Ball, Jesse
Entry updated 9 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1978- ) US poet and author whose first novel, Samedi the Deafness (2007), which is set in a world sufficiently alternative to the consensual to be described in terms of Fantastika; in this world, as articulated through a complexly allusive telling, human paranoias shape events, as though they were genuinely predictive (Ball has been compared in this to Thomas Pynchon). Much of the tale is set in a "verisylum", governed by Kafkaesque rules (see Franz Kafka); thriller tropes intervene, surreally; a Biblical apocalypse is due on the seventh day of the tale. The surreal rule-bound Dystopian City of C featured in The Curfew (2011) evokes the verisylum of the previous novel, as does the paranoia-inducing plot. The intimate drama of interrogation that shapes A Cure for Suicide (2015) is set in a solipsistically abstract village. In Census (2018), a census taker embarks on a Fantastic Voyage through an increasingly surreal America, each town he visits (or invades) identified solely by a letter of the alphabet. (C from The Curfew does not appear.) Z comes, climactically, at the end. The carceral intensity of this earlier work is not lessened in The Repeat Room (2024), the titular enclosure allowing jurors to observe mysteriously obtained repeats of crimes; the second part of the tale traces the solitudinous life of a prisoner subjected to this regime. The Dystopia depicted, with Eugenic precepts imposed from above, is clearly poisonous to human community.
Ball is of most direct sf interest for The Divers' Game (2019), an elaborately depicted Near Future Dystopia, set after a violent Ecological collapse (see Climate Change) and something like World War Three. Not unusually for this genre, but here very savagely, the remaining population is broken into citizens and non-native-born "quads", who are marked by facial surgery and the amputation of a thumb. They can be killed at will. The world is shaped as a theatre of cruelty, the only release being annual Walpurgisnachts, when the quads roam free for a day. But the day queen they choose is not expected to survive. The twenty-first century Satirical targets of the tale – especially in scenes where those declared to be outside the pale are murdered – are clearly articulated. [JC]
Jesse Ball
born Port Jefferson, New York: 7 June 1978
works (selected)
- Samedi the Deafness (New York: Vintage Books, 2007) [pb/Rebecca Aidlin]
- The Curfew (New York: Vintage Books, 2011) [pb/]
- A Cure for Suicide (New York: Pantheon Books, 2015) [hb/Karen Fuchs]
- The Deaths of Henry King (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Uncivilized Books, 2016) with Brian Evenson [graph: illus/hb/Lilli Carré]
- Census (New York: HarperCollins/Ecco, 2018) [hb/Sara Wood]
- The Divers' Game (New York: HarperCollins/Ecco, 2019) [hb/Sara Wood]
- The Repeat Room (New York: Catapult Press, 2024) [hb/Sara Wood]
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