Pay As You Go

by Eskor David Johnson

Overview

Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize

New to town and delusionally confident, Slide imagined himself living in a glossy building with doormen and sweeping views of the skyline. Instead he’s landed in a creaking, stuffy apartment with two roommates: a loping giant who hardly leaves his room, and a weight-obsessed neurotic who keeps no fewer than forty-seven lamps throughout the house, blazing at all hours.

Unwilling to accept this fate, Slide—a barber with an opaque past—embarks on a quest for the perfect apartment, pinballing through the sprawling, madcap city of Polis and its endless procession of neighborhoods. As he bounces from foldout couch to disaster-relief tent, falling in with some tough types, Slide begins to realize that he’s going to have to scratch and claw just to claim a place for himself in this world—let alone a place with in-unit laundry.

An exuberant, fantastical odyssey, Pay As You Go wonders if what we’re searching for is ever really out there. Its pages—surreal, biting, and teeming with life—announce the startling talents of Eskor David Johnson, who knows that all any of us really want is a place to rest our head.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952119743
Publisher:	McSweeney's Publishing
Publication date:	10/24/2023
Sales rank:	109,394
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Eskor David Johnson is a writer from Trinidad and Tobago and the United States. His writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. A graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was the recipient of the Richard Yates Short Story Prize, the Maytag Fellowship and the Teaching-Writing Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

08/07/2023

Johnson’s unbridled debut runs in circles of accelerating grandiosity and lunacy. Slide has been in the big city of Polis for two months and feels marooned in the chaos. He’s low man on the totem pole at the barber shop where he works and is constantly at odds with his quirky roommates, Eustace and Calumet. Abundant oddballs float through his orbit, like the florid novelist Sir Artem Borand and Madame Lupont, the maternal manager at Calumet’s previous place of employment. Polis, with its subway, rats, and mean streets, resembles New York or Chicago, but is purposely off-center enough to accommodate the outrageous characters that Slide encounters when he moves out of his awkward living situation. Just as Polis is an unknown city, Johnson makes Slide a blank slate with no documented past. A parade of larger-than-life characters traipse through his life, and he becomes a soldier of sorts, a gangster, and eventually a celebrity under the tutelage of the wise seductress Monica Iñes. It’s a familiar template, and Johnson meets its challenges with panache and imagination. Piquant titles, like “That Lady Is Swallowing a Sword,” are dropped intermittently into Slide’s odyssey, underscoring its irony and reinforcing its episodic nature. This big, buoyant adventure feels both ebulliently modern and transparently classical. Agent: Andrea Somberg, Harvey Klinger. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Both lampooning city life and confessing love for it, this story is a display of prodigious storytelling talent. It rushes by with the creative adrenaline of a one-man show; it hums with an infectious joy. […] Told in a raucous vaudeville style that blends gorgeous lyrical descriptions with madcap farce, Pay As You Go is a magnetic novel.”
—Foreword Reviews, starred review

“A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future. […] Like Dante, Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable. […] An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“Johnson’s unbridled debut runs in circles of accelerating grandiosity and lunacy.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A brilliantly surreal and vivid feat of imagination.”
—Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2023, Part Two

“Eskor David Johnson’s Pay As You Go dramatizes the important question of what is home as Slide maneuvers life’s obstacles and searches for a place to live. Johnson writes with the fierce intensity of Ralph Ellison and delivers a prodigious and compelling novel with an unforgettable story. Eskor David Johnson is an extraordinary writer.”
—Brandon Hobson, National Book Award finalist and author of The Removed

“Pay As You Go is an exuberant, maximalist delight.”
—Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog

“A wondrous mock epic, dreamlike yet jaunty, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time. […] Johnson’s gift for pure invention is downright García Márquezian, and Polis is his rambunctious Macondo, a place readers will want to visit again and again.”
—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

“Pay As You Go is testament to what is possible when we, in the paraphrased words of Mary Oliver, allow the world to open itself to our imagination: we might, as Eskor David Johnson achieves in these pages, bring to bear art so wondrous, so magisterial as to be prophetic. What but prophets are the great voices of literature? Count Slide among them, a character you won’t soon forget in this masterpiece.”
—DK Nnuro, author of What Napoleon Could Not Do

From the Publisher

★ 2023-06-21
A madcap odyssey through the hellscape that is the metropolis of the near future.

In a narrative that’s long on rich description and has a playful love of language, the protagonist, Slide, is a young man with a problem: He lives in a seedy neighborhood where orphans steal his socks from the laundromat and one of his roommates sneaks into his bedroom at night for reasons unclear but likely untoward. Confronted by preteen hoodlums who demand to know which gang he swears allegiance to—“You run with Gulag? Uncle Death? One Shot? Diablos? Why’re you wearing shorts?”—Slide decides to find his own place in a better part of Polis, about which his roomie warns him, “Polis is a friend to no one. It will only take what you give and spit back the bones, even your past, which it holds in reserve to taunt you.” That’s just so, and as Slide goes out into the city, moving from one pitiless zone to the next, he meets some extremely odd characters, such as a hot dog vendor who demands that he eat a suspicious-looking tube steak before proceeding (“Can’t help the streets if you ain’t buying the meats!”) and a tent-city denizen decked out in two tracksuits even in the “June heat that wrapped our throats like pythons.” Finally Slide reaches a part of town “where the light shines brighter,” where the coffee shops have dozens of varieties of beans and “everyone’s clothes were of a higher thread count”—a paradise that’s inaccessible to him. Like Dante, Slide wanders in circles, soaking in weirdness, tragedies, and occasional flashes of beauty. And like Joyce, Johnson builds a world that, for all its improbabilities, is recognizable, with characters who dispense rough and memorable wisdom to help survive an ominous future; as one Uglygod instructs: “You don’t step into a snake’s mouth because it says it’s got its teeth pulled.”

An inventive, beautifully written debut that will leave readers wanting more.

Kirkus Reviews