Felicia McDonnell’s Reviews > Hell of a Book > Status Update

The first sentence of the novel introduce the reader to Jason Mott’s unique writing style: “In the corner of the small living room of the small country house at the end of the dirt road beneath the blue Carolina sky, the dark-skinned five-year-old boy sat with his knees pulled to his chest and his small, dark arms wrapped around his legs and it took all that he had to contain the laughter inside the thrumming cage of his chest” (3). This sentence is very long, evocative of the Modernist literary style. Mott also repeats adjectives (such as “small” and “dark”) and compounds many of his adjectives (“dark-skinned five-year-old”). We see this as well in Chapter 2 with the repeated phrase “very large”: “very large man wielding a very large wooden coat hanger” (10). Throughout the text, Mott maintains a consistent style of excess, always including plenty of contextual and descriptive information. This style reinforces the characterization of the unnamed first-person narrator, who is imaginative, wild, and prone to tangents.