Gad's Book

by Dylan Bassett

GAD'S BOOK follows an awkward, obsessive novelist with a carefully constructed life who unwittingly joins a seductive circle of charismatic activists, who may or may not be part of Antifa. Never able to write much, now each time he's asked to describe his novel-in-progress, he offers an entirely different description than the one before-each one closer to the escalating events of his life, packed with the sexual misadventures and political violence he now finds himself entangled in. GAD'S BOOK marks the debut of a keen, incisive and very funny new voice.

316 pages, Paperback

Published October 3, 2023

Reviews

[Alex Deiters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basset’s novel does a lot of things that wouldn’t normally work for me. It has excessive tangents, it’s very meta in its exploration of storytelling, and most characters are aggressively unlikeable, but his bizarre characterization and precise and vivid language make all the indulgence worth reading. I was surprised by just how funny it was. This is such an aggressively Connor book I can’t imagine anyone else writing something like it. It’s gross and disturbing, and I had a great time reading it.

[RF Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

The nameless writer is asked, "Is your novel about a thirty-something living in Berkeley who writes a novel about a thirty-something living in Berkeley?" Another character asks, "Is it one of those lit bro novels? Is it about a sad man who feels sorry for himself? Are you one of those dude writers who only describes women’s tits?" In Dylan Bassett's Gad's Book, Bassett's writing and his nameless alt-ego's surreal novels, and novels within those novels (v.e. At Swim, Two Birds), are a challenge to classify when all these novels and their imagined novelists go plotted but never written down. The reader spirals into Bassett's hyperreality and nameless is psychologically disenfranchised as he tries to navigate through a drumfire of internet media crises, tries to organize post-modern courtship with a polyamorous woman insistent to make anti-image her social image, and discovers himself accidentally lured into a violent anti-fascist protest cult in which he gets involved less for politics than a desire to belong socially to something, anything. Presenting a hero writer who can neither define his obstacles nor produce the impetus to write and a world of imitation having misplaced its signifiers, the reading experience is alternately terrifying, offbeat, and darkly humorous; what Mikhail Bakhtin called a "carnivalesque" sense of the world. It turns out Gad's Book IS about a sad straight white dude feeling sorry for himself (there's some blood, tit portrayal is minimal). But Bassett is a savant at framing both the collective and isolating parts of life in modern America, especially for anyone who desires to create but is paralyzed by the future.

[Grady Boris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel of novels and why stories are told in our current political climate. Moments of brilliance offset by ramblings that were too long and images of the grotesque for nothing more than the sake of being grotesque.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the many novels within this novel.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love this book