CANON

Two warriors travel into a world of hero’s-journey tropes.

This highly meta debut novel by acclaimed poet Lewis runs on two plot threads, both powered by winking references to epic yarns from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bible to Moby-Dick and beyond. In one, Yara, a nonbinary artist, is recruited by God to take on Dominic, a Bad Guy. In the other, a lesbian prophet named Adrena is sent on a side quest to help a certain General Harpo locate his wife, who’s disappeared. Yara is ferried for much of their journey by a whale named HOWBIG!, who speaks in all caps and claims to be the reincarnation of Jacques Cousteau; Adrena finds a budding romance with a singer named Sivan, whom she discovers at a Camelot Music store. The usually brief chapters have titles defined by the narrator’s oft-snarky metacommentaries like “Oh, You Want to Know What Yara Looks Like?” and “Brace Yourself—Things Are About to Get Weird.” But Lewis isn’t pursuing archness for its own sake: Their tinkering with the familiar themes of epic sagas exposes both the power of quest stories and the kind of (usually masculine) authority we associate with them. Here, God is a profound egotist (“I’m losing worshippers! I need to recapture the public’s attention, to jingle my keys in front of the masses, so to speak”) and readers’ desire for bloodshed is a worthy subject in itself. (Chapter title: “I’m Honestly Worried About You—Why Do You Want to See More Violence?”) In that sense, Lewis is in line with the postmodern satirists of the 1960s and ’70s—John Barth, Robert Coover, William H. Gass—but with a new sensitivity about gender and sexuality, and a wit sharpened by the social media age. Lewis is questioning narrative, but their story is all cool assurance.

A brash, informed, and funny anti-epic.