Constant Reader

Remember back when stuffy book reviewers (the kind who don’t have
jobs anymore) used to dismiss McSweeney’s as a faddish vanity press?
And the accusations that the publisher only put out books by white male
friends of Dave Eggers with childish preoccupations? In the
beginning, of course, when the McSweeney’s list was very small, those
accusations had a certain kind of truth to them; Eggers will have to do
a lot more charity work before he can atone for the sin of siccing Neal
Pollock on the world. But two new books from McSweeney’s provide a
perfect counterargument to those early charges and show how much the
press has grown.

The protagonist of Jessica Anthony’s debut novel, The
Convalescent, couldn’t be more unlike the authorial stand-ins who
usually play the modern literary hero. Rovar Ákos Pfliegman is a
dwarf who sells meat out of a dilapidated bus that doubles as
his home. Pfliegman suffers from an array of crippling physical
ailments. He considers a very tall weed growing near his bus to be one
of his best friends, and he devotes his spare time to chronicling the
long-forgotten branches of his family tree (including “The Great
Leg-Wrestling Champion of Tenth-Century Hungary”).

There’s nothing ironic or glossy or otherwise typically McSweeney’s
about The Convalescent; it’s a grimy, grubby book about dead
and living meat. It’s no coincidence that Geek Love author
Katherine Dunn has written an adoring blurb for this book; Pfliegman
could have been abducted from Love one night while Dunn was
sleeping. Anthony has sketched a compelling character who inspires
repulsion and pity and a weird kind of romantic love in the reader.

More surprising than Pfliegman, though, is Gary Gray, the main
character of James Hannaham’s new debut novel, God Says No. An
overweight 19-year-old African-American man, Gray is an evangelical
Christian who loves to take his brand-new wife to Disney World. He also
secretly has sex with anonymous men in public bathrooms. He’s
the kind of tragic closet case who doesn’t even possess a vocabulary to
describe his longings.

As Gray learns the truth about himself (even while lying to his
family and fellow churchgoers), the reader experiences the queasy flush
of excitement along with him: “Miquel really enjoyed my big body,
romping all over it like a kid on a muddy hill… I was real
surprised that anybody could like the way I looked.” No doesn’t
make easy jokes about evangelicalism or body image or sexual
politics—Gray’s relationship with God becomes complicated as he
evolves, but it never goes away. Instead, it charges headlong into
those issues and, with Hannaham’s compassionate voice guiding the way,
finds room to accept everyone. In this world, Hannaham (and Anthony and
McSweeney’s) is saying, there’s time and patience enough for everyone
to speak their mind and seek a little understanding.