The Collar That Would Not Sit Right

This is an Apple Books audiobook narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator.
Yeasir Marrow’s debut novel is a surgical, almost forensic dissection of a friendship that dissolves without a single raised voice. Told in fifteen chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, The Collar That Would Not Sit Right maps the slow tectonic shift between two unnamed graduates—one stalled in post-college limbo, one already ascending—through the obsessive grammar of city planning, zoning overlays, and the cheap grey polyester jacket that becomes the narrator’s last reliable coordinate.

Every paragraph is a grid line. Every memory is a “Memory Interference.” Every failed text is rendered in the passive voice, the narrator’s only shield against the humiliation of asymmetrical effort. The jacket’s collar—always rolling, always wrong—functions as emotional barometer, physical tic, and running metaphor for a life that refuses to lie flat. Thumbtacks, brass-headed and merciless, pin power-grid maps to a bare white wall; receipts from a three-year-old hardware run yellow into brittle evidence; the microwave clock blinks 12:00 like a decommissioned substation.

Marrow’s prose is cool, laminated, and mercilessly precise. Smells are catalogued with the rigor of a municipal inspector: wet wool, burnt rice, cold oxidized metal, the chemical breath of new laminate. Sounds are measured in decibels of absence: the elevator’s mournful ding, the ceiling’s scratch-scratch of mouse or pipe, the silence that replaces shared laughter. The city itself is a palimpsest—old campus shortcuts erased by transit extensions, forty-five-degree intersections that promise accidents, ninety-degree corners that promise arrival.

This is not a breakup novel; it is a rezoning novel. No grand fight, no betrayal, only the quiet violence of diverging orbits. One life achieves altitude; the other remains at sea-level, circling the same four steps of a studio apartment. The friendship ends not in fire but in obsolescence—an un-mapped exit ramp closed five years ago, a voicemail that never returns the call.

Readers of Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, or Teju Cole will recognize the crystalline sentences and the refusal of easy catharsis. Fans of Jenny Offill and Lydia Davis will savor the fragmented, indexical form. Yet Marrow’s voice is unmistakably his own: cartographic, bureaucratic, heartbreakingly funny in its devotion to useless specificity.