THE COPYWRITER

A 30-something poet curates the absurdities of modern life in his journals as he works—and then again, doesn’t—as a copywriter in New York City.

It’s the summer of 2017 and the kitsch farm where D__ makes ends meet as a copywriter is on the brink of mass layoffs. Trump is in office, kids are being kept in prison camps at the border, the U.S. is supporting Israeli airstrikes on Palestinians, and, to a reader in the current moment, comments about the world’s tailspin into fascism have a bitterly ironic savor. Irony is an apt emotion for a novel that explores the particular disaffection of the millennial generation: There’s a glut of writing that seeks to untangle—or, failing that, poke knowing fun at—the neuroses and foibles of those who came of age during the Great Recession, but Poppick, treading the same old paths of observation, is somehow never trite. He performs the same magic trick in navigating D__’s sometimes ambivalent relationship to Judaism, succinctly distilling the tensions experienced by many Jews as the horrors of both historical and contemporary antisemitism are weaponized to justify further human suffering. The novel is clear and funny, wryly cynical without indulging in nihilism. As D__ moves inexorably through time (and the relentless march of time is a prominent theme, bolstered by frequent references to the works of Proust and the physical progression of months and years in the chapter headings), he documents scraps of conversations, dreams, emails, vignettes he calls “parables,” and, occasionally, poems. This mélange lends itself to an agile prose style, one that runs the gamut from insouciance to elegance. For all of this, the narrative is not abstract. The dissolution of D__’s seven-year relationship, his close-knit group of poet friends, his search for employment, and his appetite for meaning comprise a linear, moving, and accessible story.

Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes.