Major Arcana

by John Pistelli

“Perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century.”

It begins with a a student's public suicide on a university campus. The blast radius of this tragic explosion expands to encompass 50 years of our history and two of the grandest characters in recent American Simon Magnus, a comic-book writer who transfigured popular culture turned gender activist who transfigures the English language, and Ash del Greco, an online occultist who by the age of 20 has seen to the end of everything and wants desperately to prove the superiority of mind over matter. With a decades-spanning but tightly-knit plot, written in an expansive style, Major Arcana canvasses America’s inner life and moral history from coast to coast and across two generations in a delirious saga about art, magic, love, and death. 

Originally serialized on the author’s Substack newsletter, Major Arcana is a novel about the transformative power of popular culture. With a nod to Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and for fans of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Pistelli reimagines the expansive novel for the 21st century. 

Genres: Fiction, American, Modern

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 18, 2024

About the author

John Pistelli is from Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of five books: the forthcoming Major Arcana, The Class of 2000, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, Portraits and Ashes, and The Ecstasy of Michaela. Find out more here.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a funny, sad and smart, but also hopeful, satire of American culture, a sprawling, spanning-decades novel in the Jonathan Franzen mould. Starting (misleadingly?) with the suicide of a student on campus, it rewinds through the backstories of several generations of characters, adding a splash of magical realism. Many of said characters seem cliched at first glance – the sad-sack middle-aged lecturer, the wayward single mother, the rebellious student – but Pistelli does entirely non-cliched things with them, letting them deepen and twist and contradict themselves. It’s slow going at times, it’s ambitious, it’s genuinely interested in thinking big.

I don’t agree with all the book's conclusions and/or implications (but do I need to?); and I wouldn’t have got the context of the story’s real-life comic-book writer inspirations without reading some other reviews (but do I need to?); and I felt the motivations of the female characters, in particular, got a bit jumbled near the end. But I really liked this. I believe that Pistelli writes with compassion and curiosity towards his characters throughout. As with Let Me Try Again, its surface cynicism masks a soft heart. And thank god for a book with ideas in it that doesn’t just spoonfeed the reader’s presumed opinions back to them.

[Nick Klagge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally don't put stars with my reviews but I wanted to signal boost this self-published-soon-to-be-small-press-published book. I don't have any connection with the author, a friend of mine just talked it up so much that I picked it up, and I was really glad!

The book is compulsively readable. It starts with a shocking event and then traces back many threads of how that event came to be. I think it's a testament to the quality of the writing overall that, although I didn't ultimately find the full explanation that convincing, it didn't bother me that much. There are many great characters in the book and, as I often find with self-published books, it was very hard for me to predict what was going to happen, which makes it more exciting. (I was definitely surprised with, if not the details of the ending, the tone.) A lot of implicit and explicit discussion about the value of art and ideas, and the struggle to lead an authentic life.

While there are things that I think could have been done better, I can't think of a book I've read this year that I want to discuss with other people more!

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Writing teachers love to tell their students, "Write what you know." It's good advice. It's also advice no English professor should ever actually take.

'Major Arcana' is so obviously written by an English professor that it's tedious. The story, set in a university and starring an adjunct English professor, is so loaded with "kids these days" bellyaching that anyone not directly involved in its milieu will have difficulty getting traction with it.

This is a book that cares a lot about trends in academia, about "kids these days," about the kinds of things English professors care about. But it's not about anything anyone else cares about.

The last novel to which I gave one star, Raymond Carver's 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,' was at least readable. 'Major Arcana,' on the other hand, is simply awful. Pass this one by.

[Mary Jane Eyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Full review (with footnotes) at https://maryjaneeyre.substack.com/p/r...]

John Pistelli’s serialised-on-Substack novel opens with what Camus called the only truly serious philosophical question.12 A male student in an oversized army jacket shoots himself in the head with a vintage revolver; a classmate films the incident and whispers Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

This major (but by no means arcane) novel is Pistelli’s own attempt at a Q.E.D. of the proposition that, despite the anaemic state of officially sanctioned contemporary literature, one can write imaginatively about the present.3 In my opinion, the proof succeeds.

Major Arcana celebrates artifice while abjuring obscurantism (for the midwits among us, Pistelli tells us exactly what he is up to4 by including both a Preface and a Foreword to the Preface of the Proem of the Novel of the Future5 and by providing running commentary on Substack and Tumblr). He makes full use of the serialised format: each chapter, evocatively titled and carefully bounded, can be savoured on its own, perhaps even shuffled at random (especially in its audio form, as the author doubles as a gifted voice over artist).6 The ethics of the novel similarly evokes an earlier model of la littérature engagée with its richly inventive backstories for characters that could otherwise have been simple mouthpieces for this or that theory of art and the unsparing attention paid to the not-always-creative destruction wrought by technological and cultural change.

Concurrently, the boundaries of the novel, like that of the soul, are porous: events from cyberspace seep into the story and one has the sneaky suspicion that the occult forces that have been summoned may already have escaped into consensus reality. Unlike other “Internet novels”, this book (or whatever) doesn’t simply wallow in the anomie and anhedonia that predictively results from shackling oneself to a particular hellsite, lol,7 but swallows the Internet whole, with room to spare for the world before it, and God willing, the world thereafter.

After the climactic opening sequence,8 we are slowly introduced to a colourful suite of characters to explain (or fail to explain) why Jacob Morrow, that beautiful boy, decided to sacrifice himself; and why Ash del Greco, that weird-looking girl (or whatever) with the spiral scar on her face, decided to film the scene to prove a point.

First up, in a brief but hilarious satire of 21st century campus life, we meet the self-mythologizing Simon Magnus, former countercultural comic book author and current adjunct lecturer of Studies in the Graphic Novel, who gave up writing comics, gave up writing anything really, after the bloody genesis of Simon Magnus’s magnum opus Overman 3000.

One half expects Simon Magnus to start a YouTube channel destroying the arguments of the insufferable enbies in Simon Magnus’s classroom in a building that is literally called “the Cathedral”9 but instead Simon Magnus decides to beat they/them at they/their own game and destroy the very idea of gender identity through a reductio ad absurdum by first suggesting that everyone should be referred to as they/them regardless of personal preference before insisting that, actually, now that Simon Magnus thinks about it, Simon Magnus would prefer not to be referred to by any pronouns at all — a request which the narrator scrupulously honours, effectively illustrating how the necessary hubris of the artist is often difficult to distinguish from the male sense of entitlement to act like a dick. But the administrative empire strikes back, placing Simon Magnus on leave pending an investigation by the sinisterly named non-profit Community Harvest into possible trigger points in Simon Magnus’s oeuvre that might have contributed to Simon Magnus’s student’s self-harm or self-slaughter (or whatever we are now supposed to call suicide).

The tone shifts abruptly but effectively from comic to tragic as Jessica Morrow, our first lady of sorrows, looks back on her life in a hopeless attempt to understand why she, who had tried so hard to be the loving and nurturing parent that she had never had, had nevertheless failed in her basic responsibility of keeping her beloved Jakey alive. Then follow several other stories of characters trying to escapee lonely childhoods and broken homes through literature and art (and other less wholesome means), with the most harrowing of all being that of Valerie Karns, reaching such Dostoevskyian depths that one can’t help but wonder whether Pistelli is of the devil’s party without knowing it.10

In Simon Magnus’s retelling of Simon Magnus’s personal myth, however, Valerie Karns is reduced to “the mysterious figure who had initiated Simon Magnus into the mystery before disappearing into it herself”.11 It is Valerie Karns who introduces Simon Magnus to the tarot and to magic and to Aleister Crowley with his motto of “Love is the law, love under will”, of which she will retain only the first clause in her final red message. In the novel, magic possesses a certain (dare I say capitalist) efficiency: you may very likely get what (you think) you want, but it comes at a cost.12

If this makes the novel sound like a quantum entanglement of trauma plots, fear not. It explores not only the depths but also the breadths and heights of human experience. Neither biology nor sociology is taken as destiny. Words and images have the power to trap the characters but also to set them free. Conversations, even arguments, are sources of entertainment and instruction. Take for example the following exchange between Simon Magnus’s lover, a lapsed Catholic aesthete, and Simon Magnus’s visual artist collaborator on Overman 3000, a Stalinist Jew:

“I was raised Catholic,” she said to him one night in the bar after a moment’s silence. “The whole fucking religion is a graven image. That’s the only good thing about it! Otherwise, it’s old men in dresses telling you not to have any fun while they eye up the altar boys. The sermons would put you to sleep, but you could always stay awake by looking at the stained glass windows—the way they colored the light that came through them and spangled the backs of the people in the pew in front of you—and those sadomasochistic reliefs of the Stations of the Cross on the wall, all that flogging and bleeding of the beautiful male body, like something out of Mishima.”

Her eyes glassed over in reverie as she dragged on her cigarette.

“Well, there you go,” he said. He raised his beer glass and slammed it down to re-seize her attention, rattling the fruity wine in her flute. “You were missing the parables, the allegories, the commandments—distracted by some goddamn sex fantasy.”

Pistelli’s keen sense of humour prevents the narrative from ever descending into mere didacticism, but something of the Invisible College lecturer nevertheless shines through: attempting to convey not facts or arguments, but sensibilities — ways of seeing, if you will. Perhaps the most important lesson is the ability to read the world as fiction, which is not to say that the outside world doesn’t exist, but that there is a lot more to the real than the unimaginative mind is capable of perceiving. Wittgenstein said: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” Or, as Ash del Greco, in her incarnation as virtual manifestation coach, told her customers:

If you change the way you think about the past so radically that it changes the effect the past has on you—how is that not magic?

The transparent refictionalisation of existing fictional characters (Overman, Ratman, The Fool, Sparrow, Marsh Man) reveals the archetypal nature of the overfamiliar brands and franchises which have become dead metaphors.13 Nevertheless, one does not have to be a fan of comic books to enjoy the narrative.14 In Simon Magnus’s youthful musings about the proper relationship between tradition and innovation, you could replace ‘comics’ with any popular art form:

Alone, Simon Magnus might have found the comics too simplistic and banal to hold much attention and the classics too antique and convoluted to move the body and the soul. Together, however, the one set of books fertilized the other. Simon Magnus felt through the comics’ crude images something of the passion and despair Milton, Shelley, and Dostoevsky meant to convey, while discovering at the same time, through the classics’ elevated diction and thematic grandeur, the ideals those superheroes manifested for a popular audience in the present.

After the fateful quickening of Overman 3000, and of Ash del Greco, we return to the present, more or less. The skewering of gender pieties, language policing and Covid protocols are familiar, although of course we’re used to seeing it from pseudonymous chaos magicians, rabid right-wingers and reactionary centrists, rather than intellectually and morally serious writers whose aims transcend the political.15

Pistelli is not attempting to redpill his audience — nor to blackpill them or pinkpill them or to feed them whatever pill the cool kids are taking these days. In fact, in our pharmacotopian era, he dares to suggest that ingesting a chemical (government issued or otherwise) may not be the most advisable route to true insight. I’d go further, though, and call the novel’s guiding ethos anti-enlightenment: if by enlightenment is meant a binary transition from illusion to reality, from dreaming to wakefulness, from darkness to light.

The novel’s (non)duality is most clearly illustrated by the parallel gender journeys of Ash del Greco and her high school friend Ari Alterhaus. Ari Alterhaus attempted (with enthusiastic parental support) to literally excise the gendered aspects of their anatomy by means of hormones and surgery only to end up as a Catholic convert and detransitioner. For Ash del Greco, however, dysphoria about her (or whatever) gendered body was but a small part of her general dissatisfaction with her corporal existence, which she quickly realised could not be assuaged by dictating how others should refer to her in the third person. Having already undergone much more fundamental transformations, she foresees:

She would never detransition because she would never cease to transition. Her whole life was nothing but transition.

A hostile reader could question why, in the current political climate, Pistelli chose to make this point by bringing to life the fever dreams of the likes of Wesley Yang and Mary Harrington, when other examples of techgnosis abound. But in his artful response to cultural developments that have evidently deranged many otherwise intelligent observers, Pistelli offers an alternative to both leftwing and rightwing censoriousness. We would all be wise to heed this lesson, since the 21st century isn’t likely to become any less weird.

Contra Crowley and the young Simon Magnus,16 the narrative suggests that we do not need to push ourselves to ever further extremes to find the truth, that there may yet lie great wisdom in the pragmatic pluralism of William James: a willingness to give a fair hearing to both missionaries and visionaries, to prophets and perverts and freaks, without renouncing the ordinary (dare I say bourgeois) delights offered by friendships, old books, babies and dogs.1718

The novel communicates a vision of life as a deck of cards, endlessly shuffled and reshuffled: the same images occurring again and again in different combinations. In the end, though, it is not the surprising correspondences cooked up by chance and fate that bring meaning to successive readings, but the growing ability of the reader to notice the patterns unfold.

[Yvonne Tunnat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es ist sehr selten, dass jemand einen Roman mit einigen Figuren schreibt, die sich nicht als männlich oder weiblich definieren und es nebenher schafft, glaubhaft und nicht konservativ darzustellen, dass das mit den Pronomen dann ganz schön nervt. (Obwohl ich den Roman definitiv als queer und woke lese und die meisten Figuren auch!)

Plus, die konsequente Darstellung von Simon Magnus als Simon Magnus, ohne irgendein Pronomen, selbst nicht nur mit dem Vornamen (das geht so weit, statt himself SimonMagnusself zu schreiben), das war schon gewöhnungsbedürftig.

Abgesehen von dem Paralleluniversum mit den Comics muss ich allerdings den SF-Teil verpasst haben. Es ist aber auch ein schwer zu lesendes Buch mit vielen Perspektiven und irgendwann ging es mir eher um das Rätsel "Wer ist hier eigentlich wessen Kind?" und das Anfangsrätsel "Warum hat der Junge sich erschossen?", aber da war noch etwas drittes, und das muss an mir vorbei gehuscht sein.

Übersetzen wird das vermutlich niemand, dazu wäre es zu sehr special interest und einfach zu übersetzen wäre es sicher auch nicht.

Ein lesenswertes, massiv gut geschriebenes Buch mit vielen Details. Hier kann jemand wirklich über komplexe Gefühle und Menschen schreiben.

[Mofe · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author promised that we would all read this book in a week, and that’s exactly what I did. I honestly don’t think I’ve read a novel this long so fast in my life. It’s one thing to whip through a slim novella like Child of God or CoL49 in two days. But somehow sustaining that focus over a week or two just seemed impossible. This is the first 600+ page novel I’ve finished since 2666, in late autumn of last year. Between that masterpiece and this one lies several disappointing (more so in myself than in the books) DNFs.

I’m not nearly as skilled a critic as Dr. Pistelli so I will just come out and say, this book is excellent. Between the subject matter, the depth of the characters, the beautiful language, and the engrossing narrative, I couldn’t put it down. I will be sure to revisit it and more of his work soon.

I appreciated the homages to the comic book (or graphic novels) I loved when I was younger. Although, I can’t quite figure out what specific comic “Overman 3000” alludes to if it alludes to one at all. It immediately reminded me of “Red Son”, but that feels like more of a stretch than comparing “Fools’ Errand” with “A Death in the Family” or “The Killing Joke”

The most relatable (and perhaps least concerning) facet of Ash del Greco’s character that I found myself identifying with was her aversion to novels. I have read several novels, and I will no doubt read several more. But I don’t know that I understand them. I suppose I have less of an aversion and more of a suspicion. I can’t help but think “What am I getting from this?” “What am I learning?” “Are there better things I should be doing with my time?”. I suppose when a book is good enough these concerns melt away. Otherwise, I wouldn’t finish any at all. But what sets these specific books apart? Is it because my questions are answered? Because I feel as though my time is being well spent? Or because without realizing it, I do “get” novels in those moments, and what they’re truly for.

I’m reminded of a quote from Ash herself:

“Now she knew that good novels-graphic novels, in this case- did what music did, unlike fragments of poetry and philosophy. Fragments of poetry and philosophy pricked, she thought, the mind, an obvious and therefore stimulating irritant; music and novels, by contrast, leaked silently into the heart until they drowned it”

Trying to dissect the point or utility of novels is probably just as futile as doing to the same to the music I enjoy. I’ve never quite felt the need to do so with music, so I’d probably be better off dropping those habits.

“Words only dissolved into dissolving letters on their way to the dissolving images of a dream”

Major Arcana melted away those concerns and like the great novels I’ve enjoyed over the years, makes me want to keep reading more. I think Middlemarch will be next. According to the Penshurts, I’m almost a decade overdue.

[Henry Begler · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the pull quote on the back says, MA sets its sights on being a big, expansive, lively novel about the present and in this I would say it certainly succeeds. However the main thing I’ve been thinking about in my notes on it is nostalgia in general. There are two timelines in this novel, with two different generations. The 90s characters spend long hours in bedrooms and cafes discussing art and literature, they’re young and optimistic and (perhaps unconventionally) beautiful and it all just seems so real and desireable. Person to person, you know? Meanwhile the young 2020s characters have their brokenness foregrounded, they’re literally scarred or disabled, wracked by strange illnesses, barely able to get through life, and all the old characters show up again bitter and frustrated (though to be fair, by the ending the possibility of an artistic life seems achievable again). I don’t think the 2020s sections are any less well done, but it’s just a different thing reading about someone going online or livestreaming on Youtube, or about the endless little stupid bureaucracies and categories we’re all forced into.

It reminds me of The Secret History and the ‘dark academia’ thing, we all realize subconsciously that our relationship with learning and literature is out of wack, that academia is totally over and done with, so of course this older book about wearing a big sweater and trudging across a snowy quad while thinking about Homer in the original greek experiences a renewed surge of popularity. Same with the parts in this about a mythical time when you could actually make daring popular art with comic book characters, where coffee shops had big couches instead of uncomfortable stools. I enjoyed reading about the present day characters, but I wanted to hang out with the 90s ones, at least until the end of the novel when Ash accepts The Novel into her heart and chills out a bit.

But these are just my own spiraling, silly thoughts, this is definitely not a nostalgia text but one that successfully marries an old form and new feelings. It has a very traditional novel feel - a big, long, panoply of colorful characters, like Dickens or Bellow. And the characters are great, really great, I particularly loved the aesthete Simon Magnus and his lover/artistic partner Ellen Chandler. But it’s also alive to the concerns of the present in a way that feels, for the most part, natural, not forced. And (speaking of nostalgia) it brought me back to being a library kid reading The Invisibles and Watchmen and eventually moving on to Blake and Pynchon. Anyone who’s read Pistelli’s critical work knows that his love for and engagement with literature is basically without peer and in addition to a lot of little shoutouts that English majors will enjoy there is a general richness to Major Arcana that speaks to how being deeply versed in the texts can give your novel that little extra cube of butter in the sauce. This is a book about loving art but not in a twee way, about a life of serious engagement with literature and art as a means to better be in the actual world. It’s also, speaking of the actual world, not afraid to depart from the realms of the real and is all the stronger for its more, ahem, metaphysical aspects. It’s also kind of a Christian/Catholic metaphor? I haven’t even addressed the gender stuff or the superhero stuff or the occult stuff or any of the other fascinating themes that can be pulled out of this novel. I’ll leave that to someone else, I suppose. I eagerly await Pistelli’s next creative work.

PS: After finishing the last page of this novel I went to my deck just for fun and pulled Nine of Swords (fear, anxiety), The World (completion, integration), and The Empress (femininity, nurturing, abundance), which is a shockingly accurate read of one of if not the main character’s progression through the novel. So…make of that what you will.

[Ian Mond]

There’s been a lot of chat about [Major Arcana](https://beltpublishing.com/products/m...), most of it good—but not all.* I spent well over 1,200 words dissecting the novel in Locus (June edition), so I won’t repeat myself here.

I will say that if you’re reading this Substack and you like the sort of stuff I like, you should buy it**, not least because you can partake in John’s brilliant reframing of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison into American-born occultist and comic writer Simon Magnus. One thing I didn’t mention in my review (because I was already well over the word count) is how brilliantly John describes the creative process, especially between two auteurs—Simon Magnus and the reluctant artist Marcus Cohen. John doesn’t romanticise it but highlights the frustrations, bitterness, pretension, and special, transcendent moments when art occurs.

And this is just one section of the novel. There’s so much more to love, argue with, be offended by, and chuckle at. It’s a novel overflowing with emotion—mostly love. I genuinely hope that many people pick it up and that, in years to come, Major Arcana is discussed in its own right and not in connection to Substack.***

*I’m not going to link to the Compact article that uses John’s novel as a case study, proving that Substack will not be the home for the next great novel. As much as I have come to love Substack, I find the debate about its place in social and literary culture tiresome. All it leads to is a lot of bullshit sniping on both sides. I thought using John’s work as an exemplar of Substack’s failure was unfair. Not just because I think it’s untrue but because John’s novel shouldn’t have to be burdened with legitimising a Substack subculture. It’s not like John is asking for it.
**Despite reviewing it for Locus, I purchased a hard copy. Belt Publishing have delivered a fine looking book.
***To be fair, people are doing this. You’ll find numerous reviews here and elsewhere that speak to the themes John is exploring. Also, every review, including mine, can’t help but mention where the novel was first serialised. It’s just the Compact article saw Major Arcana become a symbol (mascot or punching bag) for the current state of literature, it’s place on Substack, and reviewers who focus on the particulars (sentence structure) and not the general (themes explored). But that’s more than enough from me.

[Chris Almeda · Rating 2 out of 5]

So at some point I'll get my life together and start writing more long form stuff. I feel compelled to do a long form review of this and put it on Substack considering the author and this novel's publication so look out for that I guess.

I mentioned in a status update that I was waiting for this novel to come back around on it's discussion of gender and I'm really disappointed to say it didn't. In fact, Simon and Ash basically don't grow up until they both decide to be cis, and Ash has a weird thing where she doesn't find her womanhood until she literally becomes pregnant and her neurochemicals rearrange (and there is plenty to say about it but I'll just say it was a weird, ill-advisable choice from the author for now). Also in the ending we get this tone deaf, completely unearned thing where the characters all wrap up neatly and congratulate themselves on arriving at the end of the plot. One of them even delivers this soliloquy where she wants to write a book about her life, but doesn't know if she should because her life has been so crazy and the characters are so wild the audience may not even be ready for it. She eventually decides to write it with the title "Major Arcana" (go fuck yourself). The book is only like 300 pages. It's like when an undergrad forgets how short their essay is and says something like "I'd like to loop back to an earlier point I made" and it's just in the last paragraph.

Also from this ending we get maybe the worst line of dialogue I've ever seen in anything. Simon Magnus, now rid of his previous gender delusion, tells Ash Del Greco "the only pronouns I care about anymore are me and you." I'm not kidding you, this is a sincere line in the book. I went back over it like 20 times because I couldn't believe what I'd seen.

The most unfortunate thing about Major Arcana is just how many promising things we had here. The connection between tarot and comic books, the inclusion of gen z in a multigenerational story, the commentary on art and entertainment -- all great ideas! There are really great moments in this book. John Pistelli is clearly a very gifted writer. But it's just torpedoed by what feels like a rushed ending (maybe having to do with the serialized publication on Substack), some underdeveloped characters, and Pistelli's insistence on ham-fistedly cramming his weird gender grievances into every other sentence.

[Emma Paulet · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a little under a month to read this, and in that time, Major Arcana was picked up by a wee publishing house! I'm not sure it's my place to be proud of John Pistelli, but here I am, beaming.

Having read some of Pistelli's writing around the novel, I thought it prudent to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay first, and I can see the resemblance, but Major Arcana is dimensions apart from this progenitor-but-not-really. I think it definitely primed me in some ways, but I am eternally never ready for 'dark academia', having escaped it fairly recently myself (the 'genre' simultaneously makes me sick and want more).

Although I took my time (#noragrats), this novel was immensely readable. In the first half, I found myself feeling weirdly suspicious. I couldn't articulate why. Then the other half happened and by the end of it, I think I found my why.

Most of the characters are so far up their own arses you just want to grab them by the shoulders and give them a good shake. And I think that's good writing; they're immensely believable. While none of them have particularly heroic qualities, they all have some sort of redeeming features, which also adds to their credibility #imho.

The circuitousness (did I just make that up) of it all is something to behold. It's literal, it's figurative, it makes you question many things and I am here [clapping emoji] for [clapping emoji] it [clapping emoji]. It's also pretty current and thus relatable except when it's not.

I admire the serial nature of the OG Major Arcana. Although I wasn't a paying subscriber, I could appreciate the logistics that went into it and how these minor but regular hits of Major Arcana fed the curiosity but not so much that you'd be okay with not finishing the story. With our tiny attention spans and tinier pockets, I really appreciated the accessibility of the novel and its #tbt to the early days of publishing novels through serialisation. There's something about it.

My only "issues" with the novel are purely editorial, so I won't bother mentioning them here and I'm sure they'll be ironed out (or singed, spirally) by Major Arcana's next publication.

Thanks for another excellent read, John Pistelli.

[Michael Hilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book challenged and charmed me. It is stylistically playful, thematically dense, and unapologetically ambitious. It seems to me a distinctly Catholic novel, in symbol and even perhaps in temperament, an announcement which is a tad louder than the mirror and razor crossed over the bowl of lather in "Ulysses" but also quieter than Flannery O' Connor's gory benedictions. I found myself thinking back to "Infinite Jest" on a number of occasions, not because the novels share much in terms of story or style, though the scope may be at least comparable, but they seem to move along a similar trajectory. Whereas Wallace was measuring the enormity of God's absence in a hyper-consumptive, extremely passive society, Pistelli perhaps has suggested something closer to God's proximity in that same place, sliding mischievously into our lives via the eccentric channels of graphic novels and Tarot. Interestingly, both novels deal frankly with suicide, but the former opus foregrounds failed attempts while the latter shows us a successful one that, paradoxically, ends up bringing the world of the novel further from the edge of the void rather than closer to it. This is a work of art with ardent defenders and avid detractors, and therein lie the seeds of its durability, its testament to the power of the novel to still make us feel restless, to shake out our dusty assumptions about the world we inhabit, to give us something to chew on, argue with, and finally, for just enough of us to tip the scales perhaps, to love.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

The themes and story of this breakout Substack hit was like a heat-seeking missile for me, a bookish elder millennial and comic book fan who came of age in a humanities department of a New England school in the early 2000s.

Pistelli floats between characters and time periods effortlessly, highlighting motifs and archetypes, shuffling his Tarot deck to reveal the Magician, the High Priestess, the Empress—each card a new form, a new face, but very familiar. There is something relatable for most readers, I’d wager, but more importantly something disorienting.

The novel is a blend of literary and pulpy, high brow and low, in the best way. Something about the way it moves between worlds, the way it confuses and then lands an emotional punch out of nowhere…it’s reminiscent of the chaotic media diet we all consume. Pistelli captures that millennial vertigo better than anything else I’ve read.

The novel is a labyrinth of ideas: art, identity, magic, and the mess of being alive in this weird time. It isn’t always tidy, but mercifully, it never slips into that canned MFA tone that flattens everything into workshop-speak and is pervasive in breakout hits of Big Literati.

No, Pistelli’s voice is a breath of fresh air: smart, ambitious, a little wild. Feels like the kind of work that might, just maybe, mark the beginning of some new literary period.

We can hope.

[Xavier Mattison · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is very clever and the characters are beautiful but the last third became just a smidge too preachy for me and the middle of the book was a bit tedious. Loved the references to other literature even if it was too inside baseball for some.

The tackling of trans issues was tasteful IMO but he’s towing the line quite often toward the end of the book which can be off putting.

The two things this book does best is portray the self-righteousness of young, contemporary artists (or failed artists) and expose the ever pervading nihilism on the internet post 2015. As a whole work, the synergy of these two themes mollify how polemic the writing can be (you can see why this guy is popular on Substack. Subversion is my jam but for others it can come across as edgy). Overall a good time and I recommend it for anyone that’s a fan of Pynchon’s California books, Don Dellilo, Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami and Michel Houellebecq.

[Doctor Science]

DNFed because I read the preview & was actively repulsed. When a prof writes a novel where the POV character is a prof teaching a course that *he is teaching in RL* we're already on super-shaky ground, & then when (at least in the preview part) the POV's issues are all with people with *pronouns* & not with the administration even tho he's an adjunct ... but an adjunct w/o a PhD who still gets to teach 3-4 courses/semester ... yeah I'll just NOPE out of here wondering why this was on some people's Best of 2025 lists

[tuckermo · Rating 4 out of 5]

i really enjoyed Major Arcana, though i went in not knowing much about comic books, gender identity, or least of all tarot. Major Arcana feels deeply considered, thoughtfully written, and intentional in its themes. as someone who tends toward historical fiction, sci-fi, or simply old books, it was fun to read a novel grappling with the current moment. great stuff, highly recommend!

i came across this book on Substack in The Metropolitan Review.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claim: great literature is a product of style and not unique plots or characters. And I don't even mean that in the archetypal sense. Many of the greatest works are literal reworkings of prior plots--all but two of Shakespeare's plays, famously--or they were contemporary satires, and with the passage of time, it is easy to misconceive of them as more innovative than they are as their historical scaffolding becomes obscured. Examples of the latter include Don Quixote, anything by Jane Austen, Dead Souls.

*Major Arcana* follows this same pattern. It is an ambitious novel in a stylistic sense that hearkens back to multi-viewpoint, multi-generational novels that have become much less common. It gains its verisimilitude from heavy reliance on--and often satire of--stories from the history of the 1980s comic book industry and current-day discussions of gender. I am curious how this will age. Will it be more like Austen? Will the passage of time obscure some of the more transparently uncreative elements, increasing its apparent innovativeness? Given the ambition of the piece, I can see that happening.

[Pete Bladel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fantastic book. Pistelli has done something really phenomenal here. The cultural set points it operates from are timely, while the overarching themes are timeless. The plot is interesting the entire way through, and resonates more deeply as the pieces start to come together. Highly recommended.

[Jeremy Hornik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got very distracted by the ways in which the comic book writer character and his works were like and unlike Alan Moore. Also, this benefitted from a fortuitous and coincidental trip to the University of Pittsburgh. Lots of tarot stuff. Not great, not bad.

[Eric Curiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just breathtaking!

Let it introduce you to some of the most memorable characters you’ll ever encounter.

[Soul Eater Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

Video review link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLpwh...

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've already written nearly 5000 words about this, so I won't write any more. It deserves four stars!

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

There was some good stuff in here, but the odd pacing and amount of time spent on pretentious-teen-shallow-philosophizing made it hard for me to get through.

[Aaron · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could only finish 30% of it. I was thoroughly disengaged and bored.

[Roz · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book with so many gripes about kids and their damn pronouns it could, uh, fill a book. And the only way to redemption is through the church. But tell us how really feel, John

[Elizabeth Gabhart · Rating 1 out of 5]

I agree with some other reviewers that this book is tedious. I did not finish it.

[Di · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some good stuff but man, what a letdown.

[Chris Pepin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written with an effective ending; but perhaps a little too much cynicism.

[Drey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging, thought-provoking, full of character and characters.

[Heartbeattrue · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is what we need. The real deal.