Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THE WEIGHT

Jeff Boyd

a novel

They say the upside to losing everything is that there's so much less to worry about - but if that's the case, why is Julian still carrying so much weight? Reminiscent of Walker Percy's THE MOVIEGOER, Jeff Boyd's beguiling first novel is a Bildungsroman exploring themes of faith, race, love and friendship with acid humor, disarming vulnerability and unforgettable poignance.

Julian Strickland is the only Black man in the hipster playground of Portland, Oregon. To his friends, he's the coolest cat on the scene, the soulful dreadlocked drummer from Chicago in an indie rock band that's just about to break through.

But to himself, he's a sheltered Christian homeschool kid who used to write book reports on Leviticus. A virgin until the night of his marriage, divorced at twenty-four, he's still shell-shocked two years later, pretending to fit in and wondering if any of his relationships are real. To top it all off, he can't find God anywhere.

Just when sparks fly between Julian and Ida McKnight, the Black woman of his dreams, Julian's best friend Richmond mysteriously turns on him, Ida stops responding to his messages and his house burns down. Life has never been easy, but besides the shirt on his back, Julian has almost nothing left.

Jeff Boyd is a former public school teacher from Chicago and a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he received the Deena Davidson Friedman Prize for Fiction. He currently lives in the East Coast of the United States.

Available products
Book Published 2023-04-11 by Simon & Schuster
Book Published 2023-04-11 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

[A] delightful debut... Boyd's writing is preternaturally wise, and his characters come to life with natural dialogue and brutally honest confrontations. This pulses with the beat of life.

You've never met a fictional character quite like Julian Strickland, the soulful, searching character at the heart of Jeff Boyd's wondrous new novel, The Weight. It's a delight to watch him drum, stumble and sleep his way across the pale, smoky clubs of Portland, Oregon in this moving, comic and prodigious debut.

As a reader, Jeff's writing is the kind you love: he builds a world and inhabits it with round, flawed, real people. His astute observations and wry humor pull you in but his characters make you stay. As a writer, Jeff's writing is the kind of thing that makes you bang your head against the wall wondering "how the F did he do that!? How did he make this insane, complicated, thing feel as easy as the riff of a jazz bass line." In THE WEIGHT, Jeff somehow skewers liberal Portland while implicating all of us and, in a truly pertinent way, ask what it means to really be 'accepting of self.'

"The Weight" presents the engrossing portrait of a man in a bizarre place, at a bizarre time, doing what he can to live with the extraordinary load he carries in his heart and the sheer mass imposed upon his mind. But though the weight may be heavy, it can be managed, and Julian's decision to "make a real attempt at my own version of happiness" is instructive, because, as he tells a friend, "A man's fate is to die. But life is worth the trouble." Big facts, as the kids say.

The Weight is filled with haunting observations about romance, isolation and the daunting task of believing in something greater than yourself. Boyd has a grounded and capable hand. This is dialogue that you can actually hear. Powerful, dreamy, and altogether very true.

"The Weight" presents the engrossing portrait of a man in a bizarre place, at a bizarre time, doing what he can to live with the extraordinary load he carries in his heart and the sheer mass imposed upon his mind. But though the weight may be heavy, it can be managed, and Julian's decision to "make a real attempt at my own version of happiness" is instructive, because, as he tells a friend, "A man's fate is to die. But life is worth the trouble." Big facts, as the kids say.

You've never met a fictional character quite like Julian Strickland, the soulful, searching character at the heart of Jeff Boyd's wondrous new novel, The Weight. It's a delight to watch him drum, stumble and sleep his way across the pale, smoky clubs of Portland, Oregon in this moving, comic and prodigious debut.