New Paltz, New Paltz

by Mike Powell

Ben is adrift. A fact-checker at a New York gossip magazine, he is well-versed in the breezy cruelty that makes the modern world go and yet hopelessly drawn to the wonders that world continues to turn up. The hypnotic asymmetry of escalators. A perfectly chilled water fountain. The essential freedom of dogs. Into the stream of this private joy steps a young woman whose general impertinence leads him back to questions about art, ambition, and intimacy he’d misplaced in the scatter that he—when pressed—calls his life.

FILE UNDER

Balthus, bildungsroman, BINGO!, bullshit jobs, clumsy beauty, dumb luck, killed time, the lives of others, mundane surrealism, only in New York, rare victory, shaggy dogs, supposedly fun things, unscripted life, vulnerable worlds, young and broke

126 pages, Paperback

Published June 25, 2025

Reviews

[Nathanimal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just wonderful. No hook or elevator pitch here. And no big central philosophical cudgel to snuggle with, either. Just the world observed and reconstituted according to the sensibility of a musing, mildly nonconformist narrator named Ben. I felt lost in the mall of wonder and shit luck, free to wander through the shops without anyone selling me anything, which was most welcome. I'll take an original sensibility over a hook or a philosophy any day. This was my favorite novel I've read in a while.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d like to thank Double Negative for providing me with an advance copy!

Mike Powell’s novella New Paltz, New Paltz takes place during the aughts of the 21st century. It follows the life of Ben, a disaffected New Yorker who inhabits the type of cockamamy media job which a certain echelon of early 2000s college graduates seemed guaranteed in the period before the hyper saturation of undergrad degrees. Except, Ben is not the suave George Plimpton of the Paris Review, nor is he a Dwight MacDonald polemicizing from the trenches of the Partisan Review. No, he works at a gossip rag. And he is poor. But it’s not sexy-poor. And he isn’t one of the creatives, the doers. He is a drone who earns his coin by making distinctions at the smallest units of language and meaning for a most ignoble purpose.

This tale depicts an exceedingly modern strain of pessimism being eroded by an emergent, desperate naivete which is deployed with the blind hope of a person using one credit card to pay off another credit card. Ben is either too alienated in his parochial assembly line work to recognize the malignant role of structural forces and institutional failures (such as the incontinence of media to be able to create a convincing, kind, or constructive semblance of shared understanding in a larger community) have on his happiness, or he simply accepts them as inescapable figures in the landscape of modern life. Yet his vestigial rational instinct and pessimism that he retains from his deadening work leads to moments of dismissal towards the self-actualized Lucy, a baker’s apprentice, photographer, and romantic interest. Tragically, Lucy, who is a well-adjusted Dionysian, turns out to be the only lighthouse in Ben’s constellation of solutions that isn’t guiding him through the fog towards the jagged rocks of further despair.

Powell succeeds in rendering a stated aesthetic of his novel: mundane surrealism. Whether it is a highly produced, alcoholic cider fueled Bingo! game or a renaissance jester-themed birthday announcement interrupting the firing of an incompetent intern at work, the reader is immersed in the murky atmosphere of inane but flashy reality that prevents most people today from coming to the simplest and uplifting conclusions for themselves. Ben, in his crisis driven by overstimulation, half-heartedly opts for the debris and abstraction of experienced reality for palliation: aphorisms, astrology, self-help schemes, and canine copulation. In turn, since there is little to no access to the Self, one’s relation to the Other is even more disjunctive. In several brilliant workplace vignettes across the book, Powell displays the mechanisms driving Ben’s desensitized rationalizations which enable him to work, unfettered by conscience, on a series of increasingly disturbing and invasive articles about an actor who is regularly cast as a lead in popular romantic comedies.

In the way of novels depicting realities of modern urban life, New Paltz New Paltz stands out for it setting in the pre-social media period. The novella is set in 2006, written in 2012, and has been released in 2025. These time stamps are evident in the DNA of the book and what it problematizes. Ben is aimless and relies on his environment to provide him with direction whether that is through riding the bus or simply looking to his IRL environment to channel him in one way or another. We live in a moment where people look to their phones for such direction, and now there are entire complex industries within this “attention economy” which seeks to systemize the disarray of society and provide the answers. It is instructive to see alienation as it was 20 years ago and to notice it as less pronounced, but increasingly pervasive. This narrative is something akin to a missing link in the historical record abutting our contemporary state of extreme unrest, desensitization, and confusion.

If you find any of these topics particularly resonant, I hope you will pick up this darkly portentous, funny, and slim slice of life novella!

[Ben Nunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmmm, interesting! Like at the very core of the word. Each page had my interest and Ben sure did and his view of the world sure did. Not sure that it ever went beyond that for me, never more than a character study, but i cant say I didnt like it! A few times I wanted to shake him into caring, shake him into action, but as bleak and uncaring as he may seem, there were many times he shows insane commitment to his feelings (probably stemming from the carelessness of how he is perceived). Full of cool and deeply true insights, most pages had a powerfully fresh sentence. An adrift Ben proofreader, how could I not? Interesting.

[Naomi Falk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powell’s prose is direct but gentle and gets shaken at time like dice. Dispersed into a colorful metropolitan carousel of sorts. Stylish and intentional design by Nick Greer. An auspicious first publication for Double Negative.

[Briana Magnon · Rating 3 out of 5]

“I agreed that life could be lonely but it always seemed too unusual to want to leave behind.”

[Kaylie Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a series of beautiful sentences. No idea what it is about.

[Aidan · Rating 4 out of 5]

very charming and quite funny

[Susannah Myerson · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 rounded up because it was well written. Not much of a story…more like random observations.