A novel doesn't always live up to its name, but Hell of a Book, Jason Mott's latest novel, certainly does.
It begins in an audacious manner. An author, out on a book tour, gets caught by an angry husband in a hotel and is sprinting down the hall sans clothing. It's pure cinema, just like the old wise-cracking noir movies that the author's father loved.
But what's real and what isn't? That's the problem our narrator faces throughout the story. His anchor during this odyssey of a book tour is The Kid. No one else can see him, so is he real or not? They can see each other, and talk to each other. In other sections of the book, we learn The Kid is called Soot because he's not just Black, he is onyx. He grows up in a small Carolina town. His parents hope to teach him to become invisible, because if unseen, he will be safe.
The chances that he will not be safe are shown when his father is out jogging one night, after the heat of the day, and is killed by a white cop in his own front yard. His crime was out jogging at night as a Black man. It kills his mother, too, although it takes years for her to succumb.
Soot's Uncle Paul shows the child another way to react. He is angry. He doesn't go along with the preacher who tells stories through another long night to soothe his congregation. He is one of the men who walk out and pace in the church's gravel parking lot. He even teaches Soot how to shoot a gun. As if that would protect him.
The telling of stories is an important facet of the novel. Whether the storytelling, such as the preacher's, is part of the narrative or part of the meta aspect of this glorious book, it is done in order to live. Anyone who has ever tried to put words together in a narrative can appreciate Mott here:
Right now, none of the characters know what they want. And since they don’t know what they want, they don’t know why they’re doing anything. They’re just billiard balls banging against one another. And nobody wants to read anything about that—even if that’s just how people go through life sometimes.
And later:
We struggle to make a pattern out of our lives in order to mitigate the deep-down belief that there is no order to anything, that we’re all just marbles banging off of one another in a cold, infinite expanse.
Soot finds a way to become invisible, become unseen. He also has the gift of seeing things and people no longer there. It's how he can go fishing with his father after he is murdered.
Meanwhile, the author on tour sees people and things that are not there too, like The Kid. Although the reader may wonder if the author and The Kid are the same, that is and is not the point of what's going on.
As the author tells us early on, this is a love story.
Hell of a Book is a vast, encompassing novel in less than 350 pages. It contains multiple love stories. It also has comedy, anger, questioning and quests, and poetic language. Hell of a Book is about being a human being, about being Black, about being a Black human being, about being and not being. It is about what one is allowed to feel, what one is told to one ought to feel, what one cannot help but feel:
A voice? What voice? The voice of my people? Always? Every second of every day of my life? That’s what Black people are always supposed to be? And the Black condition? What kind of condition is that? You mean as in an existing state of being? Or a condition as in a state of health—like an illness?
In the end, Mott brings it all together. A portion of this section is as moving as Sing, Unburied, Sing, one of my favorite modern novels, and for this alone the novel deserves the National Book Award.
"The thing to remember is this: above all else, this is a love story. Don’t ever forget that."
No, I'll never forget.
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