Major Arcana
A Novel
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century."
It begins with a gunshot: a student's public suicide on a university campus. The blast radius of this tragic explosion expands to encompass 50 years of our history and two of the grandest characters in recent American fiction: Simon Magnus, a comic-book writer who transfigured popular culture turned gender activist who transfigures the English language, and Ash del Greco, an online occultist who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove the superiority of mind over matter. With a decades-spanning but tightly-knit plot, written in an expansive style, Major Arcana canvasses America's inner life and moral history from coast to coast and across two generations in a delirious saga about art, magic, love, and death.
Originally serialized on the author's Substack newsletter, Major Arcana is a novel about the transformative power of popular culture. With a nod to Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and for fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Pistelli reimagines the expansive novel for the 21st century.
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Pistelli (The Ecstasy of Michaela) offers a digressive and morbid campus novel about a legendary comic book writer turned professor and his student's suicide. Jacob Morrow, a freshman, kills himself in public view on campus, apparently at the behest of a mysterious young woman who records the act on her smartphone. Both were students in an English course taught by Simon Magnus, a thinly veiled Alan Moore (Magnus's Moore-like work includes Marsh Man and Ratman). Following Jacob's death, Magnus is confronted by the boy's mother, Jessica. From there, Pistelli alternates Jessica's flashbacks to Jacob's upbringing with the tale of Magnus's rise to fame, and his past relationships with women. The mysterious young woman who filmed the suicide is revealed to be Ash del Greco, who may be Magnus's daughter, and who has a side hustle offering positive affirmations to those who desperately want to improve their lives. Pistelli's dive into comic book lore is deep and satisfying. Unfortunately, his own plot comes up short, especially when he leans on magical realism to explain such far-fetched elements as one character's resurrection from the dead and another character's virgin pregnancy. Still, diehard comics fans will appreciate this.
