The fictional character Septimus Warren Smith, from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, is the first of many spectres to haunt the pages of Sam Sax’s incendiary, prose-poetic debut novel, Yr Dead. Midway through Woolf’s masterwork, the war veteran takes his own life – and this book’s epigraph, taken from Septimus’s narration, reads: “The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames. It is I who am blocking the way.”
The novel begins with a heavy-content warning: it takes place in the brief intermission between its protagonist setting themselves on fire – at a march outside Trump Tower in New York – and their death. Reminiscent of Ocean Vuong’s lyrical meditations on identity and Maddie Mortimer’s inventive, formally ambitious Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, Sax’s book traces the traumas and political rumblings (against a backdrop of the 2020 presidential election) that have led to this moment.
When first introduced, Ezra, a queer, non-binary 27-year-old of Jewish heritage, is a worn-out bookseller, roving in and out of protests and fed up with their social media-palatable “pageantry”, convinced “it’s never enough”. After Ezra self-immolates, Yr Dead catapults us back into their past; this unspooling story is their life flashing before their eyes, unwound in a string of brisk, lyrical vignettes.
Sax is also a poet (author of the collection Pig and a winner of the James Laughlin award) and it shows – Ezra’s compiled shards of memory often read as aphoristic musings on life’s enigmas. It all unfolds non-chronologically: their abandonment by their mother (“you don’t write a book to replace a mother, but to fill in her absence”); Jewish socialist summer camp (“to imagine a better world means at least you have the means to imagine it”); an abusive relationship (“love is just another thing that happens to you, like a rash or a bad radish or a car accident”). Ezra lists species struck into extinction, is spooked by the phantom animals of Pokémon Go and, scrolling on their phone, are “eaten alive” by empathy.
But Sax’s experimental flexing does not end there. Woven in-between are the false mythologies dreamed up by Ezra’s father (because “most of my dad’s family lore ends a half a century ago with a drunk”); their parents merged into one, speaking as a single, eerily disjointed voice; and even echoes of their ancestors, among them great-grandfather Herschel, a rascally soap-factory labourer who deserted his family in Russia for America, only to be toasted at Passover in the US in the present day.
There is comedy in Yr Dead but also much darker recesses. Passages grappling with sexuality and online and physical abuse are unflinchingly frank. The novel tends to skirt over political issues, refusing to namecheck Trump, for example, or reveal the causes that inform Ezra’s protests and their tragic final act.
But where this sprawling, time-defying Bildungsroman flounders is in its attempt to cover too much ground – it often only scratches a surface. Given the inventiveness in its style, imagery and form, however, this is forgivable: Yr Dead lays bare the deep loneliness of living in the digital age; how others shape us; and how, out of the ashes of catastrophe (and despite the world’s ills), humanity shows through the cracks. There is hope.
• Yr Dead by Sam Sax is published by Daunt Books (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
