“The literati should read more books by Americans in 2025.” This recent tweet from Alex Perez, an editor at RealClearBooks, has stuck with me. Perez continued, “You don’t have to hype up every translated book by some rando from Norway. More focus on small press American writers from Ohio, New Mexico, etc. Let’s discover America again.” It’s not that I feel any special fury about hyped-up books from Norway, but there is a lack of geographic breadth in American letters. So it’s exciting when you find a writer who breaks the mold: Devin Jacobsen was born in Baton Rouge; studied English at the University of the South at Sewanee, in Tennessee; and got a PhD in English Literature at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. He has also lived in Virginia, Texas, and Paris, but never Ridgewood or Bed-Stuy. His characters don’t wear Plasticana clogs or worry about cheeseburgers selling out at Rolo’s. Instead, Jacobsen writes about sandwiches made with potato chips and ham, being “dog-tired from building all day,” and the beauty of the I-10 bridge into Baton Rouge (“cars speeding past like pale suns passing through a wormhole”). If you want to “discover America again,” like Perez, Jacobsen’s new short story collection, The Summer We Ate Off the China, is a great place to start.
In 2020, Jacobsen made his literary debut with the Civil War and Reconstruction–spanning novel, Breath Like the Wind at Dawn. He wrote eloquently about the extension of violence and disruption from that war into the years beyond, and paid homage to two Southern literary styles, the fractured family narratives of Faulkner and the (still-bloody) pre–Blood Meridian novels of Cormac McCarthy. (As well as faces blown apart and eyeballs springing out of their sockets, Jacobsen includes a prolonged cave sequence recalling those in McCarthy’s Suttree and Child of God.) Breath Like the Wind was a good book at a bad time; 2020 was a distinctly inauspicious time for a white writer to publish a Civil War novel, much less one not directly about race. But Jacobsen was able to get some very desirable blurbs, from Zadie Smith, Joshua Cohen, and the famously harsh New Yorker book critic James Wood. (Wood, who once referred to Paul Auster as a “hipper John Irving” and called Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections “wide rather than deep,” dubbed Jacobsen’s novel “wonderfully interesting and full of original power.”) The dissonance between the big-name blurbs and the small indie press that published the novel was profound. Jacobsen’s new short story collection is going indie too, but I hope his next novel will be headed for the majors.
In a short story, the Dali Museum proves a disappointment: a “sort of funhouse for uppity smart people.”
The first two stories in the collection, “Possum on the Roof” and “Man in the Sky,” also have a Southern edge. In “Possum,” we are introduced to the still dysfunctional modern-day South: a place where children are named “Seesaw,” where young men join the army hoping to “shoot me all the towelheads I can,” and where a grown man “can’t spell depot or his own name sometimes.” It’s a place where noises, like those made by an older sister’s randy boyfriend, are attributed to the animal world — in this case, the titular possum rattling across the roof. Dinner is different too: “The grease from the chicken makes his lips and chin look shiny, like he was putting on gloss while he was driving over a road with holes.” No one else is talking about fried chicken like Devin Jacobsen. “Man in the Sky” revisits the Reconstruction-era malaise of Breath Like the Wind. A former slave, Professor Poseidon Kyland, who “can read and speak several languages” and has “connections with men of peerage in Edinburgh as well as Paris,” has returned to his hometown to find his mother. When he reintroduces himself to an old overseer, the man is unimpressed, saying, “You can be the King of Siam himself.” Another former slave, who has offered to guide Professor Poseidon, wonders if he has perhaps “come back from a long vacation on Mars.”
But Jacobsen doesn’t limit himself geographically. In “St. Petersburg,” a hardworking couple visit Florida. “Thick carpet everywhere reminds me of the kind Donette put on the rim of the toilet,” says the husband about the motel room. When he goes to visit the “Dolly Museum,” his wife asks, “What like Dolly Parton?” To which he explains, “No, like GI Joe and figurines.” The actual Dali Museum proves a disappointment. “There ain’t no dolls; there ain’t no tribute to the lady of ‘My Old Tennessee Home.’” Instead, it is a “sort of funhouse for uppity smart people”; “Bad paintings filled with melting clocks and deserts and half-naked ladies”; “strange stuff made by a mad man to make a man mad.”
In “The Good Life,” Jacobsen takes on Scotland, and college graduates. “For ten years they had been on their own, done with college and living as adults, chasing jobs with benefits and a salary and something of the good life.” The married couple’s relationship had been built on undying support through mutual failure, but when success arrives, it splits them apart. “She had discerned a call to become an ordained priest,” and, after a few boring weeks working at the seminary, the husband gets a call too: a scholarship in Scotland to finish his research, where he soon meets someone new. Someone who, unlike his ambitious wife, seems to need him, a younger woman with a disability (“One leg was shorter than the other”) and a fragile mental state (she’d spent time in a psych ward “because of a breakup”). “You have an appreciation for life that is remarkable despite such suffering in your past,” says the wandering husband in utter, smitten seriousness. With this new woman he finds a desperately needy sort of relationship, one that has no real priorities other than themselves — like he used to have with his wife before the good life came for them.
Jacobsen, who pursued his PhD in Scotland while his wife studied ministry at Virginia Theological Seminary, is as familiar with this material as he is with “Stouffer’s lasagna” and children named “Traxel.” At St. Andrews, Jacobsen’s thesis (unsurprisingly) argued “for the prevalence of an Old English stylistic register in Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee novels.” His research interests included “Which, how, and why certain Greek and Latin loanwords got assimilated into English in early medieval England.” This influence comes across in Jacobsen’s intense focus (and unorthodox approach) to language throughout the work, but is most obvious in the short stories “Tauroctony,” written in the style of a medieval poem, and “Dagonet,” which is prefaced with a passage from the 15th-century Le Morte D’Arthur and tells of a Louis C.K.–comedian’s MeToo-era downfall. The story begins with an Arthurian inflection, as Dagonet, the modern-day fool, “boxered and beerbellied,” muses upon his new status as “the effigy of a dead god not to be buried but spat upon.” It soon moves into the tar-pit-black Hollywood style that Bruce Wagner popularized in novels such as I’m Losing You and Force Majeure: “Why does she have to accuse me this way before the entire world? If she wanted the cash, why not ask? If she wanted to see me in jail, why not press charges?” the protagonist wonders. But, truthfully, he’s not especially interested in the accusation, he’s too busy feeling sorry for himself (“The only Oscar he’d ever hold would be Mayer”) and planning his comeback (“The comeback tour is my apology!” he says hopefully). Dagonet’s agent hopes to control the situation too; he has a new intern write an op-ed “in which you come clean to having been molested as an altar boy” … “seeing as you’re from Boston.” Jacobsen’s dark humor still works outside flyover country.
There are other fine stories in the collection, such as “Bob,” about a young worker relentlessly victimized by corporate HR (the titular Bob, an “avuncular, yet slightly pedophiliac” HR staffer, insists on asking survey questions like “Do you ever lie to yourself?” and “The hamster eats its own ___”). Other stories of note include “Evil in the Object,” about a diner employee whose Confederacy-loving boyfriend leads a band called “The Reviled”; “The Elegance of Simplicity,” concerning the coping strategy of a jaded campus security guard with a profoundly disabled son (“Fourteen dollars an hour gets you the elegance of simplicity”); and “Hitler in Love,” about a tragic shooting at a Jewish day school complicated by the victim’s contrarian views on Hitler (he’d written a “Great Men” report on the Führer, saying, “I interpreted it was great as in very powerful”). It’s a terrific collection — wide, deep, and way hipper than John Irving. Jacobsen writes about big issues and small towns, but he always writes beautifully. Even if you still like Norwegian literature, this is a writer worth discovering. ❖
Gideon Leek is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.
