‘The Slip' is a sweaty masterpiece

Washington Post

a day ago

And in this corner, weighing in at 487 pages, fighting out of Austin, against books far above its weight class — a novel making a worldwide debut: 'The Slip,' by Lucas Schaefer.
(Pause for wild cheering.)
Here's a novel so pumped up and shredded it can't possibly sit still on a shelf. Long before its official release on June 3, 'The Slip' was already bouncing down the ramp with both fists punching the air. I spent most of the week not just reading this story but cheering it on in a state of unhinged excitement.
Although ostensibly centered on boxing, the ring isn't the circumference of the plot. Indeed, so much is packed in that 'The Slip' feels more like a three-ring circus than a 12-round match. If you like your fiction neat and ruminative, stay away from this sweaty, outrageous book.
At the starting bell, a brief newspaper clipping announces that Nathaniel Rothstein is still missing after 10 years.
Jump back to 1998: A troubled 16-year-old Jewish kid from a Boston suburb arrives in Austin to spend the summer with his Uncle Bob, a history professor at the University of Texas. Nathaniel had gotten into a brutal altercation at school, and his mom hopes a change of venue might be good for him. Uncle Bob thinks the boy — 'a schlemiel of the first order' — needs structure and a place to blow off some steam. Fortunately, he knows a guy, David, one of his buddies from Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym, where everybody is welcome to work out and hang out. David can show Nathaniel the ropes at the gym and give him a volunteer gig at the nursing home where he's director of hospitality. Best scenario: By the end of the summer, Nathaniel will have put on a little muscle, gained some confidence and developed a better work ethic.
Things don't go as planned — though Schaefer clearly has a plan, which must look something like Carrie Mathison's mad wall of clues in 'Homeland.' Try to keep up.
The problem with Nathaniel — though it doesn't seem like a problem at first — is that he's fascinated by David. This charismatic Black man from 'the baddest shanty in all of Haiti' is everything the White teenager isn't but suddenly wants to be: fit, confident and (he claims) wildly experienced with the ladies. Nathaniel — pale and out of shape, a 'serial P.E. evader' — has absolutely no aptitude for boxing, but if he concentrates and puts in the time at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym, who knows, maybe he could be as potent as David and feel a little more comfortable in his skin. And speaking of skin, it surely wouldn't hurt if he got a little more tan. Pretty soon, nobody particularly notices that 'the boy had begun to walk like David, smell like David, even dress like David.'
Nathaniel doesn't know anything about racial appropriation, but he vaguely senses that his hero worship might be infected with creepy racist overtones. At the very least, he suspects he shouldn't be searching the internet for ''makeup' + 'white to black.'' But David feels delighted to have such a dedicated boxing student, and if Nathaniel fetishizes his mentor, well, who's to know and what's the harm? David is used to taking young men under his strong wings and dispensing his libidinous wisdom, but 'no one had ever shown much interest.'
In Schaefer's narration, these shenanigans are wildly, transgressively hilarious, reminiscent of the brash sexual comedy of Philip Roth's early novels. But 'The Slip' is also exploring larger themes about the confounding nature of race in America and the human urge to slide into another identity. In fact, during what Schaefer calls 'the darkening of Nathaniel Rothstein,' the novel is just warming up.
A few miles away, an alienated 16-year-old high school student named Charles Rex Markham is beginning to realize he's not the boy everyone assumes he is. Changing his name to X seems like a good start toward realigning something essential about his gender presentation.
'X had always assumed his outside self was his self, his inside self the fantasy,' Schaefer writes, but what if it's the opposite? Trouble is, even in Weird Austin, X doesn't know any trans people, doesn't have access to stories of anyone going through what he's going through. But Schaefer does, and in moments like this, the breadth of his affection feels as wide as the depth of his comedy. In an era when racial and sexual identities have become fluid matters of who belongs and who doesn't, who lives and who dies, 'The Slip' stamps right into our most pressing debates. I won't tell you how Nathaniel and X's storylines eventually collide, but it's a plot that dares to be just as bizarre and unbelievable as real life — or what the narrator calls 'the vast peculiarities of this world.'
Despite its contemporary pulse and structural intricacy, Schaefer's novel plays off older stories, too. He's channeling the irrepressible energy of Henry Fielding. One outlandish strand of the plot has its roots in Shakespearean comedy. And Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym presents the high stakes of Hemingway's bullring, an existential arena where pretense and fakery are violently exposed.
Honestly, I haven't felt quite like this about a book since I was dazzled by Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' almost 25 years ago. But despite his equally capacious reach, Schaefer is no Franzen wannabe. If anything, he's looser, confident enough to be sweet, and despite his richly comic voice, this satiric tongue never develops fangs.
Is 'The Slip' messy? Often. As the narrator admits, 'Stories that start as one thing sometimes become another.' But I'll forgive almost anything in a book this ambitious. And it has that essential quality of all great novels: It's easy to imagine how someone could hate it.
Like a new contender trying to make a name for himself, Schaefer never turns down a match — no matter where it takes him. That reflexive willingness to travel anywhere anytime provides 'The Slip' with some shaggy-dog side trips to Kenya and Haiti, plus crazy explorations of phone sex, illegal immigration, crooked police officers and the pursuit of clues down rabbit holes that run off down their own rabbit holes because — it's easy to forget amid all the antics — this is at its heart a mystery novel. And in these pages, the maxim of every high school drama teacher comes true: There are no small parts.
That sprawl will drive some readers crazy, but I could hang around Terry Tucker's for a long time, which if you'd told me last month, I'd have thought you were crazy. 'We are not static. This world is not static,' Schaefer writes. 'People don't go to boxing gyms to stay the same.'
People don't read great novels to stay the same either. Lace up — get in there.
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for 'CBS Sunday Morning.'
By Lucas Schaefer.
Simon & Schuster. 487 pp. $29.99