John Haskell - American Purgatorio

“Why not?” she says. She smiles. “Look at the stars.”

I look up at the sky, neither dark nor light. “It’s too early to see any stars,” I say.

“Some,” she says, and she points to one, about halfway up. She was always good at finding stars.

She sits down on a cement bench overlooking the water. I wait while she puts her shoes on. I watch her tie the laces, and then we’re walking again, side by side, not looking at each other. Occasionally a sentence or a word comes out of one of us.

“The air feels good,” she says.

“I know,” I say, and I feel the air, around me and in me, and—

You probably can’t see us anymore, walking along the edge of the cliff. We’re invisible now, although we don’t quite know it.

We’re walking. We know that. Our footsteps are very quiet. Our voices are silent.

And it’s not a matter of accepting death. It doesn’t happen like that. “Accepting” is a word in a dictionary and what happens isn’t a word, just like clouds aren’t words, or the man driving by with his arm out the window isn’t a word.

But they happen. They all happen, and then they’re gone.

Clouds, people, buildings, laughter, darkness. It all happens, and then it’s gone. The piece of yellow paper in the street. The sounds of children in the distance. It fades away completely. The puddle in the sidewalk and the memory of the puddle.

And then it’s gone.

“Haunting … It would have been easy for John Haskell to turn this novel into a mere literary trick, drawing in the reader with technical virtuosity. But the grace of it all is that he infuses this strange world with the sense of consequence, that as the novel progresses, we become more invested in the narrator’s life.”

— The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“It’s what every writer strives for — an event both surprising and inevitable. American Purgatorio is a serious, admirable novel, well worth reading.”

— Carolyn See, The Washington Post Book World

“An excellent first novel … [ American Purgatorio ] is a testament to Haskell’s awareness that life, like fiction, is both inherently mysterious and inherently too vivid, too strange, too marvelous not to keep wondering about.”

— Rain Taxi

“Haskell, whose short-story collection promised the raw wit of thirtysomething passive-aggressive lit, now proves that he can keep it going for the novel, adding mystery and kindness to his palette.”

— Los Angeles Times

“Haskell has written one of the most interesting, intricate, and intimately nuanced novels of the season.”

— Flaunt Magazine

“Extraordinary … Haskell has become one of the most fascinating new talents in American fiction.… The narrative abstractionist has ever-so-carefully metamorphosed into a gripping storyteller; the theatrical monologist has been transformed into a novelist, both richly familiar and, somehow, newly minted.”

— The Buffalo News

“It’s more and more evident that Haskell is a writer to keep an eye on, if only for his ability to mix the fantastic and realistic in strange, compelling, and humane ways.”

— Ruminator

John Haskell is the author of the short-story collection I Am Not Jackson Pollock. His work has appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, Conjunctions, and Ploughshares. A contributor to the radio program The Next Big Thing, Haskell lives in Brooklyn, New York.