Against the Country
A book filled with sentences that make you want to read them aloud and to glory in their humor, which is by turns exuberant and dark, it is a mirror in which we see ourselves plain.
A peer of Twain and Melville walks among us. His name is Ben Metcalf.
But who is he? And why has no one I know ever heard of his ghostly, rage-fueled masterpiece?
The first time I read Against the Country my wife rolled over in bed and swatted at the reading light — it was 4 AM and my laughter had woken her up. I had found the book earlier that afternoon while perusing the stacks at the New York Public Library. Its cover, of simple white font floating on a background reminiscent of Joyce’s “snotgreen sea,” stood out amid the loud titles of other contemporary fiction. From the colophon I learned it had been published by Random House in 2015, but other than that, my knowledge of the book and its author was zilch. From the very first page, however, it called out like an estranged relative; one I had never met but known all my life. My second read was more studied, but an undercurrent of hysteria remained, especially as I discovered that none of the many book-lovers in my life had even heard of the novel, let alone read it. Literary kismet is rare. It renders a text uniquely yours — you unearth a piece of yourself within a book. The type of …
