paperbackmorning 's review for:

The Slip: A Novel by Lucas Schaefer

5.0

---

Make a face long enough enough and it becomes your face.

Crackling with life, dripping with details, firmly situated in its setting, and infuriatingly but hilariously all over the place, The Slip is a wild ride from start to finish. If it’s about anything, it’s about the fluidity of identity.

Sometimes your desired identity can be achieved through pure desire and stubborn action. Sometimes your inner self doesn’t match what others see, but a person can have as many selves as there are people to perceive them and places to be seen. A group of middle aged men who go to the local boxing gym first thing every day are play acting versions of themselves their wives and bosses may never be privy to.  A rookie police officer pretends to be a proper cop until she disappears into the role. An awkward white teenager decides to transform himself into a sexy confident Black man, with tragicomically successful results. A bevy of other painstakingly rendered protagonists and minor characters, misfits all, come alive on these pages. 

In the acknowledgments, the author thanks his editor: “one thing I’ve learned from Tim about writing fiction is that sometimes what seems like a detour isn’t a detour— it’s the route.” The Slip is circuitous, it zigzags, and it all comes together beautifully if you stick around for 500 or so pages. 

Read this if you love the work of Nathan Hill, Donna Tartt, James McBride, Zadie Smith, or Percival Everett. Read this if you want to be astonished by an ambitious debut novel and start impatiently waiting for the author’s follow-up. Read this if you want to live inside a novel and be sad to leave the characters at the end.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to be an early reader of this title, which is available now!