Nowadays, writing or making any art about Appalachia can be fraught, throwing oneself straight into a thicket in the holler. For the past decade, American culture has decided the region is one of the places it needs to understand. The body politic produced the urgency and the mainstream media produced the response through a steady accumulation of films, TV series, and books [I made it two chapters into That One Memoir before abandoning it underwhelmed] promising to render Appalachia (and rural places more generally) for the population who had been startled into curiosity. Even the most ambitious of these books arrived with their frames already assembled: opioid statistics, an extractive economy that collapsed inside a few generations, the cultural shorthands that purport to do the work of both locating a population and dismissing it.1 The reader is given the texture of the place and given alongside it the explanation that attempts to translate the texture into something familiar to them. What gets lost in this overgrowth are the conditions under which a reader could be said to know anything about the people who live there.

This is the tangle into which Fancy Gap was published, a novel that on its surface occupies every square inch of the territory the shorthand has already mapped. Three generations of the Fuquay family in the borderland between rural Virginia and North Carolina [a stunningly beautiful region, particularly around Mt. Rogers; one that Philip Lewis’s The Barrowfields approaches from a different angle]. Grace, the grandmother and self-made evangelist, dispensing fiery sermons and her own version of alms to her mountain flock. Her daughter Jane, dying of breast cancer and required to be grateful for the frivolous care of the church she attends. Dalton, the eldest son, discharged from the Army under Other Than Honorable conditions for a violation of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. [Dalton is discharged from Fort Drum, an Army installation about an hour from where I grew up—a small synchronicity.] Messy, the younger brother, shuttled between Bible camps and foster homes, building a moral code entirely in response to the environment he was reared in. By every available metric of subject and setting, Fancy Gap should be the novel the cultural moment expects. It doesn’t.

Jones doesn’t avoid the material the shorthand has claimed. The carcinogenic rivers, the apocalyptic preaching, the firearms, the tacky gas station paraphernalia, the big trucks with dualie wheels and floodlights are all in the prose without flinching and approached with sincerity. What he refuses is the position the shorthand asks a reader to occupy in order to consume that material. Fancy Gap will not let you stand where you would need to stand in order to know these people the way the shorthand has trained you to know them. The form is an argument about what a reader is allowed to know before they are allowed to judge.

How Fancy Gap earns the readers’ attention

There are three structural moves the novel makes that should be considered together.

• Rotating consciousness. Fancy Gap moves among Grace, Jane, Dalton, Messy, and Clyde in short, close-third chapters. You, my dear reader, are rarely inside any one of them long enough to settle. As soon as the perspective hooks you, the chapter ends and you are somewhere else.

• Withheld judgment. Each character is rendered without the narrator’s moral commentary. Grace’s drug-dispensing evangelism, Dalton’s flights from everywhere he finds himself, Messy’s warping into something neither the reader nor the family quite recognizes by the end—Jones does not editorialize. And he doesn’t arrange the material so that the editorial work is done by implication either.

• Off-page development. The major changes in each character happen between the chapters that follow them. Messy’s transformation, Dalton’s drift between jobs and across regions, the deepening of Grace’s self-radicalization—the reader experiences the consequences of these arcs, but not the arcs themselves. The reader returns to the character and they have moved, and you were not there for it.

What these three craft choices do together is something none of them can do on their own. The reader’s experience of being pulled away from each character mirrors the family’s experience of being pulled apart from each other. The changes that happen in your absence is how it happens in theirs. Jones’s construction of Fancy Gap makes you a participant in the abandonment. You leave Messy in a Bible Camp; the family left him there too. You leave Dalton aimless and trying to outrun his shame; that is also what his mother did to him, what the Army did to him, and what he then does to Jane in turn. Rather than describing the abandonment, the structure enacts it.

On the other side of the brambles, I found Zak Jones’s Fancy Gap instructive in four ways.

Sufficient interiority and the right to blame

In fiction, providing a sufficient amount of interiority can produce the illusion that a person’s inner life is the cause of their condition. The longer you sit inside a character, the more naturally her circumstances begin to look like the externalization of her psychology, rather than the other way around. This is one of the things sustained interiority is for. Jones approaches building his characters’ inner life in an interesting way. The novel isn’t emotionally cold nor filled with endless pages of psychological spoon-feeding. He doesn’t freeze the reader out, rather he demands active empathy by refusing to let interior rumination serve as a substitute for feeling, action, and consequence among his characters. He doesn’t keep the reader in Dalton long enough for you to mistake Dalton’s interior for the reason Dalton’s life has become what it has become. He will not keep you in Grace long enough for you to feel you have the standing to call her a monster, or a tragic figure, or any other of the categories the cultural shorthand stands ready to supply.

The withheld judgment for his characters is not meant to be a totally sympathetic gesture. It is epistemic. The novel, I think, is making a claim about what you have to know before you are allowed to assign responsibility. This is the answer to the disconnect the opening paragraphs of this essay was trying to name. The failure of the cultural shorthand about Appalachia is, at root, an epistemic failure—a way of knowing the region without ever quite experiencing it. Jones’s form is a method for the opposite operation. You see the place. You see these people inside it. But the construction of Fancy Gap will not let the reader mistake the seeing for understanding. It will not let the reader mistake the understanding gained for the right to judge.

The inheritance the form breaks

Once you see the mechanism of withheld judgement, the novel’s relationship to the frame of inheritance starts to take on a new meaning. Fancy Gap, on one available reading, could be read as a prodigal-son novel with Dalton as the wanderer and the family as the unstable ground he keeps trying to return to. But the prodigal parable depends on the assignment of shame. One son strays, one stays, the family restores the balance. The shame is necessary as the parable cannot do its work without it.

Jones does employ the shape of the parable, while also rejecting it. Both brothers hold the shame, and neither gets to be the clean victim. Dalton’s return home is its own failed prodigal arc in miniature: he comes back and eventually he runs. The very moment the parable’s structure exists to consecrate is the moment Dalton cannot face. Messy, meanwhile, was never the brother who stayed. The family abandoned him to the care of other people and eventually foster care; whatever moral standing the parable would grant the home-keeping son, Messy never had. By the end of the novel, his anger has taken on a shape that is not simply reactive; it is its own failure and parallel to Dalton’s.

The forebear and the celestial

Fancy Gap has a prologue and an epilogue. It’s a risky device. The bookends can seem to readers as a thumb on the scale, or create a frame that the novel cannot earn from inside. I considered both for my own novel then decided against it given it ran the risk of diluting and distracting from the main characters stories. Fancy Gap earns it by making the two voices asymmetrical and structurally unalike while employing distinct registers. Both operate as two moons the rotating realist machinery in the body of the novel cannot contain.

The prologue is the voice of the grandfather, who is not present in the body of the novel. He’s the figure whose absence the family is already living inside by the time the first chapter opens. He is the man who, while he was there, seemed to have held the center together and for one chapter he speaks. The novel proper is what happens after this voice goes silent. The rotating consciousness can be interpreted as the form the family takes once that center is gone. The prologue does not give the patriarch back. It shows the shape of what happens when he leaves. The epilogue is the other edge of the same operation. After the final chapter, the epilogue places the four of them together in a register that is unmistakably celestial with dreamlike prose. Gone is the realist machinery the novel has been running for hundreds of pages. It’s the end state of the apocalyptic deliverance that Grace promised.

The two bookends work because they describe the shape of the wound the middle pages live inside. One edge is what was there, while the other edge is what the family and the flock cannot stop reaching for. The prologue and epilogue don’t soften the novel’s argument. Rather, they create the negative space the argument requires in order to be visible. The novel itself becomes a kind of interstitial place that Jones himself described as an inspiration for the project.

Sweep versus condition

It is impossible to write about an Appalachian novel without mentioning Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. [The novel is probably a masterpiece and a masterclass in creating a distinct voice.] Both novels take Appalachia seriously as a place, refuse the easy condescension, and render the texture of poverty and lived-experience of addiction with empathy and precision. Kingsolver and Jones are asking the same question: how do people end up this way? But each novel takes structurally opposite approaches.

Kingsolver’s answer is causation. Demon Copperhead is a Dickensian sweep through a single first-person voice across years and decades, accumulating the path that produced the person. The reader experiences the conditions become the boy, and the boy becomes the man. Jones’s answer is the condition itself. Fancy Gap does not show you the entire path that produced Dalton or Messy. It shows you these people inside their situations, present and gritty, and gives the reader fragments to reconstruct the path. Causation and condition are both legitimate answers to the question, but they produce different works and different demands on the reader. Kingsolver’s reader leaves with a kind of explanatory power. Jones’s reader leaves with the opportunity to be inside a situation he or she has not been permitted to explain.

What the rotation makes teachable

What I took from Zak Jones’s Fancy Gap reinforces what I have been working with in my own fiction: the moment your form makes a claim about what kind of knowing is possible inside it, every other choice you make either honors that claim or betrays it.

Fancy Gap honors its claim with a discipline I have rarely seen in a novel. The rotating consciousness isn’t just stylistic. It acts as a moral mechanism for how we hold the multitudes within the characters and, by extension, the people around us in our lived experience. The withheld judgment is not just a sympathetic posture, rather it operates as an epistemic limit. The off-page development is not a structural shortcut but a refusal to let you mistake yourself for someone with access.

How does one write about a place that has become, in some ways, a caricature of cultural curiosity? Jones’s answer is the form itself. He gives you the place. He gives you these people inside it. And he refuses to give you the position from which the caricature operates.

I closed the novel with questions I could’t let go of. Why are these girls unable to stop thinking about the things they cannot stop thinking about—the lifeguard chair, the locked shed, the older sisters? What does a tournament mean once you already know how each girl’s life will turn out decades later? What is the body permitting the mind to do during a fight that it cannot do anywhere else? I want to take these questions seriously, which means starting with how Bullwinkel constructed her work to ask them.

The sports novel is the most teleological form fiction has. Most scenes in a sports novel are tributaries to the outcome the form was built to deliver. There is a lineage of books that lean into this—Malamud’s The Natural, Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding [a personal favorite, and a book that takes the form’s outcomes seriously enough to let them devastate]—and a counter-lineage that strains against it: Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, DeLillo’s End Zone, Tim Krabbe’s The Rider [another personal favorite, recently called by Patrick Redford in Defector the best sports book he’s ever read]. And who can forget Infinite Jest. Headshot belongs in the second camp, but it does something none of the others quite do.

Headshot preserves the tournament bracket’s scaffolding while doing the opposite of what the form normally does. The fighters arranged in the bracket enter the tournament with their past, present, and futures assembled: the girls are spit out into futures where the tournament either mattered or not at all, and they cannot tell from inside the ring which kind of moment they are inhabiting. The novel also wades into the weird (and pernicious) world of the youth sports industrial complex. [I’ve had the privilege of having been a participant AND an intrepid carpool driver for this Glorious Modern American Pastime.] Most of the fighters have traveled from far reaches of the country—with their parents, grandparents, or on their own, sleeping in the car along the way—in quest of an achievement they hope will recast their lives. The novel is built to register that gap, a form being part of the argument.

Joyce Carol Oates, in On Boxing (1987), wrote that “each boxing match is a story — a unique and highly condensed drama without words.” What Headshot has, in place of dialogue, are two narrative voices: a close third that lives inside each girl during her bouts, and a contemplative-omniscient voice that pulls back to the bracket and to the years before it and beyond it. The friction between those voices is the engine of the novel. Three craft mechanisms make it run.

Body as alibi

In the close-third sections, the body has to keep moving—bell, round, jab, step, parry—and the mind is freed to refuse forward motion. The physical task is not a competing demand on the character’s attention. It is the occasion for ruminative material no other narrative situation could so naturally accommodate. Andi Taylor, mid-bout, returns to the lifeguard chair where a child drowned on her watch. Rose Mueller carries the shed her family locked her in as a girl. Artemis Victor cannot stop comparing herself to her sisters. Bullwinkel said this almost directly on NPR: when you use your body for something difficult, your unconscious goes to uncontrollable places, and the things that haunt you come to the surface. The boxing is not the interruption of the haunting; it is what makes the haunting available.

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot (Viking, 2024), pp., 132-133. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

Rendering thought during action or activities of heavy concentration requires precision on the page. In my own fiction, I’ve found the action can grind to a halt the second the thinking gets interesting. One of my novel’s main characters is an alcoholic who builds intricate furniture. It took many revisions to strike the balance between the character’s physical action—sanding, applying a coat of polyurethane, mortising a joint—and an internal monologue about what he feels while doing it while also folding in memories. The trick is the wider consciousness underneath both, and not letting any of the three overweight the others. What’s interesting to me about Bullwinkel’s novel is that her solution is structural rather than rhetorical: choose a sport whose physical demands are so total that the mind has no choice but to wander, and then trust the wandering. It works because boxing is the rare athletic context in which sustained interiority is plausible. The fighter has to be elsewhere; her body is doing what bodies do under threat, and her self has to live somewhere it can survive.

The voice inside the bracket

The omniscient sections are where Headshot’s strangeness lives. The register is the thing to name carefully. It is mythologizing, but loftier and more interior than a play-by-play. While there are some elements of play-by-play, it does not reach outward for grandeur the way the great American sports-documentary voices did. If you want the contrast in their ear, here is John Facenda narrating They Call It Pro Football in 1967: Frozen tundra! Pirate winds! Full Wagnerian football mythology! [I’d embed the YouTube video, but alas the NFL’s copyright rules prohibit so onward.] This voice is the zeitgeist of American sports culture. This is not what Bullwinkel does. Her voice gets grander by going deeper. It pulls back from the action and asks the kind of questions about repetition and pattern and consequence that the girls themselves are too inside-the-moment to phrase. In a late bout the narrator catches the form in the act of betraying itself: “there is the implication of a loop, or the suggestion of a repetition, a circular groove within which the tournament has fit its narrative.”

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot (Viking, 2024), p. 117. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

Words like implication and suggestion are doing real work there. The voice is uncertain at altitude—authoritative in its distance but still working something out, in the register of meditation rather than commentary. This is the contradiction the second voice generates. Brackets promise whittling. Many becomes few becomes one. As the boxers advance, they do not become more singular; they accumulate the consciousness of the girls they have defeated. Bullwinkel told Lincoln Michel for an interview in Counter Craft that the structure had to “fold in on itself in order for it to continue to build suspense.” The omniscient voice is not the bracket’s voice, rather it is the voice dismantling it within.

The Bob’s Boxing Palace time vortex

Bob’s Boxing Palace is a converted warehouse in Reno. [It’s basically a venue Phish would have played in the early 1990s—hello, Bomb Factory in Dallas, ‘94.] It has folding chairs and bad light and a styrofoam quality I want to insist on—cheap, off-brand, materially provisional, unaging. [This contrasts with the millions of taxpayer dollars spread across the United States to build gargantuan soccerplexes, basketball stadiums, natatoriums, baseball fields, et al in its own bracket of national economic development glory.] The point of Bob’s Boxing Palace is that it can still serve the purpose and offer the promise of these other places precisely because of the illusion of opportunity. Bullwinkel set the book in 20XX, she told Lit Hub, because she wanted it to take place outside of time. The warehouse is how she makes the year hold. A more specific setting would betray time. And a more storied venue—Madison Square Garden, the MGM Grand—would carry its own historical weight and force the book into more of a reality. Bob’s Boxing Palace is generic enough to dissolve. And that dissolution is what allows the incompatible time-registers to operate simultaneously inside the same building.

There is the bracket time: linear and forward-driving, winnowing the fighters down from eight to four to two to one. There is the fight time: the present-tense pressure of a single round in which a second can hold a calculation or a memory or a lifetime. There is the loop time of the close-third interiors: recursive and refusing the present even while inhabiting it. And there is the flash-forward time: delivered by the omniscient voice, decades ahead. The contemplative voice is the agent that has access to all of these at once and grants them to us simultaneously, so that the bouts the girls are pouring everything into arrive at the reader already half-undone. The champion does not become famous. The losers do not stay losers. We are reading toward outcomes the book has already disclosed: outcomes that will not matter the way the bracket assumes they will.

What the bracket can’t decide

Most sports novels have to land a verdict, if not a champion. By the final bout the form has arranged its material so the meaning is clear: either the right girl wins, or the wrong one wins and we understand what was lost. Headshot refuses this transaction. There is a winner, but the championship is not the meaning. What the novel delivers instead is accumulation: eight consciousnesses we cannot finish thinking about, futures that arrive before the bouts conclude, a warehouse that holds incompatible times at once. The match Andi Taylor is fighting against Artemis Victor is not just with Artemis. It’s with her past and future. There is another reading under the surface. How did these eight girls come to be in this room at all? What about their agency and wanting and inheritance got them there? What does the protection of one’s own ambition cost?

Back to the hangover. The mechanism of it, I think, is that Rita Bullwinkel gives the reader eight girls in a structure compressed enough that you finish each chapter wanting the novel that could have been written about just her. The form generates an appetite it refuses to satisfy. You leave with eight unfinished hungers and no way to address them. This is the lesson that I am taking back into my own fiction: the present moment we are most intensely inside is almost never the moment that turns out to have mattered, and we cannot tell, from inside it, which kind of moment it is.

For the record, I was rooting for Iggy.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.

Lily King’s two Casey Peabody novels, Writers & Lovers (2020) and the very recent Heart the Lover (2025) take this jaggedness seriously rather than treating it as a failure of will. Read together, the novels make an argument easy to mistake for one about literary ambition and a life committed to making art. While ostensibly about relationships and love, the novels are really about grief’s permission structure. In my experience, grief deflates our gladness and saps more of our agency than we realize.

In rendering Casey Peabody [SPOILER ALERT!], King has given us a protagonist for whom almost nothing in her life is something she has chosen. Her mother dies suddenly on a trip to South America under circumstances that remain only partly understood. Her father, earlier in her life, lost his high school coaching job after he was caught looking through a peephole at teenage girls in a locker room. Casey and her brother Caleb drift through Writers & Lovers in a semi-fugue state, unable to reconcile with the family that dissolved. The only act left available to them is the refusal to make any further choice. The not-choosing seems to be the closest thing to agency a mind broken by a death it couldn't prevent can manage.

Crucially for Casey, inside that drift, there is the writing: six pages a day kept up for six years on a single novel, done in the morning hours before her restaurant shift. By coincidence or design or synchronicity, both novels place passages I kept returning to at pages 80-81. In Writers & Lovers, Casey describes the practice itself: “The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane.” The line sits on the page facing the news of Princess Diana’s death—public grief on one side, private discipline on the other—and it gives the defended-corner argument in Casey’s own words. King has said in a 2020 Dead Darlings interview that Writers & Lovers poured out of her after her mother’s death, when she had been unable to write anything for a long time. Of course, this is essentially what the writing is for Casey too: not a triumph of will but the one practice that survives the unmaking.

Lily King, Writers & Lovers (Grove Press, 2020), pp. 80-81. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

The mirroring page 80-81 in Heart the Lover shows Casey doing what a writer does, which is to see. Yash, back on campus, has come to find Jordan (a nickname given to her by Sam and Yash), and they have a conversation about reading each other’s work. She tells him his story was gorgeous and tender, that the writer in it “sort of reminded me of” him. He dismisses it as maudlin and overwritten, then hands her a paperback of Knut Hamsun's Hunger and tells her it is “about being a writer, no matter the cost.” She holds back the deeper thing she sees in him, because what she sees is him, and the words won’t come. He gives her the framing for the vocation they are both already practicing. He does not quite give her himself.

Lily King, Heart the Lover (Grove Press, 2025), pp. 80-81. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

While Casey manages to claw out a space for her writing within the drift, the drift’s seems to overwhelm nearly every relationship Casey is in. Paco, Luke, Oscar, Silas, Sam, Yash—the six men across two novels set the romantic rhythms Casey lives by. Around them a wider weather of relationships she inhabits rather than chooses: the landlord whose apartment she takes because it is offered, the kitchen staff whose orbit she joins because the job is there. She follows Paco to Spain on something close to a whim, uprooting her whole life on the gravity of one man's pull. As the older Casey in Writers & Lovers, she dates Oscar and Silas in parallel, drifting between them as circumstances (joining an already formed family versus building one), rather than her own desires seem to decide. As a college senior in Heart the Lover, she is pulled into Sam and Yash’s orbit, loses Sam to a breakup, and is then crushed when Yash, on the eve of their planned move to New York together, chooses his loyalty to Sam over his love for her. Maureen Corrigan, reviewing Heart the Lover for NPR, observed that the Yash wound is the engine of the older Casey's arrested development, another grief inside the larger one—and the formulation extends past Yash to all of them.

What grief has done to Casey is more particular than the deflation of agency in the abstract. The wounds at the center of her life are wounds of regard—a mother who could no longer hold her in mind because she was dead, a father whose attention turned out to have been the wrong kind all along. What Casey lost was the experience of being chosen, chosen to be looked after, chosen to be seen rightly. The posture she takes toward the men is not passivity. It is the specific shape of waiting to be chosen again, because to choose first would require trusting she could survive choosing wrong. [The latter is why, I think, King’s novels land so powerfully on the reader. Unless you’re hermetically sealed off from the world, every reader can relate to the notion of how fear drives us away from making a choice.]

The first crack in this pattern comes late in Writers & Lovers, when Oscar returns from a work trip in a foul mood and expects Casey to absorb it—after caring for his boys for the weekend, no less. She refuses, leaves the house, and does not go back. The refusal is small in the scale of a life, but it is the first time she declines to organize herself around a man’s weather. Everything that follows in Heart the Lover later is built on the ground this exit clears.

Charting Casey’s arc across the two novels, King manages to do something quite bold in that she takes a rather conventional climax setting (a deathbed plot) and turns it on its head. The hospital room in Heart the Lover makes the climax possible rather than being the climax itself. Yash is dying and Sam is keeping vigil when Casey goes to them, and what she is given there is the chance to do for Yash what she was unable to do for her mother years earlier. She’s present at the ending rather than receiving its aftermath from a distance. The agency she was denied at the central wound of her life is partly returned to her here, in the smaller form of choosing presence at someone else’s wound. It isn’t redemption, since Yash still dies and her mother is still gone, but being there is something Casey chose for herself, and the choosing is what opens the door to the final moment of the book.

The deathbed scene also sharpens what the writing has been arguing all along, giving Casey the comparison she didn’t know she was making. Sam and Yash are the brilliant boys whose essays the professors read aloud, and everyone assumes they will be the writers. By middle age, it is Casey who has become the writer and the brilliant boys who have not. The hard life of writing doesn’t yield to kindness; it tends to find the people already practiced at keeping going—even inside loss.

After everything the two novels have piled up against this moment, Casey is finally and completely seen. Silas in that closing moment is at once the partner she has built a life with and the father she never had, present and generous and capable of recognizing exactly who she is, and the wound that began with her own father is met, in this last image of the book, by a man inhabiting both roles at once. This is what the agency King has been tracking has been moving toward all along: not Casey directing her own life, not even Casey choosing presence at someone else's ending, but Casey at last being witnesses by another.

What King refuses, in both novels, is the rationalization—the consolation that grief makes Casey stronger, the argument that loss is a teacher. The novels are not scaling the tired mountain of personal resilience and grit, which I admire. What they do instead is leave something in the reader, a residue that allows us to look at the hard moments of our own lives. The line I opened this essay with—that grief deflates our gladness and saps more of our agency than we realize—is not a claim I came to King to argue. It is something her writing made visible to me about my own. The deepest subject here, as Mary Kate Carr observed in her AV Club review, is what it means to be known by another at a particular moment of your life, and being known is itself one of the small choices grief still permits—alongside the morning hour at the desk, the trip to the hospital room, the willingness to be loved at last by someone who can show up.

Epilogue

The butterflies on the summer breeze

The wildflowers sway with ease

At the bridge of two infinities

What’s been lost and what lies waiting

— Big Thief, “Double Infinity” (2025)

Big Thief’s ‘Double Infinity’ was in my ears while I was drafting. The bridge image kept rhyming with what I found in King’s novels.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.

The “Ninth Hour” in the Catholic canonical hours is ‘None’ (pronounced noh-neh) prayed at 3 PM and historically associated with the death of Christ.

Let me take a step back here to say that obviously Alice McDermott is a living legend and among the giants of precisely rendered fiction. Across her work, the reader finds that she often holds a moral life in suspension rather than resolving it. You see it in Charming Billy (1998), After This (2006), and Absolution (2023).

The move most writers don’t make

Withholding judgment is a familiar craft virtue, the workshop cliché of don’t judge your characters. But that is usually a rule about the narrator’s stance. What McDermott does is different and more difficult. She has this uncanny knack for navigating her characters’ own ongoing negotiation with the past—the act of turning the same events over, finding new meanings, suspending verdicts they thought they had reached. Yet the judgment that gets withheld is not McDermott’s about her characters. It is the characters’ about themselves and each other.

That is a rarer move, and it is closer [at least as I’ve tried and often failed to reflect in my own life] to how consciousness actually works. A lot of fiction gives characters interior monologues that build and build and build until they reach a conclusion. The character thinks something through, inveighs to themselves, then arrives somewhere. The ol’ well-trodden path of the epiphany structure, even in novels that claim to resist it. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott’s characters think their way toward understandings and then keep thinking, and the understanding gets revised, softened, complicated, sometimes abandoned. Sally’s feelings about her mother’s marriage. Annie’s about Jim. The nuns about each other. She manages to keep readers in this liminal space because we recognize it in our own lives—even if we aren’t always honest to ourselves. In The Ninth Hour nothing settles, because in real life nothing does.

The craft mechanisms are worth naming. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott does it in three specific ways:

• Time as solvent [which sounds fancy and academic but is really just how memory works]. The collective narrator, looking back across decades, makes every judgment provisional. The reader knows more time will pass, more context will arrive, and what feels like a conclusion now will look different from the other side of another death, another child, another decade.

• Sympathy that outlasts context. McDermott gives the reader reasons to judge. The novel opens with Jim’s suicide preparations. Then there’s Annie’s hidden longing for intimacy, written in scenes that make the reader flinch with her. Mrs. Costello’s manipulations. Sister Jeanne’s final act. Sally on the train to Chicago, intent on her vocation, gulled and disgusted and then cruel herself when the girl in the next seat plays her for money. McDermott keeps rendering these characters with a tenderness the information does not license.

• Revised memory. Characters return to the same events and remember them differently. Not unreliably in any gotcha sense, but in the way that memory works, where what you notice in a scene changes based on what has happened since. [I keep trying to do this in my own work and find it’s difficult to stick the landing without being heavy handed.]

To achieve this, she makes a structural choice that carries the novel forward from the central wound of the family rather than backward toward it. Most literary novels about family trauma are archaeological. They move backward through time. Something happened before the book began, a death, a betrayal, a buried secret, and the narrative is the slow approach to it. The reader arrives at the wound alongside the protagonist, and the arrival is the climax. We have so many novels in this shape that we have stopped noticing it is a shape.

The structural refusal

The Ninth Hour opens with the character of Jim closing the windows, sealing the door with rags, turning on the gas. His pregnant wife Annie is out. She comes home to the smell. A neighbor runs for help and a nun arrives. By the end of the first chapter we know what happened and why, and the rest of the novel, three generations and several decades and a dozen lives, unfolds forward from this scene rather than back toward it. This is obviously a big structural choice and it changes everything the novel can do.

Archaeological novels have to land a verdict. Of course, that is what the approach to the buried thing is for. By the time the protagonist reaches the wound, the novel has arranged its material so that the meaning(s) becomes clear. The father was cruel, the mother was complicit, the child survived, and now we understand. Understanding is the reward for the excavation.

The Ninth Hour cannot deliver this, because you cannot reach a verdict on a story that keeps going. Annie remarries. Sally is born, grows up, considers the convent, turns away. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor tend the dying. Sister Jeanne, near the end, does a thing you could call sin or you could call mercy. And McDermott does not tell you which, because the grandchildren who narrate the book are still alive and still thinking about it. Yeah. I know. She’s doing something wild and magical here. Every judgment the novel seems to reach is revised by the next chapter, the next generation, the next death. Time keeps passing, meaning keeps moving. It is the moral texture the forward structure makes possible.

If you’re reaching for this book for the first time, watch closely how she handles Jim. The opening chapter gives you every reason to judge him. A young husband, a pregnant wife, a selfish and devastating act. The novel could have positioned him as the wound the family approaches and understands. Instead McDermott keeps rendering Jim, across years and perspectives, with a tenderness the information does not license. Annie’s memory of him softens and hardens and softens again. Sally, who never met her father, inherits a version of him that is not quite her mother’s. The nuns, who cleaned the apartment, carry their own. No single Jim emerges. The reader is not permitted the comfort of a settled view. The grandchildren serve as the collective narrator for The Ninth Hour, acting as an instrument of the unsettled point of view. The voice McDermott uses is both far enough from the events to see around them and close enough to the family to keep caring. And this voice refuses to stop revising into the future.

The Ninth Hour has stayed with me long after I finished it—the echo of that voice and arc of each character lodged into my skin like the best kind of splinter.

My notes in the margin and notebook were copious and thorough. McDermott shows how a moral life actually works—not through a series of verdicts that are reached and filed away—but as an ongoing negotiation with people who are no longer here and a past that cannot be changed. The understanding I reached at forty-two looks different than twenty-two, not because I have learned the absolute truth about the world but because I’ve lived more. But no one names this as it happens. No one wakes up on Thursday morning, sits down with a cup of coffee and a their leather-bound journal, and writes, “I noticed that the way I felt about my mother at Sunday dinner at 6:47 PM, when she asked if I felt SO RESTED because the kids slept over at friends' houses, is no longer the way I feel about her now, here, at 5:13 AM on Thursday, three days and fourteen-odd hours later. This represents a meaningful evolution in my filial consciousness.” We just keep going. The revision happens anyway—for better or worse.

Through time, most likely, we just find ourselves holding someone differently than we used to, and, sometimes, we are mildly surprised by our own thoughts. The story keeps traveling. What McDermott does so skillfully is execute this revision of her characters’ lives without letting her characters narrate it. As such, the grandchildren see what Annie cannot. The novel names what living does not. Her refusal to resolve is not a failure. She’s [I think anyway] just being honest about how time works and how people actually are.

The last chapter of The Ninth Hour is narrated by the grandchildren, looking back. They are still not finished. And they will not be finished. The family keeps going, which means the wound keeps traveling on and on and on, which means none of us get a final judgment on anyone, including themselves. The novel ends but the thinking does not. It is the ending. The Ninth Hour makes its argument by getting out of its own way and letting time do the work.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.

For the uninitiated of Vigil, Jill “Doll” Blaine descends toward K.J. Boone’s deathbed in her favorite black pumps, reconstituting limb by limb as she falls. She has been “elevated” and sent, decades after her own death by car bomb, to comfort the dying. Boone, her current charge, is an oil tycoon who knowingly poisoned the planet for fifty years and who, dying, has nothing to apologize for. Beside her at the bedside is the Frenchman, who invented the engine and has come to repent it, and who insists Boone be made to repent before any comfort is offered. Read quickly, Jill and the Frenchman look like opposites: she dispenses unconditional grace, he demands moral reckoning. Saunders himself, in interviews around Vigil’s launch, has wondered aloud who is right.

But neither of them are doing what they appear to be doing [SPOILER ALERT!]. The Frenchman has collapsed the contradiction toward moral binary: comfort must be earned. Jill has collapsed it the other direction: comfort must be given regardless. They have picked opposite sides of the same refusal. Jill’s ending—setting off for the next vigil, the human memories tucked underneath the elevated self as fuel rather than held in tension with it—is not synthesis. For her, it becomes an infinity loop. She has chosen and the choosing is the closure. The contradiction the novel wants held—that Boone is both monstrous and a man, that comfort is both warranted and obscene—is held by neither of them. Saunders refuses to redeem Boone for our comfort, not because he’s withholding, but because the unredeemed Boone is, of course, the thing he wants to think about with us.

The pressure of the novel lands on Boone and Saunders builds him with unsettling care. He is not a cartoon. He was a Midwestern farm boy who loved his wife, who raised a daughter who turned out caring and well-adjusted and who sits at his bedside in his final hours. He believes [actually believes; just like the current U.S. Secretary of Energy, someone whom I briefed a few times but that’s a story for another time] that the energy his company pulled from the ground lifted billions out of poverty and that the world is better for his having lived in it. He is also a man who knew, by the 1980s, what carbon emissions were doing atmosphere, and who spent the next forty years funding the lie. Saunders gives us both Boones in the same prose. Boone’s daughter is not a redemption. She does not undo the decades of deceit, but she is not nothing, either. She rearranges the pillow behind his head with the unembarrassed familiarity of a daughter who has done it many times before. Whatever Boone was outside this room, in this room he was a father who had taught a child how to love him without flinching. Something in him was capable of producing her. The reader is asked to do neither and both: to keep both Boones in view at once and to refuse the relief of choosing.

What makes Boone exceptional in Saunders’ catalog is that the loving husband and the well-adjusted daughter aren’t quite enough. They don’t soften the man, nor do they redeem him. But it does make the reader pause. Boone represents an evil so clear and obvious that he is worthy of our anger, and Saunders knows it. In a February 2026 conversation with Ezra Klein, an episode titled, tellingly, “George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin”, Saunders described Jill’s compassion-for-everyone framework as one he largely shared going into the novel, but admitted he got more and more skeptical about it as he examined it. Saunders’ creation of Boone seems to have broken something in the formula. Saunders said he went into Vigil ready to extend his usual generosity to a flawed character. Yet he found in Boone an evil that his generosity could not absorb. The Frenchman, for all his hardness, is right that the anger is real and earned. Jill, for all her sweetness, is wrong to dispense comfort that displaces it. The reader is asked to hold both: the anger Saunders himself could not write past and the human being he refuses to reduce to that anger.

Saunders works skillfully in compression that accumulates and accelerates. Take a single sentence on pp. 172 in Vigil where he renders two characters and two contradictions at once. Jill, seeking a fresh beginning, hurls herself toward Paul Bowman—the man who killed her—and finds him “luminous, spectral, celestial, the size of a mountain, seated at that same (football field–sized) metal table, nervously smoking.” From the page, we understand this isn’t the first time she’s done this. The sentence is doing two characters at once. Jill has rendered her killer cosmic because she cannot approach him at human scale; her elevation-system is a coping mechanism dressed as enlightenment (photo from pp. 172-173 below).

George Saunders, Vigil (New York: Random House, 2026), 172–173. Excerpt reproduced for purposes of literary commentary. Photograph by the author.

But Bowman is also there inside the prose. He is still, eternally, the man who needs a cigarette, unable to settle into the transcendence Jill is imposing on him. Jill collapses the contradiction toward elevation: he must be cosmic so I can approach him. Bowman collapses it toward the human: I am still the man at the table. They meet in a single breath and the reader feels both collapses simultaneously.

This is the kind of architecture Saunders has been building since he launched his career. Take “Al Roosten” from Tenth of December, which is perhaps my favorite Saunders story ever. [He just totally nails the characters + scene. The humor is so absurd. I still remember how much my whole body hurt after I read it in The New Yorker back in 2009.] In the story, Al kicks Larry Donfrey’s [an incredible name] wallet and car keys under the bleachers in a fit of envy and walks away. He considers himself, if not quite a hero, then at least a man who has been wronged and is owed something.

The premise runs through the entirety of the collection, including the title track, “Tenth of December”. Don Eber, walking into the woods to die before his illness takes his mind, has constructed an entire moral architecture around his choice. He wants to spare his family, exit on his terms, keep his dignity. Robin, the boy who falls through the ice, ruins it. Eber must come back, must be saved, must keep the body and the mind he was trying to spare everyone. The story refuses to tell us whether his decision to die was right or wrong, whether the rescue is grace or postponement. It holds both. The compassion that gets attributed to Saunders’ treatment of his characters is also, and maybe more fundamentally, a compassion for the reader he is asking to hold what the characters cannot.

The political register sharpens in Liberation Day’s “Love Letter,” where a grandfather writes to his grandson explaining why he and his generation did not act as democracy eroded around them. The letter is the contradiction made textual. He is composing his own moral self-portrait while the gaps in the portrait remain visible to everyone but him. The things he didn’t say, the meetings he didn’t attend, the small accommodations that became, in aggregate, the absence of resistance. He cannot quite see what he failed to do, and cannot quite not see it, and so the letter has to keep going. Stopping would mean acknowledging what the letter is actually for. Where Al Roosten kicks the keys and walks away mid-rationalization, the grandfather writes the rationalization onto the page in real time, and the prose forces the reader to hold both the man he is telling his grandson he is and the man the letter reveals. The grandfather is the necessary counterpart to Boone. Boone knew about the impact of carbon emissions and lied; the grandfather knew about democracy and did not act. One is the active agent of a knowable harm, the other its passive enabler. The contradiction the reader is asked to hold across both figures is the same: that knowing is not innocence, that the architecture of self-justification is itself a kind of harm, and that compassion for the man does not absolve the man.

Lincoln in the Bardo is the formal articulation that connects all of this. The bardo dwellers: Vollman with his unconsummated marriage, Bevins with his slit wrists, the reverend with his terror. Each refuse to know they are dead. Each has picked a side of their own contradiction and built an afterlife around the refusal. The chorus of voices, the absence of a single integrating narrator, the bardo as structure rather than mere setting—is the refusal of resolution. Vigil inherits that form, but tightens the moral stakes by making the unresolved figure actively guilty rather than tragically grieving.

What changes between the two is not the move, but rather the figure being held. Lincoln in the Bardo gives us a grieving father and a chorus of the dead, all of them holding contradictions about loss. Lincoln cannot let his son go; the bardo dwellers cannot accept that they themselves are gone. The novel’s moral atmosphere is sorrow, the radical cosmic tenderness that Saunders is so good at effectuating for the reader. Vigil narrows that chorus to two voices arguing across a single bed and replaces the grieving father with a guilty one. The contradiction the reader is asked to hold is no longer “how do we go on after loss” but “what do we owe a man who caused loss and feels nothing.” The scale changes to: Willie Lincoln’s typhoid is intimate and tragic; Boone’s lying about damage from carbon emissions is structural and ongoing and the harm has not stopped at his deathbed. Sorrow is no longer the governing register. Anger is in the room. The form has tightened from an orchestra into a chamber piece. To raise the stakes, the question has tightened from whether grief can be metabolized to whether anger can coexist with seeing the man whole. Saunders is doing the same move, but in harder material. He’s admitting into the work an emotional register that he sometimes kept at arm’s length.

There is a discomfort to all of this. Saunders does not let the reader settle. We cannot dismiss Boone. The daughter is there, the farm boy is there, the love for his wife is there. We cannot absolve him. The lying is there and the burning planet remains. We cannot let go of the anger he has earned and we cannot let the anger be all we feel. We cannot side with the Frenchman without becoming his hardness, and we cannot side with Jill without accepting her loop. Every escape route the story offers turns out to be another collapse of the contradiction it has asked us to hold.

What I think that stuckness produces, if we stay inside it, is a kind of forced widening. We have to imagine further than we wanted to. We have to extend ourselves toward Boone—not to forgive him, but to see him—and the extension is the work. Saunders’ compassion is not a posture he models for us. It is a muscle he develops in us by refusing every easier alternative.

P.S. If you aren’t subscribed to Story Club, you should be. George has built one of the rare genuinely kind, genuinely curious reading communities online, and his generosity with his own experience and craft and engagement with his readers is the engine of it. I’m grateful for every post.

Author’s Note: I am not paid by or affiliated with Politics & Prose. They’re just my local bookstore.