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A Novel
by Morgan Thomas
Book Reviewed by:From a pathbreaking writer, a thrilling, form-bending novel about a trans healthcare worker whose carefully built life is suddenly imperiled.
Ro and Liam live in a ramshackle cabin in a secluded stretch of Florida. Neither their home nor their sometimes-tumultuous relationship is what the world would call perfect, but to Ro―newly diagnosed with autism and working as a patient navigator for people seeking gender-affirming care―their life, despite the deeply inhospitable political climate, is a kind of paradise.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what shatters their peace. There's Quentin, the unpredictable teenager for whom Liam and Ro are quasi-parents, who visits on his way to college, where he plans to finally start T. There's the appearance of "Mad Eden," an online fantasy serial about heroic dragon riders that increasingly becomes Ro's obsession. And then there's a seemingly innocuous patient video call that results in consequences both unexpected and grave. This triad of circumstances sends Liam's and Ro's world spinning toward disaster―unless Ro can become the real-life hero their situation demands without betraying who they are and who they love.
With colossal heart and preternatural skill, Morgan Thomas crafts a deliciously destabilizing debut novel that challenges us to confront and reinvent questions of language, sex, prejudice, identity, and the shifting scales of morality. Playing with the possible relationship between autism and time to forge an ingenious new kind of storytelling, Mad Eden imagines, with exhilarating courage, how we might yet joyfully live in a precarious world.
Excerpt
Mad Eden
I want to tell you, simply, how joyful we were that summer. Joyful, that word which suggests two separate things: a substance and its vessel. Joy stalked us, and when it pounced we were saturated. Wring our bodies, and the joy would drip from us like dirty water. Separate but not distinct, as Christ is both the substance and the vessel of God, but without the Christianity, with a healthy dose instead of devilry, which from the outside looked like idleness or, based on the later testimony of family and friends, like madness.
When I've attempted, in the past, to describe this joy—to my friend Eva, to my therapist—they both asked the same question: What made you so joyful? What were the reasons? Reasons don't interest me—what I want is a cause beyond reasons. But here they are, the glut of explanations I offered them. There was the sun, to begin, shining each morning. It was a magnificent spring, all afternoon thunderstorm and wind. By summer the pine flats...
Morgan Thomas deliberately skews traditional notions of plot and traditional (Western) rules of narrative storytelling. Its unusual structure, its determination to keep the momentum of the plot quietly churning in the background, focusing instead on the day-to-day and the internal circuitry of our recently diagnosed autistic narrator, Ro, is in keeping with the book's obsession with time and causality. Ro is fascinated by the prospect of a world without cause and effect. And this is why they likewise become obsessed with a series of self-published fantasy stories called "Mad Eden," which is itself based on a scientific article, "Autism as a Disorder of Prediction"—not only that, we are told every word that appears in this series of stories has been lifted from the article (with some minor variations). But there is a plot here, quietly unfolding.
Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemates and Fat Swim
Every Morgan Thomas sentence is a shocking, surprising, and devious diamond. They are one of the best prose stylists working today and a true magician of character and place. Mad Eden transported me and changed me. Morgan Talty, author of Night of the Living Rez and Fire Exit
Mad Eden is unlike anything I've read―a novel of staggering invention and fearless intimacy. Morgan Thomas bends time, myth, and science into a story that is dazzling and devastating, tender and unflinching. It's a book about queer and autistic survival, about care and precarity, about joy insisting on itself in the face of collapse. Sentence by sentence, Mad Eden remakes the world as it tells it. What lingers is not resolution but creation itself: the hum of a book that will not end.
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