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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2022
ONE HELL OF A BOOK (BY A NORTH CAROLINA WRITER) RECEIVES THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor It seems to me that every year there is a particular book that I find myself recommending every time I get into a book discussion – which is often, given my profession as English Professor / NCLR Editor. This year, that book was Jason Mott’s aptly titled Hell of a Book (Penguin Random House, 2021). So, on the evening of November 17, 2021, I logged onto the National Book Foundation’s website to watch the National Book Awards ceremony and find out how right I am about “ I would like to that novel – very, very right, as it turns out. dedicate this award Hell of a Book by Jason to all the other Mott received the 2021 Mad Kids. To all National Book Award for Fiction, selected the outsiders, from the longlist and the weirdos, then shortlist of strong the bullied, the contenders. I’m going to admit here that I’ve ones so strange not (yet) read the others that they had no in the shortlist. As NCLR Editor, I find myself choice but to be mainly reading regionmisunderstood ally to keep up with this by the world and state’s prolific writers, listening to some while by those around I travel, clean house, them – the ones run errands, work in who, in spite of this, the yard. That’s how I “read” Hell of a Book, I’ll refused to outgrow admit (his earlier novel their imagination, The Returned, too, and refused to abandon as I write this, I’m listening to The Crossing, their dreams, and another of his novels). refused to deny I recommend the audio version of Hell of a Book or diminish their to any who like audio identity, their truth, books – which is not to their loves, unlike say that I find it superior to the published novel. I so many cold and just haven’t had time to timid souls.” sit down and read it –
—Jason Mott, from his acceptance remarks
but I will. I am looking forward to assigning it in my next section of North Carolina Literature at ECU. I finished listening to the novel on the way to Hillsborough, where, coincidentally, I was giving a presentation for Carolina K-12 on teaching North Carolina literature. As Mott’s novel opens with the protagonist running naked through a hotel after a sexual liaison with a married woman is interrupted by the cuckolded husband, it is probably not appropriate for K-12 classes, but I still could not resist telling my audience of teachers about it. “I need to talk about this book,” I told them, “which means I need people to hurry up and read it.” What begins as a typically comical picaresque novel turns as dark as the summer we all watched a police officer kill George Floyd, over and over, on national television, and it certainly seems the killing of Ahmaud Arbery the preceding winter was a significant source of inspiration for Mott’s novel. As I listened to Mott’s story unfold, I was reminded that I’d listened to his novel The Returned during the time when the Trump administration was separating refugee children from their parents on the southern US border, and I was struck by how Mott’s exploration of people’s fear of the unfamiliar “Other” could lead (has led) to internment camps, even in the US. And as I am now discovering, The Crossing imagines a plague killing the elderly, then the late middle-aged (I’m not yet finished listening). A native of Bolton, NC, Mott earned his BFA and MFA from UNC Wilmington, where he now teaches.
