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.
Stylistic brio, vivid sociological detail and general air of chutzpah. Trying to summarize it in an 800-word review is like trying to paint a mural on a postage stamp. Suffice it to say, you’re unlikely to read a more impressive first novel this year ... As the novel progresses, it can’t help wobbling under the weight of all it bears. The simultaneous crises of identity feel a bit schematic. And Schaefer is able to bring together his many plotlines only with a heavy application of coincidence. But perhaps plausibility is too stingy a standard for a novel this generous with its wonders ... Wildly ambitious and immensely rewarding.
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.
