency department in a predominantly Black community in North Philly. This neighborhood is also home to Holmesburg Prison, known for doing skin experiments on Black inmates for many years until it was shut down. In the novel, the prison is still open and plays a role in the lives of many of its characters. The protagonist, Joey, is especially haunted by his fear of ending up there, where many of his relatives have spent time. That said, he finds himself just as readily trapped by other, less overtly menacing but still dehumanizing institutions like his current job as an ER tech and previously as a medic in the U.S. Army on deployment in Iraq.
Within the span of a single ER shift, Joey is confronted with trying to meet all levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy at once. Like many Americans, he feels the pressure to work long hours in a stressful job to meet his obligations to his family, but this job forces him into many complicated moral situations where he must balance his basic need to survive the shift with his desire to do right by the people charged to his care. Some have done horrible things but are also in horrible situations, and even in his own relatively powerless position, Joey has some power over how they will be treated. He is also just really hungry and tired, trying to find a moment in which he can wolf down an over-processed muffin.
According to an interview with Thomas at the Politics & Prose bookstore, the title also refers to Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical 1965 novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. Like Vonnegut, Thomas sees the traditional tools of realism as inadequate to the task of depicting reality and reaches instead for a more experimental approach. In Otis Spunkmeyer, this results in a hyper-detailed, tangential stream-of-consciousness style with acrobatic sentences and a mash-up of registers that reflect the many dimensions of Joey’s personality and experience. The first sentence is a perfect example: “Of all the Level 1 trauma centers in one young though very old nation, it’s this one, on the north side of a northeastern middling city where we wear teal scrubs stained with shit which, in this context, helps signify the unbearability of true pleasure in the world.”
I admired this book for its bravura and effort to capture the full complexity and nuance of reality. It’s a messy yet extremely controlled novel, written as if to defy easy categorization about a character who defies easy categorization.
Thanks as always for reading, and I hope you'll consider sharing this post with a friend if you think they might enjoy it!
Warmly,
Jules
P.S. Next month’s post will come out a week later than usual, but I should be back to the first week of the month after that!
How cool, I met Joseph Earl at Bread Loaf. His reading was great.