![]() ![]() They might bicker a little, but when the Kid isn’t around, the narrator misses him and worries about him. The Kid can pop up anywhere: a hotel breakfast lounge, in the back of a limo, in an airport or bar. At 10, the Kid is “gangly, meek…impossibly dark-skinned” and invisible to everyone but the narrator. The author of two poetry collections and three previous novels, Mott structures his latest work around two alternating narratives: One follows the unnamed author-narrator of Hell of a Book on a raucous multi-state book tour the other tells the story of Soot, a young boy coming to terms with the injustices of his world.Īccompanying the narrator on this sometimes-rollicking book tour is the Kid. ![]() But at its core, the novel is a harrowing and powerful meditation on racial injustice and its effects on the human psyche. Hell of a Book is many things: part send-up of the publishing industry, part road-trip comedy, part metafictional sleight of hand. Just over a third of the way into Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, the narrator describes the wood-burning heater in his childhood home as having “more tricks than a carful of monkeys.” One could say the same about Mott’s wonderful new novel itself. ![]()
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