Politically timely novels in the twenty-first century are largely accidental. The novel business is slow, while the news cycle runs faster and faster. Despite our much-vaunted technical progress, the lag time between signing a book contract and the book’s actual release is longer than it was a generation ago, and compared to previous generations, the pace is glacial. (For instance, despite wartime paper-rationing, George Orwell’s Animal Farm required five months from acceptance to publication in 1945; Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, in 1900, took all of nine weeks.) Our current situation derives not from anything specific to books or technology, but to twenty-first century marketing. Nowadays, if you want something timely, you’re more likely to turn to Substack columnists or to late-night comedians. These can be good or bad, but they are all formally constrained to hot takes, to the spectacle of surfaces at the expense of psychology. 

Still, politically timely novels do pop up, happy anomalies in an ADHD culture, and Curtis Smith’s Deaf Heaven, from Running Wild Press, can be counted among them. On one level, it’s a fast-moving story of violent consequences triggered by the grotesqueries of the American healthcare system, which immediately brings to mind Luigi Mangione’s killing of Brian Thompson. (Though, given the publishing practices mentioned above, the author could not have known about Mangione when writing the book; any similarity is accidental.) But on another level—and this is where the virtues of literary fiction come into play, beyond the hot takes—it’s a thoughtful examination of the human hunger for a moral compass, and the perils of playing Raskolnikov.

Jason Driscoll, the protagonist of Deaf Heaven, is no ideologue. He works in finance, his wife Alice is an accountant and they both lead respectable middle-class lives. But they have recently lost their young daughter, Sophie, to cancer and, as they struggle to cope with their grief, another problem arises, like an insult, rubbing salt into the wound: 

After they buried her, the bills came—or, more correctly, they’d been coming all along, but without the distraction of hope, they became real. How different, the worlds of insurers and healers.”

This clash of worlds sets in motion a train of events. After their loss, any belief that their society respects those who play by the rules is reduced to tatters. And when by chance an illicit opportunity arises, Jason and Alice seize it. As a practical matter, the money gained will allow them to keep their home, which they’re in danger of losing due to medical debt. But from the outset, it is not simply a pragmatic choice. In truth, breaking a taboo exerts a moral attraction: 

It was less about the money than the belief they were owed. That the time had come to grab something from the world that had taken so much.”

Violence enters the equation, as things don’t go exactly as planned. In a more prosaic kind of tale, the rest of the novel might revolve around the question: will they get away with it? And indeed, there are plenty of gripping passages (for instance, Jason’s interrogation by a police detective) that offer this kind of plot-driven suspense. 

But, structurally speaking, these events occur early on in the book and serve a larger story: the struggles of a man unmoored by his anger. Jason is angry that “his daughter’s death had become a currency, even though that currency was the only thing keeping him afloat.” He and Alice are bound together by their loss and a crime they committed, but such ties unhappily eclipse everything else, including their previous intimacy and hopes. At Alice’s instigation, they engage in swapping with another couple, Dan and Arlene. With their woes, why shouldn’t they seek some relief? But for Jason, the sex only alienates him further. It’s less about the fun of fucking than an expression of no longer giving a fuck. But he is not inured. “They could share their bodies but not their truths.”

Here, Smith has struck upon a highly effective dramatization of character. Jason is no prude, but the sex reminds him of what troubled him in the first place: he is a person who sincerely wants to give a fuck. At root, his crisis is spiritual. He’s not a person of faith but he’s haunted by the desire to believe in a moral order. In a memorable scene, he finds himself walking on a frozen lake at sunrise:

God, the elements—whatever force painted the moment, he wanted to give it time to claim him, but even the birds fell silent, and he stood alone beneath this deaf heaven. He breathed into the stillness. Waiting. Inviting. Begging.”

This desire to be claimed, this vulnerability, animates the novel, even as Jason spirals further and commits deeds that have no direct bearing on his daughter’s death, and for which he cannot forgive himself. No bolt of lightning descends to punish him, no divine presence intervenes to rescue him, but when his marriage ends and he leaves his job, his vulnerability is all that he possesses. 

How to continue? The last third of the novel maps out a new territory for Jason as he tries to rebuild his life. He can’t change the past or undo what he has done, but he can think anew “about responsibility and what, exactly, the living owe the dead.” And this brings us back to Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson.

The personal life of the fictional Jason Driscoll is different from Luigi Mangione’s in many respects. What little we know of Mangione derives from, again, media hot takes, which dwell on materiality—money, bullets, blood. Or they emphasize visceral reactions to a vigilante—thrill or disgust. But at the psychological and, to use an unfashionable word in critical circles, spiritual level, it’s obvious that Mangione is a symptom of a crisis in our culture that runs deeper than our news cycle media can process. And that is what makes Deaf Heaven an important and timely novel. Instead of a hot take, it offers a deep dive. And if we’re going to do any better, and come to terms with Mangione as something more than entertainment or news cycle fodder, we damn well need to go there.

Deaf Heaven is now available via bookshop.org.