Staff Pick
If someone told you to braid together three disparate story lines (let's say, the reincarnated soul of Joan of Arc's executioner, a washed-up alcoholic artist, and a sudden rash of ghostly appearances), could you do it? Could you do it without sounding like an idiot? Keith Rosson can — magnificently.
Rosson's characters are so layered and well-defined, they absolutely hum with realism, even when they're talking to ghosts, or remembering the lives they've lived since 1375.
Joan of Arc's executioner, Geoffroy/Marvin, has been caught in a curse since the day he lit the fire under Joan and saw her soul escape in the form of a dove. He's reborn again and again, with full memory of his previous lives, and knowing that he'll die before his 57th birthday.
Mike Vale lit the art world on fire at the tender age of 19, producing work that was both critically acclaimed, and sold for millions. Since then he's spent two decades drunk and penniless.
Everywhere, it seems, ghosts are appearing. Everyone sees them, they stay for a few minutes, and then disappear. Who are they? Why are they here? What does it mean?
Rosson tackles the big life questions in this book, picking apart themes of purpose, redemption, suffering, forgiveness, addiction, passion, talent, guilt, the unknowable nature of life and death, the ways in which we help each other and the ways in which we hinder, the joy of living and the anticipation of death, and the absolute necessity of an examined life. His talent is staggering, his craft is meticulous, and his story is one of the quirkiest but most heartfelt I have ever read. He will clench your heart and drag you through his landscape of horror and bliss. You'll be so utterly grateful for it. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Powell's Books Best Fiction of 2018
"Rosson is a talent to be watched." - Jason Heller, NPR
Marvin Deitz has some serious problems. His mob-connected landlord is strong-arming him out of his storefront. His therapist has concerns about his stability. He's compelled to volunteer at the local Children's Hospital even though it breaks his heart every week.
Oh, and he's also the guilt-ridden reincarnation of Geoffroy Th rage, the French executioner who lit Joan of Arc's pyre in 1431. He's just seen a woman on a Los Angeles talk show claiming to be Joan, and absolution seems closer than it's ever been . . . but how will he find her?
When Marvin heads to Los Angeles to locate the woman who may or may not be Joan, he's picked up hitchhiking by Mike Vale, a self-destructive alcoholic painter traveling to his ex-wife's funeral. As they move through a California landscape populated with "smokes" (ghostly apparitions that've inexplicably begun appearing throughout the southwestern US), each seeks absolution in his own way.
In Smoke City, Keith Rosson continues to blur genre and literary fiction in a way that is in turns surprising, heartfelt, brutal, relentlessly inventive, and entirely his own.