Telephone.

Percival Everett’s Telephone is the most serious of the six of his novels I’ve read so far, with the only humorous elements some of the smartass dialogue coming from his main character. A finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (which it lost to the inferior The Night Watchman), Telephone finds Everett exploring how people respond to grief and the search for meaning in a world that appears to have none at all.

Zach Wells, another author surrogate for Everett, is a geologist and college professor who lives with his wife and their one child, a daughter named Sarah, who is the apple of Zach’s eye like Bonnie Blue was in Rhett Butler’s. Sarah starts to have absence seizures and reports some other neurological symptoms, and when Zach and his wife take her to the doctor, they learn that she has a fatal neurodegenerative disorder called Batten disease that will kill her in a few years, and on her way to dying, she’ll lose her faculties and won’t even recognize her parents.

Meanwhile, Zach orders a piece of clothing off the internet and finds a note that just says “ayúdame” (“help me”) in one of its pockets. He orders another item from the same place, and gets a similar note. He’s stymied, but eventually decides he has to do something to figure out if there is someone in trouble wherever these garments are made or repackaged. And at work, he has a younger colleague who procrastinated for years on publishing her work and now may not get tenure as a result, but Zach finds that her work is good enough and embarks on a late push to save her.

In just about all of Everett’s books, at least the ones I’ve read, he’s asking important questions and only hints at the answers. Here, Zach is a tragic figure from the start – his father killed himself, his marriage has stalled, he doesn’t seem to particularly like his work – and the one facet of his life that seems to give him real joy is going to be taken from him in the cruelest possible fashion. When you can’t save the most important person in the world, do you turn to try to save someone else? A colleague you respect, not even a friend, just someone who you think deserves more than she’s getting? A complete stranger, or more than one, who may not even exist, and if they do it’s in another country and maybe you’ll get killed trying to do it? Would any of this matter in the grand scheme? Would it help you save yourself?

Where Telephone ends up was something of a surprise, as I’m used to Everett concluding his novels in uncertain fashion – at least three of the other five lacked concrete resolutions to their plots. Wells gets an ending in fact where the ambiguity is interior to his character. Has anything changed? When he goes back to his regular life, will he be altered by the experiences, or has he just pushed away the grief that will be waiting for him at his front door?

Wells is an Everett stand-in in the same vein as Kevin Pace, the protagonist of So Much Blue, as middle-aged men facing some kind of emotional crisis, although Pace’s was more of his own making and Wells’s definitely is not. They’re well-developed, flawed, and very realistic. They make mistakes, especially in their marriages. They do not talk easily or openly about their feelings. And they are ill-equipped for what hits them, a combination in both cases of how they were raised and the choices they’ve made as adults. Telephone is just another piece of evidence in the case for Everett as our greatest living novelist.

Next up: Congo Inc.: Bismarck’s Testament, a satirical novel by In Koli Jean Bofane, who appeared in the documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.