This book is Hell of Annoying. Not finishing it. ( )

"I'm not sure Black people can be happy in this world. There's just too much of a backstory of sadness that's always clawing at their heels. And no matter how hard you try to outrun it, life always comes through with those reminders letting you know that, more than anything, you're just a part of an exploited people and a denied destiny and all you can do is hate your past and, by proxy, hate yourself." p. 245
This is a book that requires a great deal of afterthought. Because it is a story that is fast-paced, written with humor and compassion, the tendency is to speed through it, which I did- reading it in 3 days. That can lead to missing so much meaning.
It is filled with "magic realism", creatively told from the point of view of the contemporary protagonist, "The Author", as well as in the past from the point of view of "Soot". So much is left to the reader's interpretation. Are any of the passages narrated by "The Author" real? How can we know? He never fit in as a child, growing up in his small town, and only got out because he "snuck away under cover of darkness and something akin to invisibility." His love of storytelling and a vivid imagination. or as he calls it "persistent daydreaming" have finally paid off. He is a successful writer.
Now on his book tour, and in the wake of a brutal shooting of a young Black boy, he seems to be having a crisis of conscience, resulting in hallucinations and bouts of alcoholic blackouts. Why? He is hiding his true self from the world. He has written a very personal book about... well it's a Hell of a Book, but he can't remember what it is about. And although it is a personal book, his readers are surprised to find out that he is Black.
" 'You're Black?'
'I am."
Proof in memory, that I've been Black this entire time apparently.
'You didn't tell me he was Black,' Jack says to Sharon.
'I wanted to see if you could tell from his writing.'
'I couldn't'.
'Good.'" p. 89
His Media trainer and his agent think this is a good thing. He goes along with the image they make for him. They plan to train him to become himself... the best version of himself that he has ever seen. He won't even recognize himself. It will be a metamorphosis. (" Like Kafka?' I ask. 'Is that a rapper?' p. 95 ) He does have a fear of this new visibility. What will it mean? (Therefore, I contend that the nude hallway scene is not real but a nightmare that he will be exposed to respectable people as a fraud, but I digress. It is very funny though.)
His new visibility means that he now must say something about recent events, and he laments "Why can't I just write and how away?" The hallucinations are reminders he has always been trying to outrun.
Eventually, he must decide how to talk about the condition of our country. Maybe he can make a difference.
" 'I don't know what to do with what happened to you, with what happened to all the other kids like you, with what happened to me. To all the kids like you who got shot and maybe even lived through it and grew up to be people like me: Black and broken and trying to remember that they are beautiful.'"

So as an aside, the only thing I did not like about the book was the use of too much vomit. This is a personal pet peeve that I have. There has got to be a better way to demonstrate that a character is upset, drunk, or dizzy. More than one scene with vomit is too much for me. The author is throwing up out of cars, in restaurants, and in fancy houses. Enough already.
I usually take off a full star for a vomit alert. In this case, only a half-star because the overall quality of the story and writing was so outstanding. 4.5 stars rounded to 5 ( )

audio fiction (9 hours, 40 min)
Awards: National Book Award, Notable Books for Adults

funny/serious meta adventure (reading the named book that the protagonist talks about writing and promoting on book tour) that somehow involves a Black child (so dark-skinned his classmates have cruelly nicknamed him "Soot") who maybe can disappear at will and a best-selling author who meets him, or maybe just imagines he meets him. Both characters are from the small town of Bolton, North Carolina; significant time is also spent in San Francisco and Denver during the book tour.

Ridiculously comic moments are juxtaposed with a (purposefully) unsettling look at the protagonist's attempts to remain separate from the traumatic pervasiveness of a systemic disregard for the value of Black lives. An astounding, skillfully crafted story that I'll be thinking about for a long time. ( )

Update: rounding up to 5⭐️... I can't stop thinking about this book!

4.5⭐

Our unnamed narrator is a Black writer riding high on the success of his recently published book – a book titled “Hell of a Book” ("It’s been Kindled and Kobo’d, iPadded and Audible’d. It’s been optioned so that it can be movie’d—"). He is currently on a promotional tour, traveling across the country, answering the question “What’s Your Book About?”, signing copies and connecting with his reader base. Of course, he has been extensively trained in media interaction and has a “handler” wherever he goes, though that doesn’t quite prevent him from getting into trouble. As our narrator travels across the country, the recent tragic shooting of a ten-year-old Black boy by the police has garnered national attention – it’s on the news, protesters have taken to the streets - and being an African –American writer, almost everywhere he goes someone is bringing it up expecting him to voice his thoughts about it .

Parallel to our narrator’s experiences is the story of a little boy who is unkindly nicknamed “Soot” on account of his extremely dark skin. Soot’s loving parents believe that they can keep him safe if he stays “invisible”.
Our narrator is often visited by “The Kid”, a “gangly, meek, and nerdy-looking” boy only he can see and interact with, who insists he is “real” and with whom he shares some deep and meaningful conversations on what it means to Black in America.
As the different threads converge and the lines between fiction and reality become blurred -for our narrator and for the reader-the story attains a dream-like quality that pulls you in, breaks your heart and leaves you more than a little unsettled.

“But the thing to know and remember is that you can never be something other than what you are, no matter how much you might want to. You can’t be them. You can only be you. And they’re going to always treat you differently than they treat themselves. They won’t ever know about it—at least, most of them won’t. Most of them will think that everything is okay and that you’re being treated well enough and that everything is beautiful. Because, I guess for them, all they can imagine is a world in which things are fair and beautiful because, after all, they’ve always been treated fairly and beautifully. History has always been kind to them.”

I tend to be wary of award winning books with a lot of hype surrounding them which is why I took my time to get to this one. But I am so glad that I eventually did pick this book up. Aptly named, "Hell of a Book" is truly a creative and brilliant work of fiction. With its powerful writing, lyrical prose and elements of magical realism, sardonic humor and a narrative that is hard-hitting, insightful and relevant, Jason Mott’s "Hell of a Book" is a unique and immersive experience. I combined my reading with the audio narration by JD Jackson and Ronald Peet which made for an exceptional immersion reading experience. ( )

Well, if there's one thing you can say about this one, it's that it's a metafictional novel about race that won the Pulitzer Prize. Jason Mott's writing reminds me a bit of Zadie Smith circa "White Teeth" in that it's sharp and funny and exquisitely knowing. For a novel full of sadness, there are a lot of passages here that, with a little modification, could be killer bits on a slightly edgy comedy special, and that's meant a compliment. Like many underground comics, Mott scores points -- and deservedly so -- for saying what he thinks his audience absolutely needs to hear and what they probably won't be told elsewhere. He skewers the outpouring of pointless, intense emotion that seems to follow racially motivated killings in the social media age. In one especially memorable scene, he uses beautiful imagery to illustrate the past's stubborn persistence while pointing out that white folks don't much like to revisit the aspects of American history that make white people, as a group, look less than admirable. And he has a lot of fun portraying the publishing industry as essentially shallow, mercenary, and money-driven. Mott's very good at playing with caricature and archetype and he pulls this stuff off without breaking a sweat.

Having said that, what are we going to make of his unnamed main character who, it must be said, is, like Mott, a first-time black author hawking a literary novel, and his travelling companion, Soot? Our protagonist is quite aware that Soot might not be quite as real as the chair you're probably sitting on right now: even his therapist has said that his relationship is liable to interference and distortion thanks to a personal trauma that, the deeper one gets into this novel, might as well be called ambient, a set of fears and apprehensions that just come with being black, American, and alive in the twenty-first century. To give Mott credit, he never quite spells out this mysterious kid's exact nature, and he makes him human -- and likable -- enough to keep him from being nothing but a literary symbol. But don't have to be a psychologist specializing in trauma to see the collision of his and the narrator's stories coming from a mile away. Meanwhile, both the narrator and this not-quite-a-character are used as foils for any number of conflicting desires: for visibility and for safety, for numbness and closeness, for memory and detachment. In the book's closing pages, they have a painfully emotional conversation that seems to get to the heart of things, and, ever since I finished the book, I've meant to go back and reread it. After a few hundred pages of deft literary games, Mott and his book might actually hit on something genuinely human here, but, quite frankly, "Hell of a Book" is such an emotionally trying read that I haven't reread these passages yet, and I'm not completely convinced that I will anytime soon. "Hell of a Book" is funny and wry, but no beach read. Your opinion of it may depend on how much tolerance you have for its twisty metafictional constructions, but those are hardly the most difficult aspect of this novel. The novel feels like it's a built on a well of sadness that, with or without all the postmodern fireworks, the author struggles to put on paper. Whew. Eventually, I think I may go back to see how well he does this, but probably not for a while. This one is easy to like, but tough to judge. Three and a half stars will have to do for now. ( )