Justification Nation: A novel and stories

This novel, my second, is in fact a multigenre hybrid of interrelated short stories and an outsized frame. Equal parts bildungsroman, utopian quest, chivalric romance and social satire, the novel recounts the story of a twenty-something lackey at a publishing company and his jackpot idea of starting a secular confession service to assuage people's guilt over the various barbarisms they commit in their everyday lives. This idealistic entrepreneur is not exempt from his own need for validation, however, and so begins a journey through various microworlds in search of some kind of durable meaning. Some key influences on the novel include Ellison's Invisible Man, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Voltaire's Candide, and the short stories of Donald Barthelme. I like to think the novel represents a hard-won synthesis of two typically opposed impulses in American fiction: one towards realism, the other towards fabulation.