Jesse Ball has his own mysterious energy, and it is as strong as ever in The Divers’ Game. The novel is extraordinarily poignant.

The society in which the book is set has divided itself into two classes. Members of one class have the power to kill members of the other class. They don’t need a reason. There’s no legal procedure; they’re allowed to do it, and sometimes, they do.

The simplicity of his language and mastery of tone sweep you into the setting. It’s only afterward that you start to wonder about symbolic resonance. Meaning creeps in, afterwards.

Few readers of this book will understand what’s going on beneath the surface. Jesse Ball won’t say, for reasons that will be obvious to those who also understand. Nobody will say. I certainly won’t.

It’s like an optical illusion. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And most people will never see it. But the ritual mutilation of the thumbs is a dead giveaway.

Don’t worry about it. He’s a beautiful writer, so tender and poigant. Whatever that undercurrent is, it’s probably not something you’re guilty of. He’s telling the truth when he says that he writes instinctually. The issues the novel touches are far too complex for mere symbolism.

That’s why he said, in an interview about the novel, “I expect there will be a few people in various places around the world who will find it makes sense. At this point, my audience is that: just a few people here and there around the globe.”

Hi, Jesse. Here I am. It makes perfect sense to me.

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Census by Jesse Ball

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Ever since reading The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp and Carr, I’ve been a bit mystified by Jesse Ball. How are his worlds so dreamlike, yet so sharp and well-defined? There’s never any mystery what things look like. And yet you’d never be able to say what historical period or country the stories take place in. (An exception to this is How To Set a Fire and Why.)

In the introduction to Census, he tells us that he grew up with a brother, who’s no longer alive. The brother had a learning disability of some kind. Ball expected to spend his life taking care of his brother, but that ended up not happening. Census is a kind of tribute to this brother.

It’s also a writing manual, in a way. A key to Ball’s strategy. I’m only guessing, of course. But knowing this about his early family life does seem to shine some light on his writing. As a young person, he must have become good at communicating with learning disabled people. This is how he’s able to write with such simplicity, and yet still reach the deepest emotional places. I’ll bet his books are very accessible to neurodivergent people. And I imagine they’re also easy to translate into other languages.

Maybe his brother is the true, invisible audience to his novels. I have absolutely no grounds to make that claim at all. Maybe I’m too sentimental.

I suppose, as somebody who values the ability to simplify language, I’m almost jealous of him. What better training as a writer than to grow up with a beloved, learning disabled brother?

Or maybe put it this way: if you imagined that you were writing to somebody who was distracted, or learning disabled, or perhaps not a native English speaker, or stressed out, wouldn’t that help your writing? You’d take as much of the burden of communication onto yourself as you possible could. You’d impose as little mental effort on your reader as you could. That’s one way of respecting them.

There are other ways of respecting your reader. But that’s one of them.

Of course it’s very complicated. Census does a fantastic job of communicating the nuances of these relationships.

One thing I particularly like is the tattooing. The protagonist, as part of the census, goes around tattooing people. It’s reminiscent of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. But there’s a difference. Where, in In the Penal Colony, the state inscribes itself on bodies with an inhuman attitude and an ill-defined, transcendent purpose, in Census the protagonist carries out the state’s self-inscription with tenderness and a kind of ironic or absurdist detachment from any ostensible purpose it might serve. It’s as though the protagonist is aware of the criticism In the Penal Colony embodies and has accepted it. Yet he doesn’t fight the state, or flee from it, but accepts it as absurd, and then accepts his own absurdity as well.

It’s very interesting, and I’ll be chewing on it for a long time. There are insights there that diligent study will expose.



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How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I guess this is a pretty good anarchist novel. Is it meant to be YA? Either way. It’s YA Fight Club minus the multiple personalities. It’s not really what I come to a Jesse Ball novel for, but it does give you that feeling, as I believe it was Terry Pratchett who once said, of having a red-hot vest sewn on underneath your skin, which I think is really hard to do and is a testament to his skill.

Still. I feel like if you have a whole family of anarchists and a daughter born into the family who’s coming of age, you should have her maybe start to question anarchy at some point in the book. Especially when the book is about anarchy. You can have a hero with a clear philosophy of life, who ends the novel having found a better way, or a hero who ends the novel having come back to where they started — but an anarchist hero whose parents and grandparent are anarchist, and who stays anarchist the whole novel? Maybe the self-doubt was there but was just too subtle for me to pick up on.

Anyway, pretty good story. I liked it.



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