Hell of a Book

A major theme in the novel is death and how characters deal with it. The novel explores two main kinds of grief: personal grief over the passing of a loved one and collective grief over the passing of someone connected to you in some way. The novel shows the unhealthy ways that characters deal with that grief and ultimately argues that grief must addressed head-on for healing to take place.

The first-person narrator struggles with the death of his mother and father. While he is in denial about having had painful experiences, his psychiatrist insists that he has trauma that needs to be explored. However, rather than face that trauma, the narrator develops his own coping mechanism. He has a condition that causes him to hallucinate and to suffer severe memory loss. This condition allows him to avoid his own trauma. This is similar to how Soot deals with the personal trauma of his father’s death. He, too, starts to imagine things, even imagining a world where his father is still alive. His father’s death also triggers his frequent disappearances into The Unseen, where he is invisible. While The Unseen, Soot also dissociates from reality; his pain “receded, and he could believe it had never come at all” (147). Both the narrator and Soot are examples of avoiding personal grief.

Hell of a Book also deals with collective grief, when a person who has died is connected in some way to a larger social group. In the novel, this appears with the many murders of Black people because of police violence. For some characters, the way they relate to these victims is as fellow Americans, in “this country” (98). Other times, the characters relate to a collective as Black people. Characters deal with this collective loss in various ways. Like Sharon, the narrator’s publicist, some talk about it in passing. Others, like the people marching in Chapter 6, protest about it, expressing their rage. Meanwhile, the first-person narrator chooses the same approach as he does for his personal grief: he ignores the news and decides for himself that the victims are not real.

After offering these various examples, the novel explores what happens when you do not address grief. For the narrator, the consequences of his avoidance appear in his public mental breakdown in Chapter 26. He experiences a complete break from reality and is finally forced to reckon with his own mother’s death through a hallucinated conversation with Soot’s mother. Likewise, for Soot, his escape into The Unseen cannot ultimately save him from his grief for his father. When he returns to reality, he still must deal with it.

When the characters face their grief, they are finally able to grow. The first-person narrator carries a pessimistic outlook through most of the novel, despite his statement that he’s a “glass half-full kinda guy” (19). It is only when he acknowledges that his mother died and really sees The Kid as a real person that he has an optimistic outlook. This optimism is symbolic of his personal growth and, hopefully, healing to come. Ultimately, Hell of Book encourages its readers to face grief with an orientation toward healing rather than avoidance.