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

When Jack meets the first-person narrator, he asks, “You’re Black?” to which the narrator responds, “I am” (89). In the timeline of the narrative, Chapter 6 (when he is an established author) comes long after Chapter 8 (prior to the publication of his book). Yet, in Chapter 6, the narrator is surprised to learn that he is Black when Renny the limousine driver mentions it. Somehow, the narrator forgets his race between these two scenes. Mott achieves two things in this contradiction. First, he reinforces the temporal disorientation that is characteristic of the novel’s structure. The novel’s alternating chapters take place in two different time periods. Furthermore, while Soot’s chapters thus far follow a straightforward chronology, the first-person narrator’s chapters jump around between the past and the present, sometimes from chapter to chapter, sometimes within a single chapter. Mott’s Hell of a Book plays with the reader’s sense of time.

Second, the narrator forgetting he is Black in Chapter 8 also brings into doubt his reliability. In literature, an unreliable narrator leads the reader to question whether certain elements of the story are true. Jason Mott’s narrator is fundamentally unreliable because of his “daydreaming,” (19) a condition that causes him to hallucinate. He himself states, “often I have trouble distinguishing between what’s real and what’s imagined” (97). By telling the reader in Chapter 6 that he did not know he was Black, and then claiming to have known he was Black in Chapter 8, the narrator disorients the reader further.

In Chapter 10, the reader sees the moment where the narrator first begins to blur reality and imagination. As he sits with his father who is dying of cancer, he watches the news of a Black man who was shot and killed by the police. Struck by the resemblance between the man and his father, he starts to see them as one: “Before long, it wasn’t some stranger on the TV but it was my old man, one hundred percent. Even as I turned and looked at him there in the bed, dying by centimeters, he was there on the screen, already dead. Somehow, he was dying and dead all at the same time” (130). As his father’s impending death causes blurring in the narrator’s sense of reality, it introduces the theme of coping with grief. Seeing his father as both “dying and dead,” the narrator also experiences temporal disorientation that echoes the reader’s own experience.