A Naked Singularity: A Novel
In a narrow yet vital sense, this is a crime novel about one Casi, a precocious young public defender who, beginning to strain under the weight of his profession and his perfectionism, loses his first case and happens upon the opportunity to get away with the perfect crime. It is also one of those sprawling hyperverbal stream-of-consciousness epics that sometimes seem infatuated with their own cleverness but in their best moments manage to capture something profound about our sprawling hyperverbal stream-of-consciousness world. The story is anchored by notes of gritty realism—de la Pava clearly has an insider’s knowledge of the Manhattan criminal-court system—but Casi and his interlocutors are as likely to veer into digressive philosophical banter about Hume or The Honeymooners as they are to throw around the legal jargon you’d hear at an arraignment. There are some hilarious moments and more than a few heartbreaking ones involving a mentally handicapped man on Alabama’s death row. Although David Foster Wallace fans will likely notice his influence on de la Pava, the better comparison may be to Evan Dara’s The Lost Scrapbook (1998), which, like this book, developed a major following after originally being self-published. --Brendan Driscoll