God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF THE MILLIONS’ MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024, NAMED BEST OF JUNE BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND BOOKRIOT
“Like the work of Jackson Pollock, the novel reveals itself the longer one spends time with it. Keep looking, the chaos will start to show its pattern, its rhythm, its dimension and its awe-inspiring color.” - New York Times Book Review
“An astonishingly accomplished novel…Just stunning.” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review
A stirring, unsparing novel about Black life in Philadelphia and the struggle to build intimate connections through the eyes of a struggling ex-Army grad student that “reads like a direct communication from the soul,” (Justin Torres) from the virtuoso author of Sink.
After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.
Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Joseph Earl Thomas nearly reshapes the novel as an art form in this gorgeously innovative slice of Black American life. After returning from an uneventful tour in Iraq, army vet Joey has enrolled as a medical student and started working as an emergency room tech at a Philadelphia hospital. There, through his own free-form, stream-of-consciousness narrative, his experiences in his present melt into memories from his past, resulting in an audaciously surreal exploration of race, class, sexuality, and much more. Thomas’ unapologetically bold and often dreamlike narrative structure is simply hypnotic. It takes you right into Joey’s mind, where his immediate reality can flow into imagined scenarios and remembered experiences, transporting us from the ER to the apartment of his impoverished childhood and turning the faces of patients into those of his old army buddies or the father he’s never met. This deeply moving novel is a true game changer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The magnificent first novel from Thomas (Sink, a memoir) centers on an Iraq War veteran who works in a Philadelphia emergency room. Joey, who grew up in poverty, relies on student loans to pay child support for his two children. His other commitments include cigarette money for his mother, a new set of tires for his sister, and glasses for his kids, leaving his bank account overdrawn at the end of the month. Joey's stream-of-consciousness narration moves from his daily routine in the ER through flashbacks to his relationship with his children's mother, his largely uneventful time in the Army, and his childhood in a roach-infested apartment. In a remarkable feat of formal invention, Thomas collapses time and space, melding Joey's memories with descriptions of patients in the ER ("This homeless dude Greg who everybody loves to lovehate is beaten to near death outside a gas station by teenagers who are not yet shot through their daddy's deep blue Crown Vics with AK-47s at Sunoco on Broad and Lehigh"). Eventually, the ER floods with people from Joey's life, including his Army buddy Ray, whom Joey hints was his former lover, and his father, whom he'd never met. Thomas scales great heights with this innovative blend of social realism and surrealism. (June)
