Stephen Florida
Ratings4
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings4
Average rating4.1
"In Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash has created a coming-of-age story with its own, often explosive, rhythm and velocity. Habash has a canny sense of how young men speak and behave, and in Stephen, he's created a singular character: funny, ambitious, affecting, but also deeply troubled, vulnerable, and compellingly strange. This is a shape-shifter of a book, both a dark ode to the mysteries and landscapes of the American West and a complex and convincing character study."--Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding, Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season, when every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness and a step further from sanity. Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, it's a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark."--
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Like sledding down a hill on a piece of cardboard, hurtling towards a cliff, bailing too late and tumbling, limbs snapping like twigs as you become another piece of debris to careen over the edge. The chaos at the center of Stephen Florida is unrelenting, his drive to wrestle both pitifully insignificant and the only thing that has and will ever matter. To what degree any of what's happening is real or true is irrelevant to the kinetic energy that starts fully built on page one and refuses to decelerate until crashing headfirst into the acknowledgements.
The only comparison I can reach for are Johnny's chapters from House of Leaves, both painting images of isolated, angry men rapidly detaching themselves from reality until all that's left is their own paranoia. If you found Johnny's depraved ramblings hard to stomach I would recommend leaving Stephen Florida off your list (or at least heeding the content warnings because there is a lot of shit sprinkled between lines through these brief 289 pages). I have discovered that few books are more engaging to me than those concerning masculinity's proclivity towards antisocial self destruction. I'm not yet sure what to make of this information.
