The Omnivorous R eader By A nne Bly the

Hell of a Read

A dizzying jour ney of th e im ag in at ion

By a nne Bly the The adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover is not one that works for the fourth novel written by Jason Mott, a writer and poet who lives in southeastern North Carolina. The title of Mott’s latest work of fiction, Hell of a Book, is in large, bold capital letters at the top of a black and yellow cover. Go ahead, judge it.

It tr uly is a hell of a book, one that explores racism, police violence and being Black in America.

It’s a novel — and a myster y, too — about a novelist with a vivid imagination. It’s dif ficult to know what’s real and what the writer is imagining. It’s also challenging to see how the main characters are connected, until the ver y end. Even then, there’s no certaint y as to whether they’re truly bound in anything other than the novelist’s mind.

Mott pulls readers through a dif ficult and sometimes over whelming conversation about “T he A ltogether Factual, W holly Bona Fide Stor y of a Big Dreams, Hard Luck, American-Made Mad K id ” — his subtitle — with madcap humor, painf ully poignant prose and a showme-don’t-tell-me contemplative st yle.

T he protagonist is a Black fiction writer on a dizzying book promo tion tour, an unnamed bestselling writer who is breathlessly whisked through a blur of airpor ts, hotels and cities by a quirk y cast of drivers, and a profit-driven agent.

We first meet him at 3 a.m. in the hallway of a Midwestern hotel, where he’s naked, locked out of his room and being chased by an angr y husband who has caught the author with his wife. He r uns af ter him, flailing at him with a large coat hanger.

A s t he prot agon ist is ab out to b e c aug ht , t he elevator do ors op en, a nd he esc ap es into a new sc ene w it h h is sav ior of t he mo ment , a n elderly woma n br ing ing home g ro c er ies in t he we e hours of t he mor n ing.

“She’s eight y if she ever danced a jig,” Mott writes, showing his voice that delights throughout the novel.

As the naked novelist and blue-haired woman watch the hotel floors counted of f in the elevator, Mott introduces readers to a sobering realit y that becomes a central theme as the writer moves through his chaotic, alcohol-inf used tour. Another Black male has been shot and k illed by police, but Mott doesn’t give him a name. T he old woman asks the novelist a question:

“Did you hear about that boy?” “W hich boy?”

“T he one on T V.” She shakes her head and her blue hair sways gently like the hair of some sea nymph who’s seen the tides rise and fall one too many times. “Terrible, terrible.”

T he novelist tries initially to go on with his celebrit y life without fleshing out his feelings about “the boy.” He tries to push the latest outrage blaring on T Vs and pulling Black Lives Matter advocates into the streets with signs and chants into that place deep inside himself where injustices stew without boiling over.

T his time, though, the world is outraged, and the protagonist can’t tune out the calls to stop the madness or the cries to conf ront centuries of oppression and br utalit y.

T he morning af ter the naked ride in the elevator, we meet T he K id, a mysterious but thought-provok ing boy who might, or might not, be a figment of the author’s imagination. He looks to be about 10 years old, “impossibly dark-sk inned,” and might, or might not, represent the all too many Black children lost to police violence.

We also get to know Soot, another Black boy in r ural Nor th Carolina, whose father tries to teach the power of invisibilit y, pick ing up on a theme in R alph Ellison’s Invisible Man about not wanting to be seen by oppressors. We’re lef t to wonder how these boys are connected to the protagonist.

E arly on, it becomes clear that the tour ing novelist has what he descr ibes as “a condition,” an unnamed af fliction through which he can blend an imag inar y world w ith rea lit y. His stor y telling st yle, a lmost a stream of consciousness, can be disor ienting but r iveting, mind-numbing but thought-provok ing.

On one trip f rom an airpor t to a book event, T he K id appears in the backseat of a limousine. He’s f ully aware that the driver up f ront can’t see him, and he’s ready to test the author’s asser tion that he’s just a character made up in his mind.

“W hy am I not real?” T he K id laughs.

“Because I have a condition,” the protagonist says. “I see things. People too. T hey say it’s some sor t of escape valve for pressure on the mind, probably caused by some sor t of trauma. But I don’t go in on that. I haven’t had any t ype of trauma in my life . . . Nothing wor thy of a Lifetime net work movie or anything like that.”

Tr auma event ua l ly t a kes re aders f rom t he m isadvent ures of t he b o ok tour to t he d ir t roads of B olton, t he hometow n of S o ot — a nd Mot t a s wel l, r a ising yet a not her c onundr um. Is Mot t’s Hell of a Bo ok re a l ly a novel, or is it more f ac t t ha n fic t ion ab out a Black novel ist f rom t he S out h?

“Nestled in the sweat y armpit of Carolina swampland, surrounded by g um trees, and pines, and cedar, and oak, and wild grapevines, the town of Bolton is the land that time forgot,” he writes. “T he main expor ts of Bolton are lumber and black manual labor. T he wood comes f rom the forests and swamplands — all of which are owned by the local paper mill — and the labor comes f rom the town’s seven-hundred-odd residents. I wish I could tell you that there’s something more than those t wo chief expor ts that comes out of Bolton, but there’s nothing else. Bolton isn’t a town that gives, but neither is it a town that takes. It’s the t ype of place that keeps to itself. It’s self-sustaining, the way the past always is.”

T he past and the present need to conf ront, and reckon with, what generations of Black Americans have endured.

“Down in this par t of the world, we got it all: fif t y-four Confederate flags planted along the Interstate, statues put up by the daughters of the Confederacy, plantations where you can have wedding pictures taken of the way things used to be, we got lynchings, riots, bombings, shrimp and grits, and even muscadine grapes,” the novelist writes.

“Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you other wise. But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore. You just see the beaut y of the sausage. Maybe that’s why, in spite of ever ything I know about it, I’ve always loved the South.”

It’s also the place where the protagonist, T he K id and Soot converge — without f ully solving the air of myster y that surrounds them throughout the book. T he enigmatic threads Mott so adroitly weaves together become more tightly stitched toward the end. Hell of a Book will make you think while also enter taining you on a helluva journey.

“L augh all you want,” the protagonist writes as he and T he K id come to the end of the journey, “but I think learning to love yourself in a countr y where you’re told that you’re a plag ue on the economy, that you’re nothing but a prisoner in the mak ing, that your life can be taken away f rom 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.” PS

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades covering city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.

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