THE DEVIL IS A SOUTHPAW

Two boys navigate juvenile detention in Hobson’s oft-surreal metanovel.

The bulk of this book is an imagined novel titled The Devil Is a Southpaw (named after an imaginary film starring John Wayne) by Milton Muleborn, who has sublimated his experience in an Oklahoma juvenile facility in 1988 into a peculiar yet compelling narrative. His version of the story is filled with teenage crushes, abusive jailers, a storm where frogs rain down like water, cameos by Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo doppelgängers, and an attempt to escape the facility. The narrator was consumed with jealousy of a fellow inmate, Matthew Echota, who was a gifted painter (examples of his work are scattered through the narrative); Milton became a writer, he suggests, in a bid to catch up with Matthew’s talents. (Muleborn the author seems aware of the potency of his envy, giving his character’s literal devil horns on his forehead.) Latter sections of the novel clarify the facts somewhat and move the story closer to the present day. We learn the reasons behind the boys’ incarceration, which involve weed and firearms in the pre-Columbine era. There’s a certain poignancy in Milton’s desperation to be heard and understood, underscored by a series of family traumas, including a suicide. In earlier novels, Hobson has proven himself gifted at exploring characters from multiple perspectives, usually with an emphasis on Native American traditions. Here the storytelling is more slippery and at times less successful—Milton’s novel is immature by design, filled with intentionally overheated prose. That doesn’t make Hobson’s novel a failure, but it challenges the reader to set aside conventional measures of success—here, it’s about how agonizing it can be to lay bare our adolescence.

A rough, deliberately messy tale, revealing the depths of broken childhoods.