Hell of a Book
by Jason Mott
Dutton, 2021

Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book won the National Book Award for fiction in November. Since serving as an NBA fiction judge in 2005, I’ve often reviewed the five finalists before the decision. Living abroad, I’m late this year just getting to the winner, which I found mediocre at best, exploitive at worst. I offer this spoiler judgment up front so you can stop reading now – or read on to see possible reasons why Hell of a Book was given the award.

Twenty years ago, Percival Everett published Erasure, a novel within which was a Blaxploitation fiction entitled “My Pafology” that won the National Book Award much to the embarrassment of Everett’s author/narrator. The pathology in Hell of a Book is a “condition” of over-imagination. As a Black boy growing up in the South, Mott’s now 38-year-old protagonist and narrator was encouraged by his parents to imagine himself invisible to feel safe in a white world. After he sees, he says, his father murdered by a white policeman, the boy (nicknamed Soot for his very black skin) begins imagining scenes and people that don’t exist.

Soot grows up to be in the present an unnamed novelist on a sex-, alcohol-, and drugs-fueled book tour for his very successful Hell of a Book that makes readers weep and try to delve into the author’s life “story.” We never learn what’s in the author’s compelling book, but Mott gives us reason to believe that the author may have invented the Soot backstory. It would make the author sympathetic and explain why he imagines he is accompanied on the tour by the “Kid,” also a very black boy and frequent mentor. Dedicated to “Mad Kids,” Hell of a Book sometimes has the feel of a Young Adult novel gone rogue.

Mott’s author has in the past refused on scrupulous literary grounds to write about the Black experience, but the tour occurs in the spring of 2020 when the author can’t avoid seeing young Black Lives Matter protesters and imagines, for a time, that the Kid has been killed like the many Black boys and men whose deaths are being protested. The author becomes “woke.” When the public finds that his father was shot and when a boy is killed in the author’s North Carolina hometown, he returns there to come to terms with his past and maybe write this book.

All this possibly autofictional, probably unreliable, and definitely postmodern gamesmanship, Mott’s “now you see me, now you don’t” act, has the unfortunate effect of making the author’s—and Mott’s – response to violence against Blacks more important than the violence itself. The author says he once loved the story of John Henry. As a writer, he hammers on and yammers on about how terrible he feels and how awful the situation in America is, but he neglects an old principle of fiction: show, don’t tell. For an illustrative contrast with Hell of a Book, consider Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys that shows without authorial self-indulgence or metafictional cleverness the lives of boys systematically killed in a Florida reform school.

“Naturalism is dead—at least in the marketplace,” the author says to himself. For decades, African-American novelists have often combined the naturalism of, for example, Richard Wright’s Native Son and the modernism of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Although Hell of a Book is pervasively about Ellison’s theme of visibility—Blacks being both highly visible as a group and often invisible as individuals—Mott’s novel lacks the substance some gritty, in-the-streets naturalism could have supplied. Readers trapped in the author’s damaged sensibility see within the novel little more of violence and protest than those readers might view on television news.

Mott’s choice of that sensibility makes Hell of a Book a work of sentimentalism in which the emotional responses described and elicited exceed the stimuli. The novel overflows with feeling—the pain of the author’s early life, the suffering of his success, his belated anger about Black lives in general. But given the author’s “condition,” it’s difficult to trust his passions. His early victimhood may have been imagined, an invented stimulus. His later anger and grieving do not arise from his actual experience of widespread victimization. But Mott is not critiquing sentimentality, for he attempts to elicit and exploit similar responses from readers. “Exploit” because, lacking trustworthy contact with reality, the novel is made mostly of rhetoric.

A large part of Hell of a Book satirizes the book tour from hell: the author is disoriented from constant travel, he uses stimulants to get through repeated interview questions, he has one-night stands with groupies (the tour story opens with the author running naked down a hotel corridor, fleeing an irate husband), eccentric “handlers” are constantly changing, his agent is always hounding him to make people cry and buy. Mott may intend to support the Black Lives Matter movement, but the detailed tour narrative within Hell of a Book is an audience-pleasing, commercial story from which an engaged political novel unsuccessfully struggles to emerge.

Mott fills the lacuna of showing with his author’s repetitive generalizing and sermonizing, sometimes addressing readers directly, telling them what they must and should feel. In case readers don’t understand the author’s late-found wisdom about himself and his people, he sums it up during a last conversation with the Kid in which the author delivers on his early promise that the book would be a love story:

I think learning to love yourself in a country where you’re told that you’re a plague on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the making, that your life can be taken away from you at any moment and there’s nothing you can do about it—learning to love yourself in the middle of all that? Hell, that’s a goddamn miracle.

The author tells the Kid that he, the author, will try to live this wisdom. About self-love, Mott seems to have known all along because Hell of a Book is more interested in the self that created it than the people outside what a character calls the author’s ”labyrinth of myself.”

Is it possible that Hell of a Book is a parody—like Everett’s “My Pafology” – of just the kind of sentiment-exploiting novel it seems to be? Or maybe an attack by Mott on Black writers who have come belatedly to writing about systemic racism? If the latter, then Hell of a Book is an inside job, because I can’t think of serious writers Mott might have in mind. Not Jesmyn Ward, who has won two National Book Awards in the last ten years; not Colson Whitehead who won for The Underground Railroad; not James McBride who won for the The Good Lord Bird. They use fantasy and dream and historical invention, versions of Ellison’s modernism. But in all these novels, the external world on which imagination works is substantial, and readers’ emotional response to that world is free, not rhetorically manipulated. Because Hell of a Book is far removed from the art of these recent winners, giving Mott’s novel the award seems a travesty.

How did it happen? Any five-member judging committee can be quirky with diverse criteria and favors to be rendered, but in the last few years the National Book Foundation, which organizes the awards, has downgraded the importance of literary merit and mastery of past decades. The Foundation replaced a literary Director with a publicist, has vowed to become more accessible to general (as opposed to literary) readers, has pursued a policy of inclusiveness, and has added booksellers and librarians to the literary novelists who used to judge the awards. These changes were made because the publishers who fund the awards wanted to see more mainstream and commercially successful (that is, less literary) books recognized. Perhaps the judges this year were striking back by choosing the hyper-literary Hell of a Book whatever its merits. The novel within Mott’s novel is a huge commercial success. The literary games Mott plays will probably deny him the same popularity, but his contemporaneity and sentimentality, along with his award, should put some money in his and his publisher’s pockets. Maybe even get Mott a seat beside Oprah. And yet, despite its failures Hell of a Book will do no harm – except to the reputation of the National Book Award.

—Tom LeClair: His fifth and final "Passing" novel--Passing Again--will be published in March.