The Divers' Game

July 1, 2019
In his atmospheric, occasionally mesmerizing tale of haves and have-nots, Ball (Census) delivers a strident condemnation of inequality in an imagined nation. In the stilted exposition, a schoolteacher lectures his students about “the circumstances that led to the transformation of our society.” Facing an influx of refugees, the society’s leaders brand them, confine them to specified “quadrants,” and arm their privileged citizens with gases with which to incapacitate, confuse, sicken, or kill the new underclass (or “quads”). The measures are executed with a sense of “vibrant morality,” as the enforcers are secure in their conviction that “things done to those beneath are not properly violence.” The novel comprises a series of vignettes: a teacher brings one of his students to a moribund zoo whose creatures are all dead; a quad girl prepares for her ceremonial role as the queen of a carnivalesque procession; a group of children play the dangerous “divers’ game,” in which they swim through a treacherous underwater channel connecting two ponds; a woman plans to kill herself to atone for her complicity in the society’s brutal persecutions. Some episodes are gripping, while others are marred by philosophizing (“Do the places we inhabit confine us by their very nature?”). Still, the novel’s depiction of life in this dystopian world is eerie and suffused with symbolic weight. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.

April 1, 2019

In a (putatively) futuristic state, we're finally up front about vast inequalities and have clearly divided ourselves into pats and quads. Pats may kill quads without remorse or retribution, and quads just try to survive. From a Granta Best of Young American Novelists; a 60,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2019
The elusive and ever evolving Ball (Census, 2018, etc.) returns with a radical new novel about a divisive future that takes inequality to grotesque extremes. If they don't teach Ball's work in college by now, they should, if only as an example of an author whose books are so different from one another that a reader might not even recognize them as the work of one person save for Ball's spare prose, eccentric imagination, and pinpoint narrative composition. Perhaps he's a collective, like Banksy. The story opens with students Lethe and Lois in class the day before a mysterious holiday called Ogias' Day, which hasn't happened in more than 50 years. Through their discussions with their drunk, grieving teacher, Mandred, we learn more about their world. Some time ago, an influx of refugees triggered a politician to suggest an extreme solution: They can come in, "as long as we can tell them apart." Over time, this led to the development of a lower caste of people with no legal standing, all branded with a tattoo of a red hat on their faces, and forced to amputate their thumbs. Any legal citizen, "Pats," can also kill these "quads" at any time, but on Ogias' day, the tables are turned. From here, the story flips through different characters in different circumstances but all set in this curious new societal matrix. We learn about a child sacrifice ceremony called the Infanta and about the titular Divers' Game, a legendary and highly risky channel by which children might escape their fate. It's imaginatively horrifying, even if it doesn't always make sense, and readers who appreciate Ball's keen, melancholic, and often sadly satirical view of human society will likely appreciate this timely assessment of where division might take us and how it affects the generations that come after us. A dystopian novel in the vein of The Handmaid's Tale, viewed through the children who suffer from our mistakes.

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Jesse Ball's chilling dystopian tale is set in a bleak future in which citizens are "pats" who live in fear of the branded "quads," migrants, prisoners, and parolees who are separated from society and seen as something less than human. The story is told in three distinct sections. Sophie Amoss narrates "Ogias' Day" with a mix of curiosity and fear as two students become separated from their professor when they go on a trip to observe quads. In the "Row House" section, Devon Hales projects a boy's growing fear as she voices his replies to interrogation about a playmate's disappearance. Most chilling and effective is Cassandra Campbell, in "Letter," as she becomes the voice of Margaret as she faces the consequences of actions taken in a society built on fear, division, and inhumanity. N.E.M. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

September 1, 2019
Ball (Census, 2018), a writer of exceptional and pensive imagination, adds another trenchant fable to his distinctively disquieting oeuvre. In an Orwellian society (one hears the beat of Animal Farm) leeched of goodness, an influx of refugees has precipitated a barbaric apartheid in which seekers are admitted, but then branded, mutilated, and settled in quadrants. The "quads" can work in town, but they have no rights and the natives, or pats, are armed with gas canisters and free to use them. Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place in loosely linked episodes. Two pat schoolgirls, Lethe and Lois, adventurous, irreverent, and vulnerable, accompany a teacher to a distant zoo, which holds one of the last living animals in this poisoned land, an ancient, ailing hare. Lessen, an even younger girl, is chosen to be the Infanta at a violent festival. One boy is roughly interrogated about the disappearance of another, and a woman writes a lacerating suicide letter summing up the sanctioned horrors of this cruelly unjust world, one that distressingly mirrors aspects of our own.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)