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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Crime & mystery fiction

THE SLIP

Lucas Schaefer

A Novel

An audacious debut novel in the tradition of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem. Weaving across the canvas of a changing country, it is a daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.

Austin, Texas: It's the summer of 1998, and there's a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker's Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his skin, but under the tutelage of the swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter David Dalice, he comes into his own. Even the boy's slightly stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to watch him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier and more confident. Then, one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.

Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by "X," has been undergoing a teenage transformation: He trolls his mother's phone sex hotline, seeks an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, and looks for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he's been searching for. But it's never that simple.

More than a decade later, Nathaniel's uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to investigate his nephew's disappearance. The search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.

Lucas Schaefer has published short fiction and essays. He received a GW Jackson Multicultural Society grant and an MFA from the New Writers Project at UT-Austin.

Available products
Book Published 2025-01-06 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published by Simon & Schuster

Comments

Schaefer's narration is wildly, transgressively hilarious, reminiscent of Philip Roth's early novels...This is a high-wire act, but the breadth of Schaefer's affection feels as wide as the depth of his comedy.

Wildly ambitious and immensely rewarding...Schaefer grants depths of vulnerability to even the novel's least sympathetic characters...Suffice it to say, you're unlikely to read a more impressive first novel this year.

This is a character-based pop novel done right: accessible, unpretentious, hard-hitting...A tremendously strong novel.

It seems only fittingin a time of political corner-taking and weaponised identitythat the American boxing novel is back...The victories are pyrrhic, the trophies are plastic, and the gym is full of top-shelf weirdos.Norman Mailer would be livid. It's wonderful.That's the heretical brilliance of The Slip: it's not about heroic power, but communal power, a rare space where it's possible to fight for something real.

Perhaps not since Nathan Hill's The Nix (2016) have we seen a debut as hugely ambitious as this one . . . Franzen/Roth/Irving comparisons earned and deserved.

This one-of-a-kind tale delights.

Lucas Schaefer's debut, The Slip, is a crime novel in the same way it's a boxing novel, a coming-of-age novel, a black comedy, a Greek tragedy, a full-on, Texas-sized haymaker that swings for the tallest American fences and still knocks the ball out of the park. I'm mixing metaphors now, but that's what reading The Slip does to you; it removes all boundaries.

Schaefer builds us a big, bold, brave, brilliant, beast of a novel. Uproarious and tender, epic in scope and intimate in portraiture, crammed with so many outlandish incidents and exquisitely rendered characters you'll wonder how one novel can possibly contain them all, but Schaefer pulls it off with aplomb. As fearless and enjoyable a debut as you're likely to read this year.

Epic in scope and yet so intimate in detail, The Slip is outrageous, tender, and supremely fun to read. Lucas Schaefer's characters are lost in a funhouse of mirrors, each experiencing a transformation from who we thought they were, each worthy of our love.

Themes of race, class, and identity are portrayed with complex yet nuanced sensitivity. Schaefer brilliantly captures the tumultuous emotional terrain each character must traverse to find themselves. The lyrical prose moves fluidly, like the smoothest heavyweight champion, shimmering, then delivering a knockout punch. Various plot elements nicely serve the deeper themes of fate, found family, preconceived limitations, weighty expectations, and following one's dreams, all in a rapturous barrage of snappy dialogue, witty rejoinders, and profound observations that make for a wicked combination and a winning bildungsroman.

At once raunchy and tender, dipping into deep pools of hilarity and humanity, Schaefer's debut is certain to kindle long overdue conversations about race, privilege and what 'us' means and should mean in America. This novel bursts with fully-fleshed characters, each a knockout, who will stay with you long after the last, fiery page.

A fascinating novel full of so much life. Lucas Schaefer takes a lapidary eye to these characters and Austin, holding them up to the light and tracing stories only he could tell. I can't think of another writer like this except maybe Márquez, though I think The Slip is bawdier than his workand thus, a novel he might have loved.

Schaefer's writing floats like a butterfly, and I can't wait for the next rounds.

With The Slip, Austin, TX finally gets the incisive, warmhearted, epic treatment it deserves. Lucas Schaefer is a master of social detail.

An Austin epic.

A sweaty masterpiece...honestly, I haven't felt quite like this about a book since I was dazzled by Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections almost 25 years ago. But despite his equally capacious reach, Schaefer is no Franzen wannabe. If anything, he's looser, confident enough to be sweet, and despite his richly comic voice, this satiric tongue never develops fangs.

Quite simply, The Slip is everything an epic novel should be, everything you want an epic novel to be: symphonic, expansive, irresistibly engrossing, utterly unpredictable. It is immense in ambition, bursting with language, dauntless in scope and imagination; an ode to the infinite crossroads of life that lead each soul to its present moment. That this is a debut staggers me.

How can a book be uproarious and thought provoking, devil-may-care and philosophical, as full of life in all its ugliness and beauty and strangeness as Lucas Schaefer's The Slip? Complicated and comic, this is a novel about what it means to long to be otherwise, with a mystery at its heart, as well as love and ruthlessness and the kind of crazy imagination missing lately from American fiction. You may not be ready for it, but this is a book which will grab you by the lapels, the throat, the heart, the hand: everywhere.