07/01/2019
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. (Sept.)
Jesse Ball is a writer of formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity... His language is spare, strange, and evocative.... His themes are human savagery, often state-sanctioned, and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance.... The final section [of The Divers’ Game ] is breathtaking.” — The New Yorker
“A book that contemplates, with the gravity and grace it deserves, a world beyond the point of no return..... Stunning.... The book’s final section, in which a woman confronts the violence within herself, is one of the more beautiful things I’ve ever read.” — Paris Review
“It’s hard to read a book like ‘The Divers’ Game’ — in which an unnamed nation receives an influx of refugees and abandons the notion of human fellow feeling — and not immediately think of the present moment.... [An] interlocking puzzle box of a novel, artful and often inscrutable... The society in ‘The Divers’ Game’ uses rituals like festivals and games to paper over its own violence. They merely reveal how untenable that violence is.” — New York Times Book Review
“Jesse Ball (“Census”) levels a steely gaze at the very concept of humanity in this three-part novel that introduces the lower-class “quads” and the rich “pats,” who treat those below them with impunity. When a group of pats conceals the grisly fate of a young quad girl behind an elaborate festival, you may start to wonder just how different this dystopian world is from our own.” — Washington Post
“Affecting… Uncomfortably familiar…. [The Divers’ Game] should certainly make you question what kind of world we are preparing for the generations to come.” — AM New York
“Radical.... If they don’t teach Ball’s work in college by now, they should.... 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.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Mesmerizing... Ball (Census ) delivers a strident condemnation of inequality in an imagined nation.... The novel’s depiction of life in this dystopian world is eerie and suffused with symbolic weight.” — Publishers Weekly
“Ball (Census, 2018), a writer of exceptional and pensive imagination, adds another trenchant fable to his distinctively disquieting oeuvre…. One hears the beat of Animal Farm …. Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place…. Distressingly mirrors aspects of our own [world].” — Booklist
Jesse Ball (“Census”) levels a steely gaze at the very concept of humanity in this three-part novel that introduces the lower-class “quads” and the rich “pats,” who treat those below them with impunity. When a group of pats conceals the grisly fate of a young quad girl behind an elaborate festival, you may start to wonder just how different this dystopian world is from our own.
Jesse Ball is a writer of formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity... His language is spare, strange, and evocative.... His themes are human savagery, often state-sanctioned, and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance.... The final section [of The Divers’ Game ] is breathtaking.
A book that contemplates, with the gravity and grace it deserves, a world beyond the point of no return..... Stunning.... The book’s final section, in which a woman confronts the violence within herself, is one of the more beautiful things I’ve ever read.
Ball (Census, 2018), a writer of exceptional and pensive imagination, adds another trenchant fable to his distinctively disquieting oeuvre…. One hears the beat of Animal Farm …. Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place…. Distressingly mirrors aspects of our own [world].
It’s hard to read a book like ‘The Divers’ Game’ — in which an unnamed nation receives an influx of refugees and abandons the notion of human fellow feeling — and not immediately think of the present moment.... [An] interlocking puzzle box of a novel, artful and often inscrutable... The society in ‘The Divers’ Game’ uses rituals like festivals and games to paper over its own violence. They merely reveal how untenable that violence is.
New York Times Book Review
Affecting… Uncomfortably familiar…. [The Divers’ Game] should certainly make you question what kind of world we are preparing for the generations to come.
Ball (Census, 2018), a writer of exceptional and pensive imagination, adds another trenchant fable to his distinctively disquieting oeuvre…. One hears the beat of Animal Farm …. Writing with blood-freezing sparseness, Ball illuminates this calamitously immoral place…. Distressingly mirrors aspects of our own [world].
Jesse Ball (“Census”) levels a steely gaze at the very concept of humanity in this three-part novel that introduces the lower-class “quads” and the rich “pats,” who treat those below them with impunity. When a group of pats conceals the grisly fate of a young quad girl behind an elaborate festival, you may start to wonder just how different this dystopian world is from our own.
Jesse Ball is a writer of formal mysteriousness and neon moral clarity... His language is spare, strange, and evocative.... His themes are human savagery, often state-sanctioned, and human kindness, a thin thread of resistance.... The final section [of The Divers’ Game ] is breathtaking.
A book that contemplates, with the gravity and grace it deserves, a world beyond the point of no return..... Stunning.... The book’s final section, in which a woman confronts the violence within herself, is one of the more beautiful things I’ve ever read.
04/01/2019
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.
2019-06-17 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.