Work hard, read deeply. Three Labor Day picks from the staff of the Review.
“Art is so embarrassing, and if it isn’t at first blush, just give it a few years, it will be.”
This is the sort of winking line that emerges when poet Sam Sax, author of the collections PIG and bury it, steps into the ruminative space of fiction. I spoil nothing of Sax’s debut novel, Yr Dead, when I share that Ezra—the young, loner, queer, secular Jewish protagonist—ultimately dies, as an act of protest, by self-immolation in the streets of New York City. One fraught election and a tower-owning president provide the clearest indicators of the year that bookends Ezra’s life—some version of 2016.
The novel is comprised of largely untitled vignettes that seldom exceed one or two pages. These glinting flares of prose illuminate Ezra’s life like matches held to a portrait in the dark. Although Yr Dead encompasses Ezra’s time on earth from start to finish, the story does not neatly unfold from start to finish. One moment, Ezra is a teenager in their hometown drinking forties with their surprisingly brawny cohort: “I say shitheads but mean only boys. I say boys and mean some kind of mollusk, hard-shelled with tender meat inside.” Flip the page and they are alone in their last apartment in the city—nighttime, lights off—listening to the men who smoke and laugh on the streetcorner below. Unseen and unheard by the men, Ezra jokes to the empty room: “Get this guys. Knock knock: this is it.” These episodic vignettes share a hazier, more intimate relationship than linearity or logic.
In other instances, Sax strengthens the emotional momentum of certain narrative threads by placing distance between them. Early on in the text, Ezra—alive—goes to a gay bar called Nowhere because it is Tuesday and they are a regular. In this moment, Nowhere is a warm, liberating space. Closer to the end of the novel, Ezra—dead—reflects on the substance-fueled “haze” they constantly “curated as a way to survive [their] own mind.” And the cold clarity of their tonal shift left me feeling somehow implicated and adrift in the soft delusions I had previously indulged. By allowing people, places, symbols, rituals, and stories to accrue layers of meaning with each iteration in which they appear, Sax expertly keeps the reader in a cyclical state of reevaluation.
Yr Dead takes shape as a retrospective in the present tense, as if Ezra’s life demands not just to be remembered but relived. As a narrator, Ezra is self-conscious of time, viewing themself, their relationships, and the world through a lens of painful immediacy and restlessness: “Time soldiers forward, predictable and slow as a bone healing wrong, and sometimes all you want to do is light a fire to see what burns or breaks.” The passage of time is felt by Ezra acutely rather than chronically, not so much year-to-year as through intertwining moments of personal and external impact like breakups, tattoo appointments, and hospitalizations, as well as rising global temperatures, extinctions, and riots. One section begins, “I can tell where and when I am based on what cigarette I happen to be smoking,” and Ezra goes on to list the brands smoked by each of their exes. I find there to be so much truth in this interior frame of reference; these are the granular details that vividly survive in memory, even when the relationships they signify have long dissolved. It’s in the thoughtful minutiae of constructing a consciousness aware not just of the surrounding world, but of itself, that Sax rather brilliantly walks the line between satisfying storytelling and associative, nonlinear meditations.
Ezra’s final act of protest may remind you, like it did me, of a time in February when the nation watched as a twenty-five-year-old serviceman set himself on fire at the gates of the Israeli embassy in protest of the atrocities in Gaza. It is uncanny to read Ezra describe the photos of their own demise “like something from a movie.” Sax completed the final draft of this novel before Aaron Bushnell’s death, to be clear. A fact that might tempt one to label it prophetic, though I would resist such an interpretation: Sax only needed to pay attention to what was already happening in the world. (And what continues to happen in the world.) Ezra, who is often online, describes this era of virtual witnessing as an imperfect “portal into the suffering of others.” They think,
There is how the news story exists in image and in text, and then there is how that story is actually a person’s entire life in sobbing and warped metal. Empathy eats you alive. You can only survive by separating these two, by reading the news and not connecting the whole wet network of human suffering to the breath you are currently taking into your lungs. And if you cannot do this, well, what else is a person to do?
Despite Ezra’s general slipperiness as a narrator, they give a bitterly accurate self-read here. They “fail” at this project of separation and therefore of survival, the story implies. More importantly, though, Sax seems to be naming the impossibility of striking some balance that could be called success. Ezra’s question presses more urgently on me every day. If you feel similarly, you might find solace and visibility, as well as humor and heartbreak, within the pages of this novel. I’m afraid you won’t find easy answers.
—Kate Bailey, Editorial Assistant
“Embarrassment is an event, shame is a condition.” Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection centers on people who cast themselves against the world in an attempt to find their place within it, whether through masochistic fetish play or alpha-male Stoicism (“We’re going to grind our way to Eden… and THOSE are my goals, PERIODT”). Bound by the ligatures of depravity, degradation, and decadence, each of the seven stories portrays rejection as an obsessive impulse. These characters are blue-light addled, often driven to delusion and distorted perception based on whatever antisocial stimulus—incel manifestoes, Reddit threads, online gore—is presented on their scummed-up screens:
The internet is millions of solitudes blinking in and out of existence, each dreaming the others, where ‘consensus reality’ is less an agreed-upon reality than a reality made of agreement. With identity, it’s the same—this idea that a checkbox on a form is a service tunnel to a stranger’s soul. People will always fall for it.
While the book is spun as a collection of short fiction, a handful of reoccurring characters and linked narrative arcs make for something that feels closer to a tentacled novella—one composed of both traditional and innovative modes of storytelling: group chats, a project request form, a rejection letter (cheekily addressed to Tulathimutte himself, who pokes holes in his own manuscript). These stories vibrate with pity and perversion, hardened by Tulathimutte’s sardonic authority on the page. In “The Feminist,” an involuntary celibate is more interested in “the value of feminist values”; “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression” follows a loner who reckons with the idealized nature of BDSM; “Pics” explores a woman’s intense emotional investment in a one-night stand. Despite how unpleasant and often repulsive these characters may be, Tulathimutte remains level-headed in his approach to their insincerity: “One time I used his laptop and saw that his last search was ‘what are military industrial complexes.’” In a different story, a Thai-American undergraduate finds themself in a room packed with mostly white housemates: “Heads bobbed. People said Mmm at the phrase ‘refugee family’ like she’d fed them something delicious.” The social apparatus of modernity is not so much fragmented as it is prolapsed, unsightly and struggling under the weight of its own decay. If our chronic online existence is like shouting into the void, then Rejection is the void shouting back.
—Luke Gair, Associate Editor
“One punishes. The other looks forward.” Or so say the Orwellian billboards in Jesse Ball’s speculative novel, The Repeat Room. Set in an alternate America, this novel imagines a world where the justice system is always life or death. Every criminal case is decided by one juror who, after undergoing intensive testing and training, must relive the perpetrator’s entire life through their own mind with the help of mysterious new technology. In this bizarre rendering of jury duty—referred to as the “Repeat Room”—the juror retains no sense of self beyond the life playing out before them. For all intents and purposes, they become the perpetrator of the crime. After this experience, the juror must then offer a verdict: the perpetrator is either fit to rejoin society or the state will put the individual to death. The novel is told in two parts. First, we see the story of Abel and his rigorous—and often terrifying—journey through the heavily-surveilled process of juror selection. Then, we get the first-person perspective of our perpetrator’s twisted life and eventual crime.
This restructuring of the American justice system, which the government in this novel deems a “primitive court system,” was a premise that hooked me. I’ve always longed for a judicial system that was more focused on rehabilitation than punishment; although The Repeat Room’s courts are far from perfect (and perhaps worse than our current system), I was interested to see how a future society might reimagine them. However, it was Ball’s unique prose, cunning craft, and distinct skill for capturing the human psyche that led me to finish the book in two gluttonous sittings.
Abel is a man who is deeply unsure of himself and his place in the world. Ball embeds this uncertainty into the very fabric of his prose. From the first pages, when Abel finds himself in a diner before the juror selection process starts, we see this uncertainty everywhere: “She was somewhere between twenty and forty, with a face and body like a photograph of a waitress. On her neck in serif it said Carlos. Maybe it said forever, too.” Amorphous descriptions abound throughout the book and characterize Abel’s morally ambiguous view of the world. This throws the reader off balance, subtly preparing one to question their own conceptions of judgment and justice.
Another skill of Ball’s that makes The Repeat Room so brilliant and captivating is his ability to lay a trap so deftly that the reader has no idea they’re being cornered until they’ve been caught. For instance, in the first half of The Repeat Room, Abel is being trained and primed to be the perfect juror. Along the way, Ball is also priming the unsuspecting reader to become the juror for this case. Innocuous lines like “Kids don’t know what they’re doing… They’re like hands without faces” eventually prove to be integral to our final understanding of the perpetrator and the judgments each reader will cast upon their crime.
But perhaps what makes these narrative decisions so compelling is Ball’s deeply resonant understanding of the human psyche. From his ability to turn Abel (a man we only know vague details about) into a fully-realized, flesh-and-blood character to his prowess in taking crimes that are horrific on paper and making them into something devastatingly human, Ball never once falters in his unabashed portrayal of the human mind—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Throughout the novel, profound depictions of the human condition left me feeling so utterly seen that it was both marvelous and frightening. Early on, Abel finds himself feeling significant—perhaps for the first time in his life—but this momentary sense of importance is immediately followed by the line: “Equally laughably obvious: he couldn’t possibly be the center of anything and neither can you.” I felt as though an invisible hand had reached through the pages of the book and shaken me. This feeling was only amplified by the fact that this is the first moment where you is used in reference to the reader as the narrator breaks the fourth wall.
At the end of The Repeat Room, Abel must make his final verdict after enduring the process of juror training, the unparalleled experience of the Repeat Room, and the first-person perspective of the perpetrator’s entire life. And yet, we are not given Abel’s decision of life or death—the absence of which I believe is to the novel’s benefit. In eliding a final answer, the novel asks us to decide the perpetrator’s fate for ourselves. It leaves one with some terribly difficult questions: Is justice in a court of law achievable or is it simply a fantasy? Are there situations where death is the most merciful sentence? The novel both subtly and explicitly suggests that anyone else in the perpetrator’s shoes would have behaved in much the same way. All humans are—at their core—the same, “they are helpless not to be. This thing that looks out my eyes is the same that looks out yours, only its circumstance is varied.”
The Repeat Room is a book that has been stuck in my mind for weeks, and it shows no signs of leaving anytime soon. The novel is a must-read for anyone interested in considerations of judgment, philosophy, justice, and the self. And shouldn’t that be all of us?
—Brighid Griffin, Assistant Editor