The 2021 National Book Award--A New Classic

 The 2021 National Book Award Winner, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, is destined to be an important American classic. 

Claiming a new work is certain to be “important” or “a classic” is equal parts easy and difficult. It is easy in the sense that such assertions are, to an extent, opinion-oriented statements that are not easily qualified; what is more, such claims made in the here and now offer the proclaimer years to become reality. I can say this book will be a classic, and then sit back for the remainder of my (hopefully) long life, exclaiming from my very deathbed that the reading public (or academia) simply have not yet seen the wisdom of the accolades I gave this “classic” so many years before. 

Alternatively, it is difficult to say a book is destined for greatness because, first, I am simply one voice among many; nor can I know how this book will age, or how future readers will engage with the book when it becomes not just a literary work but a chronicle of life at the time it was written. Secondly, it has to be said, that it has become far, far too easy for publishing companies, bookstores, celebrity book clubs, and, yes, even the book awards that I follow so closely, to say, “A new classic.” 

In all honesty, such a description sometimes turns me off of a new book entirely. 

Having said all that, having provided you with a laborious disclaimer about the dangers of calling a new book an “important,” eventual “classic,” let me tell you: Hell of a Book is an important, eventual classic. 

Jason Mott’s latest novel features a plot that is a little bit of several things. It is a narrative work of two intertwined yet conflicting biographies. It is a work of social commentary on race, history, and police violence. It is a mystery, while also being a love story–though not the kind of love story you would think of when you hear that term. Beyond the nomenclature “literature,” it really is not easy to pigeon hole this novel into a particular category. 

The basic element of the plot centers around an unnamed Black author (the racial signifier is unavoidable, I assure you) on tour for his bestselling new novel, blithely entitled Hell of a Book. (The meta-like nature of this overlapped title fails to impress the way Emily St. John Mandel’s author-on-book-tour-during-a-plague narrative does in Sea of Tranquility, but that is okay: it is not the important element of Mott’s work.) The fictional(?) author’s tour goes from a simple exercise in banality to something far more interesting when The Kid begins to tag along. The Kid–always capitalized, and also known by a torturous nickname given to him on account of his extremely dark skin–can only be seen and heard by the author. As the country’s news channels are awash with the gruesome details of another police shooting of an unarmed Black child, the author and The Kid attempt to reach each other through the layers of pain and self-protection they have both thrown up around them in order to survive in a world that does not care for or about them. 

The theme of Hell of a Book is more important than its plot. The author and The Kid tell their stories in alternating chapters, their narratives bouncing off each other even as they move through the course of the book towards a conclusion that might or might not be shared. The lack of names ensures each character, one a child, one an adult, both Black males, serves as a sort of racialized “everyman,” illustrating the effect of an all-encompassing system on the lives of individuals. (The very narrative theme that garnered Hungarian author and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertesz a Nobel Prize in Literature, so take note of that.) 

Hell of a Book made me think of another Nobel Laureate’s most important work: Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Beloved. What Morrison did for the narrative of the enslaved, Mott has done for the Black Lives Matter movement. With this work, Mott explores one of the most important racial issues of the 21st-century–the seemingly-constant shooting of unarmed Black men by police officers–within the framework of the way in which Black citizens see themselves within the broader American social construct. Embedded deeply in the story is the ongoing, inescapable conversation about the construction of Black identity in a United States where Blacks seem to be hated because of the sins done to their ancestors by those who continue to hold the reins of power in an unequal and violent system. 

Read this book. I'm not scared to say, it is sure to be a classic.