With some novels, you know exactly what you’re getting from page one. With others --- and I’d put Jason Mott’s excellent new book in this category --- you’re compelled to constantly shift your expectations and understanding as you read. When you start HELL OF A BOOK, you might expect it to be a satirical sex comedy, but as you join the unnamed protagonist on his literal journey, you’ll be taken to some much darker and more profound places.

The main character, who remains nameless throughout the book, is an author who has received some unexpected success for his recent novel, also called Hell of a Book. When we meet him, he’s in the middle of a long book tour --- and being chased naked through the halls of a Midwestern hotel after being caught in a compromising position with a married woman. Narrowly escaping the irate husband, the narrator has to proceed (still naked) to the hotel’s front desk to request a new room key from the receptionist --- with whom he subsequently hooks up.

"HELL OF A BOOK is an intensely moving and thoughtful novel, and it’s also a love story, though perhaps not in the way that you (or the narrator) might be expecting."

However, the author’s dizzying and disorienting (and frequently hilarious) misadventures on his book tour begin to take on a more somber background. Virtually everyone he talks with wants to bring up the latest shooting of a Black boy, though it’s unclear if this is a single incident or just more in the seemingly endless string of tragic deaths like this. The author admits that he’s long had a tendency to mix imaginary visions with reality (that’s part of what’s made him a novelist after all). Soon he starts seeing and talking with a young Black boy who also is nameless but is dubbed “Soot” for the intensely dark color of his skin.

The boy tells his own story of loss and tragedy, of his father and mother’s fruitless attempts to teach him how to disappear in order to protect himself: “She wanted to have a child that could exist beyond it all. She wanted a child that could be free from it. A child that could never get shot. A child that didn’t have to be afraid. A child that she didn’t have to be afraid for because, at any moment, they could just disappear.” The scenes from Soot’s childhood are almost painfully poignant, a powerful mix of love and loss that soon begins to bleed into the author’s own reality.

As both the novelist and Soot come to terms with their lives, their Blackness and the ongoing tragedy of life in America for men like them, HELL OF A BOOK becomes something quite different and more profound --- a metafictional exploration of identity, memory and a somewhat radical response to the seemingly inevitable fact of their lives: “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.”

HELL OF A BOOK is an intensely moving and thoughtful novel, and it’s also a love story, though perhaps not in the way that you (or the narrator) might be expecting. Within the pages of this innovative example of postmodern storytelling, Mott also reveals the lasting scars of America’s legacy of racism on its people and celebrates those who find ways, against all odds, to overcome them.