Meeks
a novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor’s suit . . . and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, Ben finds that his mother is dead and his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn’t enough, he must now find a wife, or he’ll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city’s oppressive factories.
Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he’s a member of the police, is hunted by the overzealous Brothers of Mercy. Meeks’ survival depends on his peculiar friendship with a police captain—but will that be enough to prevent his execution at the annual Independence Day celebration?
A dark satire rendered with the slapstick humor of a Buster Keaton film, Julia Holmes’ debut marries the existentialism of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground to the strange charm of a Haruki Murakami novel. Meeks portrays a world at once hilarious and disquieting, in which frustrated revolutionaries and hopeful youths suffer alongside the lost and the condemned, just for a chance at the permanent bliss of marriage and a slice of sugar-frosted Independence Day cake.
Julia Holmes was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and grew up in the Middle East, Texas, and New York, where she is currently an assistant editor at Rolling Stone. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A highly imaginative debut finds a stark Darwinian logic in a rigidly hierarchical society. In Holmes s unnamed dystopia, everyone is ascribed a place strictly enforced by the police, with the young Bachelors bearing the responsibility of finding a wife, an accomplishment that will secure them a place in society. If, as in the case of protagonist Ben, a wife is not secured (due to a kind of perverse resentment and no money to order the requisite pale-colored courting suit), he falls to the retribution of the Brothers of Mercy, thugs who sweep down on the unsuccessful and conscript them as laborers and executioners. The story cuts between the plight of Ben, stuck in his black mourning suit unable to better himself, and a doomed, delusional character called Meeks, who lives in the park. Both characters fatherless, steeped in sentimental memories of a long-lost childhood and the love of their mothers now give off the stink of failure, and are by turns rescued and denounced by their brothers. Holmes has fashioned a terrifying and utterly convincing world in which the perfect human being is one stripped of all illusions.
