Yr Dead by Sam Sax: Inventive Debut Blending Comedy and Darkness

The fictional character Septimus Warren Smith from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is the first of many spectres haunting the pages of Sam Sax’s fiery and poetic debut novel, Yr Dead. Midway through Woolf’s masterwork, the war veteran takes his own life, and this novel’s epigraph, from Septimus’s narration, reads: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way.”

The novel begins with a heavy-content warning: it unfolds in the brief intermission between its protagonist setting themselves on fire—at a march outside Trump Tower in New York—and their death. Reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s lyrical meditations on identity and Maddie Mortimer’s inventive Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Sax’s book delves into the traumas and political rumblings against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election that have led to this moment.

Ezra, a queer, non-binary 27-year-old of Jewish heritage, is introduced as a worn-out bookseller, moving in and out of protests and weary of their social media-friendly “pageantry”, convinced “it’s never enough”. After Ezra’s act of self-immolation, Yr Dead propels us back into their past; this unraveling story is their life flashing before their eyes, told through a string of quick, lyrical vignettes.

Passages grappling with sexuality and online and physical abuse are unflinchingly frank.

Sax, also a poet (author of the collection Pig and a winner of the James Laughlin award), shows his mastery in the aphoristic musings on life’s enigmas found throughout the book. The story unfolds non-chronologically: detailing Ezra’s abandonment by their mother (“you don’t write a book to replace a mother, but to fill in her absence”); attending a Jewish socialist summer camp (“to imagine a better world means at least you have the means to imagine it”); and suffering through an abusive relationship (“love is just another thing that happens to you, like a rash or a bad radish or a car accident”). Ezra lists species driven into extinction, is haunted by the phantom animals of Pokémon Go, and finds themselves “eaten alive” by empathy while scrolling through their phone.

Sax’s experimental approach extends further, incorporating false mythologies created by Ezra’s father, merging their parents into one single, eerily disjointed voice, and even echoing their ancestors, including great-grandfather Herschel, a mischievous soap-factory laborer who deserted his family in Russia for America, only to be celebrated at Passover in the US in present-day.

While Yr Dead contains elements of comedy, it also delves into much darker recesses. The novel’s candid exploration of sexuality and various forms of abuse is strikingly honest. It tends to sidestep direct political references, avoiding naming Trump or explicitly detailing the causes behind Ezra’s protests and their tragic final act.

However, this sprawling, time-defying Bildungsroman sometimes struggles with its ambitious scope, scratching only the surface. Nonetheless, its inventive style, imagery, and form make up for these shortcomings. Yr Dead lays bare the profound loneliness of living in the digital age, the ways in which others shape us, and how humanity can shine through the cracks even amidst catastrophe. Despite the world’s ills, there is a glimmer of hope.

• Yr Dead by Sam Sax is published by Daunt Books (£9.99).

Source: Guardian