Culture September 23, 2016

From the first line in his debut novel, “My father said I was living in his house persona non grata and that I needed to find myself a job,” Mike Roberts casually dissolves into myth—a kind of millennial Charon come to guide his reader through a post-9/11 white-American-male version of the River Styx. The book, broken into eighteen parts, is an episodic tour of contemporary America, characterized by random violence, terrible jobs, and madness. It certainly seems like hell. Still, the narrator, our Virgil (although in this case our guide is named Mike, like the author), practically offers readers a