The Slip
Lucas Schaefer’s debut has that essential quality of all great novels: It’s easy to imagine how someone could hate it ... Here’s a novel so pumped up and shredded it can’t possibly sit still on a shelf. Long before its official release on June 3, The Slip was already bouncing down the ramp with both fists punching the air. I spent most of the week not just reading this story but cheering it on in a state of unhinged excitement ... So much is packed in that The Slip feels more like a three-ring circus than a 12-round match. If you like your fiction neat and ruminative, stay away from this sweaty, outrageous book ... In Schaefer’s narration, these shenanigans are wildly, transgressively hilarious, reminiscent of the brash sexual comedy of Philip Roth’s early novels. But The Slip is also exploring larger themes about the confounding nature of race in America and the human urge to slide into another identity ... The breadth of his affection feels as wide as the depth of his comedy. In an era when racial and sexual identities have become fluid matters of who belongs and who doesn’t, who lives and who dies, The Slip stamps right into our most pressing debates. I won’t tell you how Nathaniel and X’s storylines eventually collide, but it’s a plot that dares to be just as bizarre and unbelievable as real life—or what the narrator calls 'the vast peculiarities of this world' .... Honestly, I haven’t felt quite like this about a book since I was dazzled by Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections almost 25 years ago. But despite his equally capacious reach, Schaefer is no Franzen wannabe. If anything, he’s looser, confident enough to be sweet, and despite his richly comic voice, this satiric tongue never develops fangs.
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Schaefer’s stunning debut expertly weaves nuanced psychological depth into an adrenaline-fueled narrative ... Themes of race, class, and identity are portrayed with complex yet nuanced sensitivity. Schaefer brilliantly captures the tumultuous emotional terrain each character must traverse to find themselves. The lyrical prose moves fluidly, like the smoothest heavyweight champion, shimmering, then delivering a knockout punch. Various plot elements nicely serve the deeper themes of fate, found family, preconceived limitations, weighty expectations, and following one’s dreams, all in a rapturous barrage of snappy dialogue, witty rejoinders, and profound observations that make for a wicked combination and a winning bildungsroman.
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Swings for the fences, makes it at least to third. Franzen/Roth/Irving comparisons earned and deserved ... Perhaps not since Nathan Hill’s The Nix (2016) have we seen a debut as hugely ambitious as this one, pulling out all the stops to tell a unique version of the American story ... Schaefer, who’s white, is bold in his approach to issues of Blackness and whiteness, and has invented a truly wild plot in service of exploring them. He is equally fearless in writing about gender and sex. And the solution to the mystery is a trip and a half.
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