A Novel for the Trump Age

Colossus arrives

My new novel, Colossus, arrives next April. The below essay is about this book, which the writer Matthew Specktor has called “a broad interrogation of the American psyche in its myriad conflicting parts. The result is masterful, as thrillingly devious—and as brilliantly controlled—as Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” Please pre-order the novel now. It would mean a lot.

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For a while in my writing career—a decade, perhaps—I was anguished over the state of the novel in the United States. What did it mean that people seemed to be reading literature less often? That novelists were no longer so famous? That whatever ceiling I reached, the spoils would never match those of my predecessors, especially the swaggering Jews of the midcentury? What was I to do? It is hard to say when, exactly, I stopped caring about these questions so much. If I had to guess, it was after I turned thirty and some of my youthful restlessness leaked away. I brayed less; I was, on balance, calmer. And I learned the lesson all artists, if they are worth anything, must take to heart: only the work matters.

You do it. That’s been my philosophy as a writer since my late teens, knocking out drafts of novels no one will ever read. Too many writers, particularly in this neurotic, tech-swamped age, agonize over a blank page but do nothing about it. They like the concept of writing but not the alchemy itself, and they do not understand that, often, this process must be forced. An athlete or a musician only gets better through the drudgery of practice. A writer is no different. This, really, is how novels happen. I’m thrilled that, next April, Arcade will publish my newest novel, Colossus. I believe in it wholeheartedly, as all artists must believe in what they put forth into the world. Describing a novel is always a challenge, especially one you wrote, but I can say it’s about a successful, wealthy pastor in a rural Michigan town who is harboring a dark secret. Set in the present day—this is a novel for our new Trump age, and our pastor is certainly an admirer of the president—and written in the first person, it’s both a departure from my last novel, Glass Century, and a continuation of a project that I hope will fully see the light of day soon. I am in the process of a loose trilogy, what I’m calling my American Saga, that will grapple with the American condition from the 1970s through the 2020s. The untitled third novel in this set will share a certain current, and maybe a universe, with Colossus. I’ve just completed a draft.

There’s been much discourse, some of which I directly spearheaded, about the state of the straight male novelist in America, as well as novels that wrestle with the male condition, even when it’s unseemly. I did not write Colossus, and my protagonist Teddy Starr, to participate in this discourse. But I did feel freer, generally, as I worked on this manuscript over the course of 2023 and 2024 to craft a character that, in many respects, is despicable. Whether a protagonist is “likeable” or not always seemed very silly to me; what matters far more, to any reader, is whether they are interesting. Teddy Starr, man of God and trailer park kingpin and irrepressible horn dog and inveterate liar, passed that test for me. He speaks directly to you, and his voice is erudite, rambling, and even warm. My North Star, here, was Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels, especially The Sportswriter. Like John Updike, Ford wrote a series of novels over many decades that traced the arc of Bascombe, a sportswriter-turned-real estate agent who lives in suburban New Jersey, sleeps around a good deal, and attempts to make sense of the quotidian absurdities of modern life. If asked about Teddy, I might say, at the jump, he’s dark Bascombe. His sunny exterior masks an inner ruthlessness, a furious drive to fully reinvent himself. America is a frontier nation, rich with strivers, hustlers, and hucksters. Live a myth long enough, and it may become real. Reality is waiting to be created; Teddy, who is not the upstanding Christian he says he is, understands this well.

In a recent essay, the critic Ann Manov argued that “contemporary publishing is hostile to the individual consciousness” because the individual consciousness is, by nature, “hostile to any consensus position or mass marketing.” With the exception of Arcade and a few other publishers, I’ve found this to be more often true than not. New releases are more insipid than they should be, and the hype machine is less trustworthy than ever. Consciousness, in all its ugliness and beauty, is not always rendered as it should be—or rendered much at all. If I found Teddy Starr unsettling, I still wanted to live within him. I wanted the full scope of his existence on the page.

Perhaps I felt this way because, when I was in college, I fell under the spell of the Modernists, particularly Virginia Woolf. Woolf was, in every sense, the anti-mass marketing writer, publishing glittering, and plotless, excavations of human consciousness. Her novels only found an audience because she and her husband created a printing press and forward-thinking critics dared to engage with her work. It is this spirit that fiction requires again, whether it’s emerging from large-scale or independent publishers. Yes, a novel belongs to a marketplace—I hope you buy Colossus, and I hope it sells well—but its value as an art form cannot be forgotten or cheapened. The novel plumbs and renders interiority like no other art form. It can tell us, more than almost anything, what it’s like to be alive, to see and think and feel and make sense of the inherent contradictions of existence.

It’s true, as Manov writes, this does not always fit a comfortable marketing paradigm. A lousy novel treats its characters like apparitions or symbols; a good one makes them whole, and lets you breathe with them. This is mimesis at its very best. And if novels are following this path, they can become, morally, more ambiguous. They are not merely modes of instruction for proper living. Readers are weary of the moralistic fiction that peaked sometime in the 2010s or the early 2020s, and they want literature, I believe, that more properly reflects the curiosity and even chaos of the human condition. And they’ve grown more sophisticated about separating character from author. One needn’t write “good” characters to be a good novelist (or, to write a good novel). Though I write on politics for a living, I am wary of any novelist hewing too closely to a single faction. Novelists, before anything else, represent themselves, and themselves alone.

I hesitate to say too much more about Colossus. For one, I don’t want to give up all the secrets of the novel when you’ve yet to read it. It’s not fun to know, right now, what Teddy is hiding. Or why his affairs, alone, aren’t bringing his marriage to the brink of collapse. What I can say is that this novel was written with great confidence and care, and it’s one I’m thrilled to see unleashed into the world. This is the wonderful privilege of publishing: to have your work in the world, and witness others try to make sense of it. For some writers, this is terrifying. They have their interpretation, their conception, and they blanche when readers try to tell them something they might not have imagined in the first place. For me, that’s the glorious pluralism of the reading and writing experience. It is, in that manner, fully democratic. I cannot be the sovereign who tells you exactly how to think about Colossus or Glass Century or anything else I publish. I may try, but the relationship between reader and text is too intimate for me, the author, to impose my will fully upon it. If we are lucky, our works outlast us—there’s no Shakespeare or Melville or Virginia Woolf to tell us, in 2025, what they actually meant—and remain contested into the distant future. I can only hope that you all read Colossus and feel stirred enough to react. Cheer Teddy Starr or damn him. Take a stroll around his town, his little kingdom. And feel the full weight of this strange twenty-first century on his shoulders—and your own.

A version of this essay first appeared on Arcade’s Substack.