Lucas Schaefer’s debut has that essential quality of all great novels: It’s easy to imagine how someone could hate it ... Here’s a novel so pumped up and shredded it can’t possibly sit still on a shelf ... I spent most of the week not just reading this story but cheering it on in a state of unhinged excitement ... 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 ... In Schaefer’s narration, these shenanigans are wildly, transgressively hilarious ... 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 ... 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' .... 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.
Bursting, messy ... In these flamboyant touches one recognizes the diagnostic markings of the genus Debut Novel. Mr. Schaefer leaps around haphazardly, switching between time frames and third- and first-person narrations. He loads his writing with rude jokes, contrived provocations and portentous coincidences. The shaggy-dog excess is less a conscientious style, one suspects, than the product of a writer who is simply trying out a lot of different stuff. Too much of The Slip is painfully zany, but its footwork is fleet and its energy is unflagging. It’s hard not to like a book so gamesomely determined to win you over, if only by wearing you down.
The book is...rooted in vivid character studies, many revolving around the boxing gym, but Nathaniel’s ghost moves the reader between narratives. Each new perspective naturally emerges from the last, offering more clues, more context, more characters, with every new segment another fragment of a fractured mirror, each new addition getting the reader closer to reality. It’s Rocky in the style of Rashomon with a heavy rewrite from Philip Roth ... Much of Schaefer’s commentary on race is masked under cynical Jewish humor. But even when he’s joking, Schaefer is savvy and sober about how race penetrates different aspects of American life ... Nathaniel’s story is just the connective tissue. All the individual stories that build to his fate are equally rich ... A tremendously strong novel ... There’s a lot to admire here ... The thing I admire most is that Schaefer set himself such a challenge for a debut novel and that he succeeded. I can’t overstate how immiscible the mix of ingredients is in The Slip ... Schaefer takes an unpalatable mixture of ingredients and makes something light, piquant, and satisfying. From disparate, difficult parts comes a great Mrs. Potato Head.
Captivating ... Painstakingly researched and beautifully crafted ... A capacious and incisive history of the modern conservative movement’s formative years, seen through the eyes of its intellectual leader ... Enthralling and infuriating by turns, but never boring ... It’s Tanenhaus’s great achievement to have bottled this magic, showing how Buckley played ringmaster in the conservative circus while consistently winning over political adversaries ... Tanenhaus’s most important additions to the record involve Buckley’s ties to the Jim Crow South, which were far more extensive than previously understood ... Puzzling through these tensions in Buckley’s life—and how they color the past 40 years or so of the conservative movement—is where Tanenhaus leaves the most questions unanswered. It feels perverse to say this doorstop of a book is too short, but, after a luxuriant stroll through his subject’s first half-century, Tanenhaus races through Buckley’s last three decades at a sprint.
Schaefer’s stunning debut expertly weaves nuanced psychological depth into an adrenaline-fueled narrative ... Themes of race, class, and identity are portrayed with complex yet nuanced sensitivity. Schaefer brilliantly captures the tumultuous emotional terrain each character must traverse to find themselves. The lyrical prose moves fluidly, like the smoothest heavyweight champion, shimmering, then delivering a knockout punch. Various plot elements nicely serve the deeper themes of fate, found family, preconceived limitations, weighty expectations, and following one’s dreams, all in a rapturous barrage of snappy dialogue, witty rejoinders, and profound observations that make for a wicked combination and a winning bildungsroman.
Swings for the fences, makes it at least to third. Franzen/Roth/Irving comparisons earned and deserved ... Perhaps not since Nathan Hill’s The Nix (2016) have we seen a debut as hugely ambitious as this one, pulling out all the stops to tell a unique version of the American story ... Schaefer, who’s white, is bold in his approach to issues of Blackness and whiteness, and has invented a truly wild plot in service of exploring them. He is equally fearless in writing about gender and sex. And the solution to the mystery is a trip and a half.
