Prodigals

January 11, 2016
Privileged characters confront the spiritual emptiness of contemporary life in this deeply felt and sparklingly erudite debut collection. In “Wagner in the Desert,” a writer joins a cadre of young professionals—“sustainability experts, P.R. lifers... that strange species of human being who has invented an app”—on a drug-fueled trip to Palm Springs, Calif., only to find himself deflated by “regret that we had grown self-knowing enough to avoid our mistakes.” In “Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy,” a different writer comes under the spell of a tennis legend whose celebrity may or may not have made him insane. In “Metanarrative Breakdown,” the star of the collection, a visit by the narrator to his dying grandfather becomes an occasion for a contemplation of narrative and language: “All the words we had for everything added up to a cataloged death sentence of the discrete,” he thinks, “turning the raw matter of experience transactionable at the cost of making experience itself inaccessible.” Jackson’s exquisite insight and mandarin prose style call to mind David Foster Wallace and Ben Lerner, but his preoccupation with the demise of romance, wonderment, and spirituality in our hyper-knowing age seems entirely his own. “It was not so much information that lay beyond my reach,” one character thinks, “as a sort of presence, of shared and consummate openness, a kind of psychic nudity.” Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt, Inc.

January 1, 2016
Well-educated but rudderless people seek enlightenment in these stories--or at least an interesting trip and a good high. The eight stories in Jackson's debut are populated by bright, artistic men and women who are chafing at the adulthood that's just about to consume them. The narrator of "Wagner in the Desert" joins a group of friends for one last druggy bacchanal in Palm Springs; in "Epithalamium," a divorcee bonds with a free-spirited young woman who's taken up residence in her summer home; "Dynamics in the Storm" is told by a man who helps drive his therapist out of New York in advance of a hurricane, and the sexual tension between them intensifies along with the weather. Those characters and others are, as the book's title suggests, people who've abandoned their roots, and Jackson has a nuanced sense of how a change of scenery can frazzle your sense of self. That's best exposed in "Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy," a story about a journalist who winds up in the home of a retired tennis star and how much his own identity curdles as he obsesses over (and to an extent takes on) the athlete's persona. Jackson's stories are consistently dark and smart, if sometimes pretentious: Scrabble vocabulary ("salmagundi," "nevi") crops up in otherwise sinuous paragraphs, and the philosophizing in the closing "Metanarrative Breakdown" clouds its core story about a man's visit to his dying grandfather. To be fair, though, telling a story about telling stories is a tough gig, and Jackson is unquestionably a talented and careful writer, deft at delivering a well-turned and effective simile: a wind "forced the trees together like lousy drunks"; a woman observes that "we grow into our toughness like snakes, molting hope." An admirable debut that cannily captures the difficulty of balancing good deeds with bad behavior.

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February 1, 2016
The opening story in Jackson's daring and innovative collection follows a group of sojourning thirtysomethings as they indulge in debauchery in preparation for springing into the rest of their adult lives. The cynical, wayward creative types who spend their week lost in sex, alcohol, and drugsor just plain losttypify the artists, writers, and dreamers in the stories that follow. Recently divorced, a middle-aged woman befriends a free-spirited girl she finds living in her getaway home. After quitting his job to attend film school, a banker falls for a seductive classmate and her enigmatic sister. Vacationing in France with his girlfriend, a journalist pieces together the erratic behavior of his host, a once-famous tennis star who dismisses his past. A filmmaker fleeing New York amid a powerful storm picks up a therapist with whom he may or may not have once had a more involved relationship. As the eponymous prodigals squander their emotions and passions, their recklessness reveals hilarious and agonizing insights into the lost dreams of youthful ambition. Jackson proves himself a dexterous, compelling new talent.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)