The devil is a southpaw A novel

Review by Booklist Review

Hobson (The Removed, 2021) introduces this tale as a manuscript sent to him by Milton Muleborn, a markedly verbose account of their time at a juvenile detention facility in rural Oklahoma in the late 1980s. The horrific torments, grandstanding speeches, and violence inflicted by the guards are also experienced by Matthew Echota, a talented Cherokee artist Milton knows from school. Milton envies and reveres Matthew, and the narrative centers on Milton exploring his obsession. With flickers of supernatural moments punctuating the first two-thirds of the narrative, it shifts for a period into a surreal, abject world reminiscent of Samuel Delany's Dhalgren (1975) or the magical realist episodes of Murakami. We then join Milton years later. He's still using a remarkable and often comically huge vocabulary and is still evidently jealous of Matthew's success as he considers his deep admiration for Matthew, his difficult life, and his own unreliability as a narrator. Featuring numerous original pieces of art, Hobson's novel is a moving, propulsive box of surprises that explores state violence, mental illness, religion, and the long-lasting traumas of incarceration.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Hobson (The Removed) spins an inspired but confusing story of art and friendship. In a foreword, Hobson claims the bulk of the novel is a manuscript written by a man named Milton Muleborn, with whom Hobson spent time in the Tophet County Juvenile Correctional Facility. The novel proper opens with a captivating scene at the facility, as Milton and a group of fellow detainees are conscripted by the guards to search for their escaped friend, Matthew Echota, "a cripplingly shy, talented, smart, and handsome boy." Matthew has escaped before, but in Milton's view, he has little hope of getting out of their impoverished town of Old Dublan. The allusion to Dublin is meant to reference James Joyce's Dubliners, one of many distorted nods to literature peppered in by Milton, an ambitious neophyte writer. (He also mistakes a passage from Shakespeare's Macbeth as being from Hamlet.) Hobson vividly portrays Oklahoma's furious storms and scores of screeching grackles, and shows how both protagonists find solace in art. The manuscript is full of contrasting versions of events, some of which veer into fantasy and horror, as when Milton and Matthew encounter terrifying wood spirits who resemble lepers. It's a bit tough to follow, but Hobson holds the reader's attention with appealing surrealistic asides, such as the boys' encounter with a doppelgänger of painter Salvador Dalí, who rhapsodizes over the band Duran Duran. There's plenty of fun to be had with this cerebral novel. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Two boys navigate juvenile detention in Hobson's oft-surreal metanovel. The bulk of this book is an imagined novel titledThe Devil Is a Southpaw (named after an imaginary film starring John Wayne) by Milton Muleborn, who has sublimated his experience in an Oklahoma juvenile facility in 1988 into a peculiar yet compelling narrative. His version of the story is filled with teenage crushes, abusive jailers, a storm where frogs rain down like water, cameos by Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo doppelgängers, and an attempt to escape the facility. The narrator was consumed with jealousy of a fellow inmate, Matthew Echota, who was a gifted painter (examples of his work are scattered through the narrative); Milton became a writer, he suggests, in a bid to catch up with Matthew's talents. (Muleborn the author seems aware of the potency of his envy, giving his character's literal devil horns on his forehead.) Latter sections of the novel clarify the facts somewhat and move the story closer to the present day. We learn the reasons behind the boys' incarceration, which involve weed and firearms in the pre-Columbine era. There's a certain poignancy in Milton's desperation to be heard and understood, underscored by a series of family traumas, including a suicide. In earlier novels, Hobson has proven himself gifted at exploring characters from multiple perspectives, usually with an emphasis on Native American traditions. Here the storytelling is more slippery and at times less successful--Milton's novel is immature by design, filled with intentionally overheated prose. That doesn't make Hobson's novel a failure, but it challenges the reader to set aside conventional measures of success--here, it's about how agonizing it can be to lay bare our adolescence. A rough, deliberately messy tale, revealing the depths of broken childhoods. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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