January 1, 2024
Thomas's fiction debut delves into issues of race and class in the U.S., following his well-received memoir Sink. Returning from deployment in the Iraq War, Joseph Thomas tries to adjust to civilian life in Philadelphia as he pursues a degree, works as an EMT, and navigates family relationships. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from April 15, 2024
The magnificent first novel from Thomas (Sink, a memoir) centers on an Iraq War veteran who works in a Philadelphia emergency room. Joey, who grew up in poverty, relies on student loans to pay child support for his two children. His other commitments include cigarette money for his mother, a new set of tires for his sister, and glasses for his kids, leaving his bank account overdrawn at the end of the month. Joey’s stream-of-consciousness narration moves from his daily routine in the ER through flashbacks to his relationship with his children’s mother, his largely uneventful time in the Army, and his childhood in a roach-infested apartment. In a remarkable feat of formal invention, Thomas collapses time and space, melding Joey’s memories with descriptions of patients in the ER (“This homeless dude Greg who everybody loves to lovehate is beaten to near death outside a gas station by teenagers who are not yet shot through their daddy’s deep blue Crown Vics with AK-47s at Sunoco on Broad and Lehigh”). Eventually, the ER floods with people from Joey’s life, including his Army buddy Ray, whom Joey hints was his former lover, and his father, whom he’d never met. Thomas scales great heights with this innovative blend of social realism and surrealism.
May 1, 2024
A Black army vet working as a hospital technician reflects on his life. Joseph Thomas, the narrator of Thomas' debut novel, is having a tough shift, but that's nothing new. An emergency department tech and nurse's aide, Joseph begins his story with a litany of patients waiting for care in his Philadelphia trauma center, from a young boy with a wound from an AK-47 to a savagely beaten homeless man. Joseph rushes from one patient to another, being slowly driven mad by hunger; his friend Ray, whom he met while they were preparing to deploy to Iraq, is supposed to bring him a hoagie and an Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip muffin but hasn't yet materialized. In a futile bid to distract himself, Joseph contemplates his upcoming trip to Belize with a co-worker, one of several with whom he is sexually entangled. Throughout the novel, Joseph expounds on his complicated personal life--he has children with three different women; his mother, who's spent time in prison, has a crack problem; and he's juggling work with graduate school, where he's writing his dissertation. He's also frustrated with the arc of his life: "The past nineteen years of day-in day-out grinding hadn't meant shit because with my own mistakes and failures, the world, and a set of increasing desires for nice things combined I was basically back at square one." Thomas' stream-of-consciousness writing is superb, and well suited to the frustrated anger that his protagonist is plagued by: His fury, he says, "is composed, in part, by the material conditions of people's lives and in part by starvation. It doesn't help that I know so many of these people, either by blood relation or the repeated offenses of being ill, which are really just the repeat offenses of being poor, which is correlated too strongly with being not white, though in this world, in this country, in this neighborhood especially, with being black." This is an astonishingly accomplished novel, often funny, often tragic, one that longs for, as Joseph puts it, "that necessary love, that forceful love, that elegant and deeply painful love otherwise foreclosed to us by the world." Just stunning.
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May 1, 2024
Following his memoir, Sink (2023), Thomas' debut novel is a provocative portrait of Black life. Told in free-form, alternating timelines, the story bounces between a young man's deployment to Iraq as a medic and the present, in which he works as an ER tech at a North Philadelphia hospital while also enrolled as an MD/PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. Through narrator Joseph, who shares the author's name, Thomas creates a narrative style all his own of unapologetic, defiant, bold, and flagrant language that matches the rhythm and energy of Joseph's community. Not necessarily easily accessible, Thomas' prose is strong, clamorous, and boisterous, reflecting back the chaos, intergenerational trauma, gender issues, sexuality, violence, and search for identity experienced by Joseph's family, friends, and colleagues in a larger world not their own. Along with his ER work and memories of Iraq, Joseph is curious to learn more about the father he never knew, who is currently an inmate at the barbarous Holmesburg Prison. As for who or what Otis Spunkmeyer is, that's for readers to find out.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.