Lost Empress

Starred review from April 2, 2018
In his extraordinary new novel, de la Pava (A Naked Singularity) weaves together several story lines centered around Paterson, N.J. Nina Gill is a preternaturally gifted football strategist. She stands to inherit the Dallas Cowboys, but instead ends up with the family’s far less desirable Indoor Football League franchise, the Paterson Pork. However, an NFL lockout gives Nina the opportunity to build an absurd alternative for showcasing the sport she loves. A few miles from Paterson, Nuno DeAngeles sits imprisoned in Rikers Island. An out-of-place intellectual, Nuno is able to manipulate his lawyer and eventually lands in the somewhat cushier Bellevue Hospital while he conspires with his fellow inmate Solomon to commit a mysterious crime. Between these two worlds, de la Pava takes readers into the lives of ordinary Patersonians who work as EMTs, 911 operators, and a pig-suit-wearing mascot. Like his previous work, de la Pava’s novel employs a variety of narrative forms, including legal briefs, sermons, phone transcripts, and the text of a prison handbook. De la Pava is a maximalist worldbuilder, and the incredible multiverse he constructs in this book establishes him as one of the most fearsomely talented American novelists working today.

Full-cast audiobook productions can be tricky. Done well, they are engrossing; one wrong move, and they are perplexing. This audiobook falls into the latter category. Transitions are abrupt, pacing is challengingly fast, and characters are more often caricatures. The novel's premise is engaging--conflicts involving familial unrest and professional football, as well as some subplots, are creative, and the dialogue is often biting and sometimes funny. That said, the frantic narrative pace combined with some rather involved sentences makes the interaction among all these stories difficult to follow. Dialogue is inserted in blocks, and those vocal performances lean toward the cartoonish. The novel itself has merit, but this audio production falls short. L.B.F. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine