The best self published book I've read this year
Only a week late
In the past few months, I’ve gone to Washington, gotten very good at GPU programming, quit my PhD, moved from one coast to another, and started an exciting job. I’ve written a lot to iron out the creases of my thinking, trying to find the right path and the right people to work towards my goals, but haven’t published that here as I wasn’t sure what path I would go on. I promise I will give an update on that soon, but that is a story for another time.
A few months ago, In a conversation about book awards with Naomi Kanakia I brought up the SPFBO, a competition for self published fantasy writing. We both loved the idea, and I half-joked half-suggested that instead of writing about it she should organize her own. And thus the Samuel Richardson Prize was born.
What agency! What follow through! How great is the substack community, that willing judges abounded to work on this project?
Today, I present the winner of my prize. It is a story, at times confusing, but one well worth the trouble. Like many stories, it is about community, finding your beliefs, and the messiness of love. Unlike many stories it features pernicious boars, local newspapers and musician chair drama.
It is about being a smart yet stupid kid growing up in a town with character and characters.
I present Zodiac Pets, by Eric Giroux.
Zodiac Pets is a piece of metafiction, featuring a college student named Wendy Zhao writing her senior thesis on the dramatic events of her middle school life in suburban Massachusetts. The mystery of the novel revolves around the town newspaper (run by a lonely ideologue and staffed by middle schoolers, including Wendy), and a conspiracy involving the town Wendy lives in. The meta-narrative features our protagonist improving her thesis through revisions and interviews with fellow newspaper staffers, while the main story is the story of the events of that time, structured in the form of the supposed senior thesis.
Wendy is a force of nature, both as a child and young adult. In the wake of her father’s death she refuses to back down from a challenges and challenges authority wherever she finds it. Early in the novel she punches one of her newspaper coworker’s face in and calls the man who runs the paper a traitor. She is a delight to follow both in her unalloyed middle school years and her more mature senior year of college.
The novel’s voice does an astonishingly good job of capturing a person at the cusp of adulthood making sense of their childhood. The stream of consciousness of their early teens has been processed by the college student, but the college student still understands and shares the passion of her younger self. The narration feels more unreliable than it is, because the craziness of the story is filtered through the oversaturation of youth.
The story is set in the near future in small town called Pennacook. In various asides it is revealed a suspiciously intelligent and aggressive herd of boars reside in the town, hunted by the local sportsman’s club, the Machine Gunners of Pennacook. The local mall is staffed by robots and floods in suspicious circumstances. Mysterious objects are in the sky, disguised as birds. A worse novel would have carefully plod through this bizarre setting. But Eric Giroux has the skill to let his characters rocket through it while maintaining an attention to detail.
Wendy’s vignettes as a college student are moments of respite from the craziness. Its in these quieter sections that the softer emotions of the characters can shine, that the passions of youth can be peeled of away to reveal the nuances of adulthood.
These two voices also allow for two views on many of the characters. We see her fellow staff at the newspaper as both stupid middle schoolers and as young adults finding their way in life. The head of the newspaper, a middle aged man obsessed with John Adams and Napoleon by the name of Graham Bundt, even gets his own narrative arc.
Zodiac Pets shines because it is able to strike tricky balances: between moments of over the top craziness and moments of tender and care, between the characters expressing their totemic qualities and their human frailties, between the overbearing protagonist and the rich world. Above all, it is the rare piece of metafiction - (Hernan Diaz’s Trust comes to mind as another example) that uses the affordances of its format to their full potential.
I am happy to have read it as I moved across the country and left Massachusetts behind. Give it a read if you have the free time!