I Write Novels That Are Not Supposed to Exist

Each novel is a refusal to comply with a dominant narrative.

I did not set out to write a sequence of refusals. I wrote each novel separately. But the pattern is clear.

That pattern also helps explain why the novels sit uneasily within mainstream literary culture. The culture thinks of itself as unconventional. Its choices reveal how narrow its permissions have become.

The first novel was FERADIM.

FERADIM is not supposed to exist because it refuses to allow power to define the story of origins.

Fiction often permits private reckoning with inherited belief, trauma, and doubt. It is much less comfortable when a novel penetrates the foundations of civilization and says: the origin story itself is an instrument of power.

That is where FERADIM exceeds the usual permission granted to literary fiction: it treats origin not as background, inheritance, or belief, but as a crime scene.

Julian Weissman becomes a historian because of what he first sees as a psychoanalyst. Again and again, he encounters the same pattern: people drawn toward someone who promises comfort, certainty, love, or salvation, then uses that desire to dominate them. Julian wants to know how deeply that pattern runs through history and where it began.

Claire Bennett has lived that pattern. Raised inside the Catholic faith, she carries both the longing for divine love and the wound created when that longing becomes a source of authority over her. Julian studies the pattern. Claire knows its power through what she believes in her heart.

Together they pursue six first-century Aramaic scrolls scattered across the world. They begin with the possibility that the scrolls preserve a lost voice from the origins of Western civilization. What they uncover is the violence used to establish that origin: one voice elevated, competing voices murdered, their testimony suppressed, and their silence turned into sacred authority.

The novel’s refusal is larger than the recovery of a suppressed history. It rejects the right of power to decide civilization’s origins and whose suffering may be erased from its foundations.

FERADIM is the name carried across centuries for the many whom power massacred and then erased: the voice of many as one, and the spirit of freedom that survived their silence. A secret lineage of priests carries that memory forward, marking the burial sites Julian and Claire uncover with the words: Silence for the Many.

The novel does more than challenge a dominant narrative. It shows how dominant narratives sustain domination.

Julian Weissman is not supposed to exist.

A character like Julian violates the scale contemporary literary fiction usually permits a character to occupy. He is expected to remain inside his wound, his family, his identity, his profession, his private consciousness. Julian refuses every one of those boundaries. He sees a pattern in his patients and asks whether the same pattern shaped civilization. He leaves psychoanalysis, enters history, and follows the question back two thousand years.

As a Jewish boy, Julian experiences the ugliness of antisemitism inside his own family. When he is eleven or twelve, a drunken grandfather from the other side of the family shouts “Jew, Jew, Jew” through the house while Julian and his family sleep in the basement. Julian carries that moment into his work. His experience becomes evidence. He learns that power can commit the crime, make its victims carry the guilt, create a story of salvation—and teach a Jewish boy that his people killed the savior.

He also violates the rules of knowledge. A psychoanalyst is supposed to practice psychoanalysis. A historian is supposed to respect the historical record. A Jewish scholar is supposed to be explained through his Jewishness. Julian uses every part of himself to interrogate every other part. No discipline, institution, inheritance, or accepted history receives his obedience.

That is why he is not supposed to exist. Contemporary fiction can accommodate a character who suffers beneath a lie. Julian intends to expose the lie, trace its construction, and find the bodies beneath it. He studies history to catch it in a lie. He accepts nothing at face value because he understands as a historian and as a psychoanalyst, that the face itself is the language of deceit.

The Narcissism of the Sacred

The Narcissism of the Sacred is not supposed to exist because it refuses the idea that the performance of resistance constitutes resistance.

Fiction will allow a character to critique power and keep her tenured job. It will allow resistance to become a language, a seminar, a conference, a prizewinning novel, a form of professional safety.

This novel does not allow that safety. It asks what resistance means when it costs someone a position, a home, a family, a future, or a life. It follows resistance past the point where literary culture tends to stop: before the exile, before the ruin, before the gun at the temple.

That is where the novel breaks the rule. It refuses to flatter a culture that has learned how to perform danger while remaining protected from consequence.

Isabel Markson is a Yale professor who has built her career studying literature as a form of resistance. She knows the language of power, exclusion, and oppression. She teaches it, writes about it, and attends conferences devoted to it. The opening chapter shows a culture that speaks fluently about resistance while making sure resistance remains safely contained.

In her classroom, Isabel tells her students that the contemporary novel has retreated into individual consciousness. It no longer attempts the broad moral and historical reach of the novels she admires. One of her students asks whether fiction has been trained to obey invisible rules. Later, Isabel’s department celebrates a novel set in a German boot shop during the rise of fascism. The novel never leaves the shop and never names the force transforming the world outside it. Its refusal to look outward is praised as artistic restraint.

Isabel understands what has been lost. She also helps preserve the system that lost it.

In Montevideo, she is given an unpublished manuscript about Galen, a carpenter and teacher whose workshops ask people to examine the forces shaping their lives. Galen believes that an idea must carry weight. His chair becomes the measure: language may be elegant, sophisticated, and beautifully constructed, yet a chair made of air cannot support a human body.

The manuscript carries that test into Isabel’s life. Galen’s ideas cannot remain material for interpretation. They demand consequence. As Isabel investigates the manuscript and its author, she discovers that her own family helped suppress the book and destroy the voice at its center.

The novel places Isabel inside the structure she believed she stood outside. She must decide whether resistance will remain something she teaches and admires or become something that changes what she does.

The Narcissism of the Sacred confronts a literary culture that defines itself through opposition while rewarding forms of opposition that carry no danger. Resistance matters until it threatens the institution performing it. Galen speaks to Isabel through time. Postmodernism began as a critique of domination, then evolved into a style rewarded with literary prizes and tenure. That is why power now delights in it.

Isabel Markson is not supposed to exist because she breaks the frame built to contain her.

She is supposed to remain legible as a Yale professor: intelligent, accomplished, fluent in the language of power, professionally committed to resistance. The institution gives her a place from which to interpret the world. Her family gives her a history she has learned to inhabit without fully seeing. The manuscript destroys her comfortable place in the world.

She changes. Slowly, she abandons the way she teaches, her relationship to language, and the protected life of a professor governed by the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. Her twin sister, Annie, said the wrong thing and eventually killed herself. Galen taught the wrong things to his carpentry students in Laurel Canyon and could not endure the world as it is.

The novel refuses the bargain. Isabel is not allowed to remain a sophisticated observer of danger. The manuscript she finds in Montevideo makes danger real. It enters her family, her marriage, her work, her language, and her understanding of herself. It asks whether resistance means anything when it requires more than interpretation.

Isabel learns what fearlessness means. She leaps from the frame power built to contain her, classify her, comfort her — and then smile at her acquiescence.

That is why Isabel is not supposed to exist. Literary culture can absorb a professor who studies resistance. It has much more trouble with a professor who discovers that resistance may cost her the life that studying resistance helped her build.

001-054

001-054 is not supposed to exist because it refuses the idea that identity can explain a human being before one speaks.

To withhold Whitman’s identity until the end — and to implicate the reader in the same assumptions the character faces inside the novel — is almost taboo in a literary culture that treats identity as the key to understanding a human being.

001-054 breaks both rules. It does not allow the reader to recognize Whitman through identity. It does not let the reader remain innocent. It does not allow the reader to stand outside the fiction as a morally enlightened observer of other people’s bias.

It corners the reader inside their own assumptions until the novel is ready to reveal what those assumptions have cost Whitman himself.

Whitman Kessler is a struggling adjunct professor who writes a breakthrough novel called 001-054. Set in a near future where machine-generated literature has displaced human authorship, it follows Sebastian, a literature analyst who secretly tries to create a human novel with a creative algorithm named Turing while a surveillance system called SENTINEL searches for anything that sounds authentically human.

The literary world receives Whitman’s novel with suspicion. At the Harvard Club, he is interrogated in public. The New York Times dissects both the work and the man who made it. Critics, professors, agents, friends, and even his daughter keep searching for an explanation. Is the novel brilliant? Is it a fraud? Does Whitman understand what he has created?

The questions appear to concern authorship, artificial intelligence, and genius. They are really questions about Whitman. Everyone senses a gap between the man they believe they see and the scale of what he has made.

The novel withholds Whitman’s identity as a mixed-race Black man until the final six words. Until then, the reader encounters him through his ambition, his failures, his relationships, and the work of imagination he has produced. The reader is denied the identity that a conventional novel would place at the center and use to explain him.

That withholding turns the novel into a mirror. The reader watches the literary world misread Whitman, then discovers that the reader has been making assumptions too. Whitman has never hidden who he is. The culture around him has constructed an identity from his name, his education, his class, his Jewish inheritance, and the expectations attached to all of them.

The deepest revelation of Whitman appears in the novel he writes. Turing, the creative algorithm inside 001-054, says:

“You gave me a voice, then you put me in a cage.”

The line belongs to Turing. It also belongs to Whitman. He has been given a voice, then surrounded by people and institutions determined to decide what that voice means, where it came from, and whether someone like him could have created it.

Whitman is in a fight over imagination itself. If power decides who is allowed to imagine a better future, there is no future beyond the one power has already approved.

001-054 denies identity the right to tell Whitman who he is or what he can imagine. That is why this novel is not supposed to exist.

Whitman Kessler is not supposed to exist in contemporary fiction. Not the way he is rendered, or the way he renders himself.

His identity at first seems clear: a struggling adjunct with a name that sounds strangely Anglo and Jewish, who writes a breakout novel. He has a daughter in private school and an ex-wife who is a surgeon living in a tony Brooklyn brownstone. He is a Yale graduate invited to the Harvard Club. We think we know him.

He should not exist because contemporary fiction would not allow him to exist this way. His identity as a mixed-race Black man is withheld until the end. That is not allowed in a literary culture that insists upon identity as the source of his struggles and the key to his legitimacy as a novelist.

Whitman has no vociferous inner voice. For the reader, he exists through the scarcity and economy of his words and actions. We know him through the novel he writes, inside a system that governs who and what he is allowed to be.

Whitman raises the question:

If identity is not what allows us to perceive a character on the page, what have we been seeing?

We have not been seeing Whitman Kessler.

We are seeing ourselves.

Lord Atlas

Lord Atlas is not supposed to exist because it refuses the fantasy that the individual can be the foundation of society.

Fiction knows how to handle the selfish individual when he or she remains enclosed inside private life. The form becomes much less comfortable when individualism becomes ideology, even though that ideology is one of the foundational myths of American civilization.

That is where Lord Atlas breaks the rule. It takes the most flattering story America tells about itself — that freedom begins with the sovereign self — and follows it until freedom becomes domination.

The selfish actor is acceptable as long as his appetite remains private. Once that appetite spills into the larger world — once the pursuit of power begins to resemble the world we actually live in — literary fiction begins to lose its nerve.

Suzanne Dreyfus is a scientist who writes a satirical birthday manifesto for her lover, Garrick Cripps. She invents Lord Atlas, a god of pure self-interest, and the Sacred Church of Living Capitalism, a faith built on the belief that the individual owes nothing to the state, the public, or anyone else.

Garrick reads it as revelation.

He builds the Freedom Society around Suzanne’s ideas and turns them into a movement to strip government of power. What began as a joke becomes a creed. What began as private language between two people becomes a plan for the country.

At the heart of that creed is a simple belief:

I am well because you are not.

My gain requires your loss. My freedom requires your defeat. Society becomes a contest in which another person’s well-being diminishes my own. Power teaches people to live by that rule, then calls the result freedom.

Carson McCready stands against it. A retired Navy SEAL, he has spent his life inside a different truth. Strength comes from the team. The oath binds each person to something larger than himself. No one survives alone.

Garrick wants to free the individual from every debt. Carson knows the debt is what makes us human.

Lord Atlas shatters the lie that power lives in the self. Power lives in the bond. It lives in the oath. It lives in what people will do for one another.

Carson McCready is not supposed to exist.

What happens when a character who appears to be everything Garrick worships reveals that he is the opposite?

Garrick’s hero is the strongman who holds up the world through his pursuit of self-enrichment. Carson is a former SEAL who defies every stereotype the culture uses to define such a man.

Contemporary fiction has been trained not to trust a character like Carson. It has grown suspicious of men like him.

He is strong, capable, disciplined, and morally serious. He can use violence, yet violence does not define him. He has power and does not worship it. He does not need to dominate a room, announce his wounds, or explain himself. His life has been built around the team, the oath, and the obligation to act when other people are in danger.

He refuses the role fiction would assign him. He will not become the damaged warrior, the fascist brute, the obsolete white man, or the uncomplicated hero. He knows what he has done, what it cost, and what he still owes. He wants very little from history. He has already given it enough.

Carson becomes larger than life because he knows life is so much larger than he is. That is what contemporary fiction has trouble allowing: a man whose moral authority comes from responsibility and whose heroism survives his refusal to call himself a hero.

Suzanne Dreyfus should not exist. She violates the fantasy that intelligence protects a person from appetite, vanity, and self-betrayal.

She has everything contemporary fiction teaches us to read as proof of control: beauty, wit, education, professional promise, moral intelligence. She sees Garrick clearly enough to satirize him. Then she mistakes that clarity for immunity. She believes she can play with his hunger for power, enjoy what he offers, and remain untouched by it.

The birthday manifesto is the perfect act because it joins her intelligence to her greed. Her wit wins Garrick. Her intelligence should win the job, the house, the family, the life. And for a time, it does. She gets everything she desires and nothing she truly dreams of.

Suzanne destroys the flattering idea that a brilliant woman who understands power cannot become its accomplice. Nor its victim. Nor the object of its seduction. She does understand it. She toys with it. She believes she is immune. Then she falls deeper into its grip until it is too late to escape the damage.

And then she loses everything. She never gets what she was born to have.