Contemporary Authors

• A Naked Singularity University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2012
• Personae University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2013
• Lost Empress Pantheon (New York, NY), 2018

1. Lost empress : a novel LCCN 2017049323 Type of material Book Personal name Pava, Sergio de la, author. Main title Lost empress : a novel / Sergio De La Pava. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Pantheon, 2018. ©2017 Projected pub date 1111 Description pages ; cm ISBN 9781524747220 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3616.A9545 L67 2018 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. A naked singularity LCCN 2011032343 Type of material Book Personal name Pava, Sergio de la. Main title A naked singularity / Sergio de la Pava. Edition University of Chicago Press edition. Published/Produced Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2012, ©2008. Description 678 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780226141794 (paperback : alkaline paper) 0226141799 (paperback : alkaline paper) Shelf Location FLM2013 010719 CALL NUMBER PS3616.A9545 N35 2012 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) 3. Personae : a novel LCCN 2013016557 Type of material Book Personal name Pava, Sergio de la, author. Main title Personae : a novel / Sergio De La Pava. Edition University of Chicago Press edition. Published/Produced Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, [2013] ©2011 Description 201 pages ; 23 cm ISBN 9780226078991 (paperback : alkaline paper) Shelf Location FLM2014 037074 CALL NUMBER PS3616.A9545 P47 2013 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1)

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergio_De_La_Pava

  Sergio De La Pava
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  Sergio de la Pava
  Born 1970/1971 (age 47–48)
  Occupation Writer, lawyer
  Nationality American
  Website
  sergiodelapava.com
  Sergio De La Pava (born 1970/71) is an American novelist and lawyer. He is best known for his novel A Naked Singularity.

  Contents
  1 Biography
  2 Career
  3 Works
  4 Notes
  Biography
  Sergio De La Pava was born and raised in New Jersey, to parents who immigrated from Colombia. He attended Brooklyn Law School, where he met his wife. They live in New Jersey with their two children.[1]

  He works as a public defender in Manhattan,[2] where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time. He says of that work, "The stakes are a lot higher in that world than whether or not my book gets attention. On a given day, I have someone who really needs my help on a serious matter."[3]

  Career
  In 2008, De La Pava self-published his first novel, A Naked Singularity through XLibris.[4] In October 2010, literary site The Quarterly Conversation ran a review by Scott Bryan Wilson that called the book "one of the best and most original novels of the decade" and "a towering, impressive work." [5] That review caught the eye of staff at The University of Chicago Press, who signed the book up and published it in paperback in April 2012. The book was named one of the ten best works of fiction of 2012 by The Wall Street Journal.[6] In the Chicago Tribune, Julia Keller wrote, "A Naked Singularity is not about physics. It's about the American criminal justice system in a large and chaotic city, a place slowly crushed by hopelessness in the same way that an ancient star is gradually crushed by gravity. . . . It is about a city that teeters on the edge of total collapse and complete disaster, but that has the capacity to right itself (whew!) at the last possible second." [1] A Naked Singularity went on to win the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize from PEN as the best debut novel of that year.[7] On February 10, 2014, it was named one of eight books on the shortlist for the inaugural Folio Prize for the best book published in the United Kingdom in 2013.[8]

  In April 2011, De La Pava self-published his second novel, Personae. The University of Chicago Press published a new paperback edition of that book in September 2013. In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks wrote, "[I]n this willfully cryptic book, Mr. De La Pava's sense of moral urgency is ever-present. In only his early 40s, he is already a writer of mercurial brilliance, and even his strangest detours are worth following",[9] and Bookforum called it " the most galvanizing meditation on the possibilities and ramifications of artistic process that I have read in recent memory." [10]

  Works
  Novels
  2008: A Naked Singularity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ISBN 978-0-226-14179-4
  2011: Personae (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) ISBN 978-0-226-07899-1
  2018: Lost Empress (Pantheon)[11]
  Articles and essays
  2010: "A Day's Sail", published by Triple Canopy [12]

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/27/sergio-de-la-pava-naked-singularity-interview

  QUOTED: "Not that it's perfect, but it's what I set out to do. ... I wanted it to have an angry, propulsive core but at the same time to be full of heart. It's a difficult combination to pull off. You can do one or the other, and there are dangers with either, but I wanted both and when I finished I read it and I was like: 'Oh yeah'."
  "I wanted it to be funny, first of all because comedy is enjoyable and keeps you reading. I wanted it to be achingly accurate."
  "I thought since I'm in this unique position where I actually do know what happens, intimately and accurately, let's make sure my depiction doesn't have the silly gloss that's usually applied to these things."

  Sergio De La Pava: 'My book's not perfect, but it's what I set out to do. I wanted it to have a propulsive, angry core'
  Susanna Rustin
  The public defence lawyer turned writer talks to Susanna Rustin about the US justice system and how, 10 years after it was written, his book has gained the recognition it deserves
  @SusannaRustin
  Fri 27 Jun 2014 13.30 EDT First published on Fri 27 Jun 2014 13.30 EDT
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  Sergio de la Pava
  'It just felt natural to sit down and say, "I want to write a novel"' … Sergio De La Pava. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
  In 1999 Sergio De La Pava, then a New York defence lawyer in his late 20s, began writing a book. He tried to avoid rigid schedules and instead wrote on the train in the mornings or while waiting around in court. A Naked Singularity was to be a blistering attack on the American criminal justice system in which De La Pava still works. "If you learn only one thing from the ensuing maybe let it be this," he tells his reader. "The police were not merely interested observers who occasionally witnessed criminality and were then basically compelled to make an arrest, rather the police had the special ability to in effect create crime by making an arrest almost whenever they wished."

  De La Pava represented poor, desperate, ill and addicted people, accused mainly of drug crimes but also of other offences. In his manuscript he raged against a system he viewed as ruled by cruelty and stupidity, in a plot that took its rookie lawyer and hero Casi on a journey to the most violent extremities of American crime and punishment.

  In 2004 De La Pava, who by then had two small boys with his wife Susanna, a supervising attorney in a legal aid office whom he met at law school, finished the book. He had written 270,000 words, around three times the length of the average literary novel. Nobody wanted to publish it. "I knew no one," he says, meaning he knew no publishers, editors or authors."What you're supposed to do is send these letters describing the book to agents, and if they're interested you send them the manuscript. So I did that for three years. It was a really grim process.

  "Replies varied. Some said 'not interested', others said 'sounds great, send it to me'. I think what I found most dispiriting was that quite a few people were into the concept of a book about criminal justice, but when confronted with something that was complicated and not easily quantifiable, that interest disappeared. It was humiliating. It was horrifying."

  So he gave up, and began thinking about another book. But his wife did not give up. Instead she set about convincing him they should self-publish the novel, a much newer concept in 2008 than it is now. They paid a few thousand dollars for a print-on-demand deal, ordered 100 copies, had a party and sold the book to their friends. And after that, De La Pava says, "I forgot about it, the experience had been a bad one in my opinion, even though it was nice to see it in book form. I couldn't spend any more time thinking about publishing or editing. It was like an hour I spent thinking about it was an hour that I hated. I hated every aspect of it."

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  Susanna had other plans. She began sending review copies to every literary journal and website she could think of, and eventually her persistence paid off. Posts about the book began to pop up. "A blog, what the hell's that?" is how De La Pava describes his reaction to his wife's updates. "OK keep at it, do whatever you're doing and leave me alone."

  Finally, more than 10 years after De La Pava began writing his novel, a publishing insider got in touch. Levi Stahl was publicity manager at University of Chicago Press. In 2010 he was also, in his spare time, poetry reviews editor at the Quarterly Conversation, an online literary magazine. Stahl got hold of A Naked Singularity after it was flagged up by a contributor, and was impressed.

  He took it to an editor who agreed that although, as an academic publisher, University of Chicago does not publish new fiction, it should make an offer for this book. In 2012 De La Pava's slow-burn, word-of-mouth novel won the PEN/Robert W Bingham prize for the best debut novel of the year.

  In 2013 University of Chicago published De La Pava's follow-up, the fragmentary and experimental Personae, much of which is made up of the imaginative writings of a character who has died alone, aged 111, in his Manhattan flat. Last year publisher Christopher MacLehose (who introduced the English-speaking world to Stieg Larsson) also brought out a British edition of A Naked Singularity following a tip from a retired editor who read about it on Twitter – and not before several well-known London publishing houses had turned it down. Then, this February, A Naked Singularity made the shortlist of the Folio prize, the newly launched £40,000 literary award for English-language fiction (the eventual winner was George Saunders, for his short stories, but the judges singled out De La Pava for praise; also shortlisted was Eimear McBride, another first-time writer who struggled for years to find a publisher, and who has since won the £30,000 Baileys prize).

  The son of Colombian immigrants to the US, De La Pava grew up in New Jersey speaking Spanish (a Spanish translation of A Naked Singularity is shortly to appear). His father drove a cab, among other jobs, his mother worked in offices. They sent him to a Catholic high school from where he went to a state university and law school.

  He is full of gratitude to MacLehose ("an outsize figure literally and figuratively – that's an individual who has devoted his life to literature"). But success has not removed the taste of failure, and De la Pava is not alone in feeling unnerved. The Folio prize judges called his novel a "messy masterpiece"– it is not only full of insight into judicial processes, but philosophy, science (the naked singularity of the title comes from particle physics), acerbic commentary on mass media, the life of Puerto Rican boxer Wilfred Benitez, Latino family life – still a rarity in English-language fiction – and pages of absorbing dialogue. His fictional world is a big, funny, information-packed place, yet initially no one wanted to know.

  Through it all, his faith in his book was unshaken,"not that it's perfect, but it's what I set out to do," he says."I wanted it to have an angry, propulsive core but at the same time to be full of heart. It's a difficult combination to pull off. You can do one or the other, and there are dangers with either, but I wanted both and when I finished I read it and I was like 'Oh yeah'."

  De La Pava began reading in Spanish, "but the reading in English kind of took off". He cites Melville, Woolf, Dostoevsky and Dickinson as influences and singles out Moby-Dick and To the Lighthouse. "I've always been reading, to the point of obsession. A novel to me is a magical thing so it just felt natural as a writer to sit down and say, 'I want to write a novel'."

  He intended for his first book to be unlike anything else. "I wanted it to be funny, first of all because comedy is enjoyable and keeps you reading. I wanted it to be achingly accurate."

  As a teenager his interest in law had been piqued by watching LA Law. As a public defender, paid by the city to represent the poorest people, he decided every TV show and film he had ever watched about law and order was wrong. "My experience of depictions of the criminal justice system was that they were grimly inaccurate, either purposefully because considerations of entertainment were taking over, or out of ignorance because the author didn't really understand. So I thought since I'm in this unique position where I actually do know what happens, intimately and accurately, let's make sure my depiction doesn't have the silly gloss that's usually applied to these things."

  De La Pava's critique of US criminal justice is fierce and unrelenting, the clients in his novel are victims as well as law-breakers. The system is both mindless and soulless in his portrayal, fixated on definitions and processes that make no sense, lacking even the most basic humanity. Casi's typical defendant is a penniless addict involved in low-level dealing at worst, risking years behind bars for the few dollars he needs to feed his addiction.

  As a law student on a placement in a public defender's office, De La Pava fell "head over heels" for the thrill of representing real people with problems rather than the state. Over two decades in the job, he came to the view that the whole system – judges, police, penal code – is "truly toxic". "I've probably handled 15,000 cases in my life," he says.

  "You go into the system, let's say you're good at trying cases for whatever reason, so you will have success in the sense you will be able to help people who are in trouble. But at some point you will reach the limit of that and realise there's only so much you can do, and only so much that your being good at the job really means for the people you're representing."

  This is the realisation faced by Casi in A Naked Singularity. The novel's second half, in which he involves himself in both a death row appeal on behalf of a man with profound learning difficulties and a heist, dramatises his spectacular response. Did De La Pava once face a similar crisis?

  "I think I was naive when I started," he says. "Doing the work, even though I find it gratifying, breeds in me a certain dissatisfaction, a certain anger." Most public defenders believe the "common person's thoughts" on law and policing are mainly wrong, he says. "Our view generally speaking is that what is happening is mass injustice. Indigent people and racial minorities are being rounded up in huge numbers. I mean we [the US] incarcerate a higher percentage of our population than pretty much any country in the world."

  But for a long time De La Pava didn't see it as his role to try to communicate this perspective beyond the circle of his colleagues. More recently, inspired by Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow, he has chosen to speak out. His next novel, which he aims to finish this year, is about prisons. Writing A Naked Singularity, the tension between his artistic and social aims was "terrifying and thrilling. How didactic can you get while still hopefully having it function as a work of art? I think I was keenly aware of that tension the whole time. It's there on every page."

  The tension suits him, and he wouldn't give up the day job and legal activism that goes with it even were he able to, feeling a sense of obligation to go on using his legal training "in a way that's useful to actual human beings", as well as uneasy about the prospect of writing full-time.

  He thinks most American fiction these days is shaped by postgraduate courses in creative writing, and knows his own background sets him apart. The blurb for Personae make a joke of his apartness from the literary smart set: "Sergio De La Pava still does not live in Brooklyn."

  The morning after I meet him, De La Pava will be back in court. "Whether I feel up to it or not I will have to get my head clear and start thinking about some legal things that are happening, and that will slap me back into reality and get me out of my own head, which is a scary place sometimes," he says.

  • A Naked Singularity is published in paperback by MacLehose Press on 3 July. Personae is published by University of Chicago Press.

• Longreads - https://longreads.com/2018/05/16/the-tether-between-two-worlds-an-interview-with-sergio-de-la-pava/

  QUOTED: "I think what drew my attention was a kind of ... a form of revolution and upending of the existing social order, let’s call it. Here you have by far the most successful sports league in our country and because of that success, it just feels monolithic and entrenched and not subject in any way to attack, and then you think, well, what’s the most ridiculous thing? There are indoor football leagues. There is, for example, the Arena League and things of that nature. They don’t in any way put any kind of dent in the NFL, but they do exist."
  "The notion is taking this and having it stand in for other entrenched social systems that exist that feel invulnerable. So the notion is that, where you’re talking about revolution, you’re talking about upending, or you’re talking about a social upheaval, it never feels, certainly from the perspective of immediately prior to the revolution, like something that could ever possibly succeed in any way."
  "What I’m looking for before I start the project is soil where things can grow. I’m looking for things like that, that are rich enough that for several years I’m going to be able to entertain myself, which is always my first goal. The NFL will always be the gift that keeps on giving just because it’s such a central part of our society."
  "Paterson’s a fascinating place. I went there a lot during the course of writing this novel. I think there’s a palpable energy there. It’s also a defeated energy, maybe. When you look at what Paterson was at one point. ... It was a real hub of commerce and a genuine central city. It still is in many ways; it’s just changed with loss and sadness. That was always appealing."

  The Tether Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Sergio De La Pava
  His new novel is about mass incarceration, indoor football, and parallel universes. De La Pava says that when “you dig deep, you start seeing the way everything is connected.”

  This story was funded by Longreads Members
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  Tobias Carroll | Longreads | May 2018 | 18 minutes (4,881 words)

  Lost Empress addresses the injustice of mass incarceration, plays with the possibility of parallel universes, and uses arena football as a metaphor for how the revolution is unforeseeable. Welcome to the world — or should I say worlds — of Sergio De La Pava, whose fiction certainly doesn’t lack for a sense of scope.

  His debut, A Naked Singularity, followed a young, incredibly successful public defender through a personal and professional collapse, weaving in a heist narrative and moments of absurdist comedy, moving from harrowing scenes of inequality to suspenseful setpieces and back again. Initially self-published before being reissued by the University of Chicago Press (which also released his second novel, Personae), A Naked Singluarity would go on to win the prestigious PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize — an award also won by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Paul Harding’s Tinkers.

  In De La Pava’s fiction, grand ideas and societal tragedies coexist with a brisk narrative voice and an irreverent worldview. Lost Empress alternates between two seemingly unconnected stories: Nina Gill, a genius football strategist, suddenly becomes the owner of an indoor football team in Paterson, New Jersey, during an unexpected pause in the NFL season; meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles, imprisoned at Rikers Island, ponders his earlier crimes and romantic connections, and his plans for the future. Within this sprawling narrative, De La Pava tells the secret history of a Salvador Dalí painting, discusses Cambodian politics in the late 20th century, and muses about why the NFL’s labor market is uniquely exploitative of American athletes.

  Improbably in our age of hyper-specialization, De La Pava, like the hero of A Naked Singularity, is a public defender in Manhattan, where he handles 70 to 80 cases at a time. He recently wrote an impassioned op-ed calling for reform of New York’s discovery laws. His interests are obviously wide-ranging, and our conversation touched on the cultural history of Paterson, what we hate about rich people, the multiverse, and more.

  *

  Tobias Carroll: In Lost Empress, you deal with characters from a number of different social classes and backgrounds. What about football was useful, narratively speaking, to bring them all together?

  Sergio De La Pava: I think football is useful aesthetically in this book for many reasons. I’m not sure I had thought about explicitly what you’re bringing up, but now that I do think about it, certainly there’s a cross section of individuals on a football team. The person who owns the team almost overwhelmingly comes from a background of huge privilege. The actual players who risk their health and their safety and their lives — not exclusively — tend to come from far lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

  Again, I’m not sure how much of that was explicit when I was setting out to give a wide-ranging narrative about as many different people as I could fit in. On some level, perhaps, that was an influence.

  Where you’re talking about revolution, you’re talking about upending, or you’re talking about a social upheaval, it never feels, certainly from the perspective of immediately prior to the revolution, like something that could ever possibly succeed in any way.
  Did you initially plan to focus on an indoor football league, or was there a moment where indoor football caught your attention and you got the idea that this could be something that could fit into the narrative?

  No, I think what drew my attention was a kind of… a form of revolution and upending of the existing social order, let’s call it.

  Here you have by far the most successful sports league in our country and because of that success, it just feels monolithic and entrenched and not subject in any way to attack, and then you think, well, what’s the most ridiculous thing? There are indoor football leagues. There is, for example, the Arena League and things of that nature. They don’t in any way put any kind of dent in the NFL, but they do exist.

  The notion is taking this and having it stand in for other entrenched social systems that exist that feel invulnerable. So the notion is that, where you’re talking about revolution, you’re talking about upending, or you’re talking about a social upheaval, it never feels, certainly from the perspective of immediately prior to the revolution, like something that could ever possibly succeed in any way.

  To me, the unlikelihood of something like an indoor football league one day challenging the NFL was not a deterrent in any way, it just kind of felt like the other piece of the current things I was thinking about.

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  What was it like being in the process of writing this book and then seeing real world events mirror it, like Colin Kaepernick and other football players kneeling during the national anthem and bringing some of these sociopolitical issues to the forefront, or Vince McMahon announcing that the XFL was going to come back in a couple of years?

  Those were weird moments. What happens is, the novel’s not very good at being topical. The genuine or the good novel meant to be reductive is not going to be very topical because it took me years to write.

  And your newsfeed — certainly since November of 2016 — our news cycle is like 12 hours long. I’ve often had the experience where I’ll get in the car in the morning to drive to work and I’ll hear the newscaster talk about the news and it just feels like, that happened yesterday? That feels like that happened last week. Because the second it happened you read about it on the internet. By the time you read it in the paper, it just feels like they’re talking about something that happened a week ago. I’m not breaking any ground, a lot of people have felt this.

  The novel’s never going to be good at dealing with that kind of topicality. If you choose, so to speak, fertile ground — I think the NFL, the criminal justice system, things of that nature are fertile ground — then what’s going to happen is events are constantly going to be feeding your ability to produce the work. What I’m looking for before I start the project is soil where things can grow. I’m looking for things like that, that are rich enough that for several years I’m going to be able to entertain myself, which is always my first goal.

  The NFL will always be the gift that keeps on giving just because it’s such a central part of our society. We all know people who have no interest in it whatsoever, but I think even those people understand about the kneeling before the national anthem and concussions and these kind of things that pierce beyond just the specialist and the person who’s interested in the NFL, and take on larger social significance.

  There’s a speech fairly early on in the book when Nina is explaining why she’s making these business moves in the indoor league. She has a speech about the way that, if you’re a talented football player, the NFL is the only place that you could make a living from it. I found that to be particularly interesting and particularly revealing for the course of the novel.

  Right. So, again it goes back to that monolithic power that I was just referencing that the NFL has in a way that probably no other American sports league has, for the very reason that Nina’s bringing up, which is, you want to play this weird sport with this weird ball that they only care about in the U.S., really? We’re the only game in town. We’re the only place you’re going to be able to do that and make a living.

  Not true, for example, of Major League Baseball. Not true of the NBA. Yes, those are the three major leagues, but there are other leagues that are close. The Spanish basketball league is pretty good to make a living. The Chinese basketball league, you can go there, and NBA players have gone there. The NFL really is the only game in town. They have absolute power. We know what absolute power does.

  In terms of monolithic systems, you have the NFL on one hand and then you have the system of incarceration that one of the novel’s main characters is also dealing with. Did you find a conscious analogy between the two, or did that emerge as you were writing the book?

  I think it’s a combination of the two things. I think early on, you see this connection, or it’s more like you sense a connection, but you’re not fully certain what it is. If you were fully certain of what it was, it’s almost like there’d be no point to writing the novel.

  You sense that there’s a connection between these two things. You’re not sure what you feel about it. You’re not sure what you think. You’re not sure how strong that tether is between the two worlds. Then you kind of write the novel to figure those things out.

  What I’m looking for before I start the project is soil where things can grow. I’m looking for things that are rich enough that for several years I’m going to be able to entertain myself, which is always my first goal.
  You also have Nina and Nuno having these similar names that almost, but not quite, echo one another.

  I’m not fully conscious of deciding to do that. There’s not a point where I look back and say, oh yeah, that’s where I decided to create these mirror image names of these two central characters. I don’t believe that it was that kind of identifiable decision. I am conscious, at some point, of becoming aware of the fact that there is this mirror image quality of their two names, and then making the decision of, okay, how corny is that? Does it survive? Does it remain? And then deciding that that becomes a concept, that I’m leaving it in.

  There are aspects of archetypal plots here: the underdog sports narrative related to Nina’s efforts with the team; Nuno’s plotline having aspects of a heist narrative. What was the challenge for you as you were writing these to acknowledge these archetypes, but kind of keep them in balance with each other and in balance with the larger story of the book?

  I think the archetypes are, above all, to me, entertaining. Then the challenge becomes whether you can stretch them just shy of the breaking point. Not suck them of all their entertainment value, but take it somewhere that it hasn’t been taken before. That’s the way I always view these — in this case, a prison break and art heist. In my earlier novel — a robbery, a legal thriller.

  How far can I stretch these things so that they no longer, in any way, resemble what we’ve come to passively accept as kind of low level hack storytelling? That interests me, for whatever reason. I like to think that there’s something revelatory about encountering these well-worn tropes and then watching new life be breathed into them. If the novel works for the reader that way, that’s what it will feel like. That’s a special kind of entertainment that is maybe more rare than we think.

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  You said earlier that when you’re writing, you’re writing to keep yourself entertained, but do you end up having an ideal reader in mind as you’re writing this?

  It’s a cliche, it really is. Writing it so you can read it. I have a certain conception of what I find compelling slash entertaining, illuminating, elucidating, whatever you want to say. I’m constantly checking up against that ideal that I have in my mind. There’s really no ideal reader I’m thinking of. I’m just thinking more of an ideal destination that this novel will get to. Then when you’re done, that’s the check. Does it match the ideal? It’ll never match it perfectly. Is it close enough to the ideal that I had in mind three, four years ago, that I kept kind of projecting and trying to match in some way? If it is, then that the project is done and now whether or not other readers will respond to it is largely out of your control.

  My experience is that I’m similar enough to some readers that there will be a substantial number of people who will find it entertaining, but I’m not similar enough to enough readers for it to break the interest of the average human being. In other words, my taste matches up with a very small percentage of people, but they’re probably passionate about their tastes and they like to read this kind of thing, and it takes off from there. I recognize that this isn’t going to be… pick your number one bestseller.

  Over the course of this, you incorporate this history of this Salvador Dalí work, a history of Cambodia in the late 20th Century, and even quantum theory. Were all of these things that you knew already, or did you end up doing research as you were writing to figure out how to incorporate them into the book?

  I would say the three things you’re talking about I knew about, but by the time I was done with the novel I knew a lot more about them. I knew enough about them to know that they kind of fit the key of the piece, and that they would be useful and that they would, in many ways, be a tool that could drive the project forward. In the course of writing the novel, my interest grew and I learned more about it. I knew there had been this piece that Dalí had donated to Rikers when he got sick before a visit. I knew the very bare outlines of that and so that served as a tool, as a function, as a starting point to dig deeper and enmesh it into the narrative.

  One supporting character has a long speech a little more than halfway through the book, which deals with questions of parallel universes and parallel timelines. When did that end up becoming a part of the narrative?

  I don’t know how deep you wanna get, but I’m always interested in — or I grew interested in — what the world of a novel is in relationship to our world. Like I said, I could go way off the deep end here and tell you that I don’t draw the greatest distinction between the reality of the people I encounter in my day-to-day life and fluidly alive literary characters. Taking off from that — that I have that weird kind of relationship to fiction writing and reading — I was looking to explore the concept of what people call the multiverse and things of that nature, which I think gets mislabeled a little bit, but those kind of theories from theoretical physics about what the reality is of possible worlds and other worlds.

  I was interested in it from the outside because I was tying it to these strange movies that I have about the role of a fictional world that’s created in literature.

  You sense that there’s a connection between these two things. You’re not sure what you feel about it. You’re not sure what you think. You’re not sure how strong that tether is between the two worlds. Then you kind of write the novel to figure those things out.
  As someone who grew up reading a lot of science fiction and a lot of comic books, I would say the multiple universes is something that kind of has been ingrained in me from a very early age.

  The only thing I’ve never liked about Professor David Lewis’s possible worlds theory is when they say something like, okay, this is where you do X and, because of that, you know that XYZ. You, I think, can object that, whoever it is that they’re saying did X, it’s not me. What are you going to say to convince me that that’s also me. Well it looks like you. Well that seems silly. Has your name?

  Whatever it is that makes us an individuated human being, we don’t think it’s our looks or our name. We think there’s something else and that, whatever that is, seems indivisible.

  So I never responded well to when somebody would say to me, there’s a possible world right now where you do X. I’m just responding, no there isn’t, because we are quibbling over the definition of the word “you.” If there’s something in another universe that looks like me, has my name, that other people call Sergio De La Pava and is doing something, that’s great, but whatever that thing is, it’s not me.

  I address this in the book; whatever you want to say about that person and how weird that situation is, it’s not me. It’s your clone. Fine, it’s my clone. It’s a clone of me. It’s not me. Everybody feels this way if they take the proper time to think about it, which is, whatever you want to say my physical body or whatever you want to call it — a mind, you want to call it, a soul, whatever you want to call it — it feels indivisible.

  We’re going off on a huge tangent. I was watching a movie the other day with time travel. Not a very good movie. The Time Traveler’s Wife. And Eric Bana goes to when he was a child and there was a bad car accident. You see him address his eight year old self. Now, this is going to sound stupid, but that’s just impossible. And I don’t mean impossible like there’s no time travel, I get that. There’s only the individual and whatever he goes through and whatever he’s addressing, he can’t be said to be addressing another individual that’s himself.

  I’m not making this perfectly clear, but even within the rules of science fiction and even within the rules of wildly speculative things like time travel and the multiverses, I think the rules of logic have to be obeyed even if you can invent a technology that does it. You can’t invent a technology that makes it that I don’t exist. What I’m saying is, similarly, you can’t invent a technology or even posit one that makes it so that there’s another individual who is also me.

  You’ve talked about the improvisational quality of your writing. In the novel, you allude to both Joni Mitchell and Joe Satriani, and you also incorporate official documents into the body of the book. Do you view those as soloists in their own way, or each instrument getting its own moment in the spotlight?

  Yeah. I think that can be a useful analogy. What I envy about music is not its freedom. I feel like I have more freedoms than they have, to be honest with you. What I envy from that is their kind of accessibility, if that makes sense. It’s a lot easier for me to bring you into a conversation and say, you’ve got to listen to this new artist, you’re not going to believe how good it is, and probably within ten, fifteen seconds you’ll say, oh, I like this — or, I don’t like it. I envy that kind of ease of education that comes with that.

  If I want to convince you that there’s this great new novel that’s out there, I have to hand you a book and maybe talk to you three weeks later and maybe you’ve done the work, but more likely life has prevented you from doing that. I’m not even speaking to my viewers in particular, because you probably read a lot, but most people don’t read. But everybody listens to music. It’s on the radio, it’s there when we’re shopping for shoes. It’s ubiquitous and it’s easily accessible not just technologically speaking, but mentally speaking. Right away you kind of start making up your mind.

  Now, really good music requires repeated listening to make your mind up, but there’s an element in which music just kind of smacks you in the face and asks to be dealt with in a way that novels and literature just don’t. So maybe that’s why I’m constantly going back to music as a way of simplifying discussions of artists and things of that nature.

  With respect to found documents, to me, it just feels more genuine to me to include an actual grand jury transcript, or an actual 911 report, than to have a character describe it or to have a narrator describe it. That, to me, is more artificial than literally giving you the document — you, meaning the reader — and letting you process it the way you process things in the real world. When people don’t sum things up, you come across documents. You see actual maps or you read a transcript, et cetera. While it may be, I think, that the average person says, well, that’s a little transgressive and odd and not what we’re used to. I think it’s the opposite. I think it’s actually less artificial to do it that way.

  I’m always interested in what the world of a novel is in relationship to our world. Like I said, I could go way off the deep end here and tell you that I don’t draw the greatest distinction between the reality of the people I encounter in my day-to-day life and fluidly alive literary characters.
  Was it difficult to write the documents that were in the novel and make them feel both genuinely like the transcripts of what they are and parts of the book?

  It’s not that different from everything we do. When you write a long novel, you’re always mimicking. You’re always putting yourself into another head space that’s not your natural one. Most of the documents that I think are found in Lost Empress are 911 tapes or incident reports of grand jury — these are things that I’m familiar with from my other career. Well, I guess there’s that medical stuff that I’m not so familiar with. You educate yourself a bit and it’s interesting and fun. I don’t think it’s particularly difficult.

  In your previous work, you’ve also dealt with legal issues. To what extent do you need to balance your work as a public defender with your work as a writer? Do you keep a wall between the two?

  I do try to keep the things separate. There’s some overlap between the two things. I do view them as separate, or…. what’s that Stephen Jay Gould article, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”? About religion and science? I kind of feel that way about the practice of law and novel writing or fiction writing. I try to keep those two worlds separate.

  You recently published an op-ed about the discovery process. Is that something that, for you, exists between the two?

  I mean, it’s writing. It’s non-fiction writing. Generally, for some reason, I struggle with it. Not that I can’t do it, but I don’t enjoy it for some reason. It feels weird to me. The kind of writing that’s attractive to me is about freedom and expansion, and non-fiction writing quite often wears its intent on its sleeve and has a particular goal and is trying to maybe accomplish it, whereas with fiction it’s more of an exploration. I mean, I do it. That’s an example where my legal career kind of calls for an attempt to educate the average person who doesn’t follow the legal system too closely about this mass injustice that’s going on. Non-fiction writing, even in book form, is really not something I’m all that interested in exploring.

  As you’re doing the exploration that comes with writing a novel, was there anything in Lost Empress that surprised you as you wrote it, or after you looked back on it?

  You would think by now I wouldn’t be surprised by it, but I still find that I’m surprised by the interconnectivity of all human activity. I start by thinking, well, this is a completely unrelated thing. There’s no genuine connection, for example, between the NFL and Rikers Island. And then, the more you dig deep, you start seeing the way everything is connected. Not to sound too hippy-dippy here, but I do end up feeling like…. it’s like that game six degrees of separation. It’s like, if you keep digging, you keep looking, you will find a connection between things. That’s what I always end up being surprised by.

  In this case, for example, when I started writing, I’m not sure I could have told you the first thing about Hart Island or the Dalí theft or Joni Mitchell’s music; these are things that I had a very vague sense about when I started writing and then by the end…. You mentioned the word surprise. Yeah, it’s surprise at how with just a little bit of minimal digging you can connect pretty much anything.

  It’s like that game six degrees of separation. It’s like, if you keep digging, you keep looking, you will find a connection between things. That’s what I always end up being surprised by.
  Did you have a good sense of Nina and Nuno before you started writing, or did that also develop over the course of writing the book?

  I think Nina, right away. Right away I was like, what would it be like if the best football mind was a woman, and what kind of blatant sexism would she have dealt with and how would that have affected her and what kind of bitterness would it cause, to be the smartest person in the room and then condescended to for however many years? That, I think, I had a pretty early conception of. She’s just a powerful force that just drives from that.

  Nuno was a little tougher to come by because I felt like with Nuno — and I don’t know how well this came across in the book — I felt like there was more than one Nuno and he’s going to show one or the other depending on the situation. When Nuno’s talking at Rikers Island to fellow inmates, it’s a different Nuno than when he’s writing in his diary. A different Nuno than when he’s, in essence, narrating on the intellectual history of humanity. There are different Nunos that suit each situation. There’s really only one Nina and she’s a madwoman. But that does make Nuno more difficult. That was more of a search.

  It seems like he has a much more difficult go of it over the course of the novel, too.

  Yeah, certainly. He is one of the close to two and half million people incarcerated by this country, which is…. it’s not number one, but it’s close to the most per capita. Yeah, he’s incarcerated for a long time. Some of his misery’s self-created. I do think that one of the flashpoints of the book is this kind of contrast. Early on, Nuno is on the bus being taken to Rikers Island, and Nina Gill’s playing the piano. Just sipping from a brand new snifter.

  That’s American reality, man. Huge gap between those who are essentially going through life playing, as I would argue Nina is, and those who are basically just repeatedly being victimized. So that was a contrast that I was interested in.

  Was it difficult to keep Nina as a fairly sympathetic character when she is someone who comes from this incredibly privileged, incredibly wealthy background?

  I think we tend to be forgiving toward funny people. Rich people, they generally aren’t very funny, in my experience. They tend to be pretty humorless. I think part of what makes Nina…. even though she’s an acerbic wit, she is constantly displaying verbal wit. That tends to make us like people.

  I think that, while Nina is certainly incredibly wealthy, my interpretation of it was that she’s never screwed anybody over to become that way. She was born into it. She was never all that interested in it. She loves football. She cares about achievement in this very bizarre and narrow segment of society, and that’s really her list of priorities. That, and having fun, in a way. Not somebody who is, in my opinion, actively exploiting others. Which I think is what turns us off to the rich: the notion that too often it feels likes the wealth is accumulated at the expense of others. And then the need to keep that wealth at the expense of others, is what we find offensive, generally.

  Did the decision to set parts of the novel in Paterson, New Jersey, also come from the questions of class and economics that you were dealing with in other parts of the book?

  Paterson’s a fascinating place. I went there a lot during the course of writing this novel. I think there’s a palpable energy there. It’s also a defeated energy, maybe. When you look at what Paterson was at one point…. it was a real hub of commerce and a genuine central city. It still is in many ways; it’s just changed with loss and sadness. That was always appealing. You dig into the history of Paterson. I knew Paterson mainly from William Carlos Williams; that’s obviously an outdated picture of the place, but certainly there’s a majestic feel to it, as odd as it feels. For a place that’s not doing particularly well, there is kind of the ghost of past majesty, and that, I found interesting.

  When, in the course of writing the book, did the title come into play?

  I feel like I had some other really bad titles. I like to start with a title and I chose a title pretty early, but I had some other weird shit that wasn’t good. Mainly, when I’m picking titles, whether I like the sound of it is 99% of it. If I like the sound of it, then I’ll figure out why that’s the title afterwards.

  * * *

  This interview has been edited for clarity.

  Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the books Reel and Transitory.

  Editor: Dana Snitzky

QUOTED: "The style, of course, is the extraordinary thing, as it would need to be to unite all the elements of a novel of this length and sprawl. It is colloquial in tempo yet nerdy in content, divinely detached yet intimately casual in tone, impossibly learned and improvisational at the same time. If de la Pava has a signature move, it's to zoom out from a highly specific action or bit of characterization in order to generalize about or extrapolate from it, while still holding on to the speech-replicating sentence structures that ground that action in a kind of conversational specificity."

Offensive Formation
Dee Jonathan
The New Yorker. 94.12 (May 7, 2018): p69.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
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Full Text:
Byline: Jonathan Dee

Offensive Formation

Vengeance, art, and football in Sergio de la Pava's "Lost Empress."

tifIllustration by Allison FiliceDe la Pava brings postmodernist style and structure to social-justice themes.69

We speak of great athletes in mythic terms, as heroes or even gods, but the truly Olympian figures in modern professional sports are probably the team owners. They move in realms we can't understand and to which we have no access. They cause mortals to enact arbitrary contests (the Patriots versus the Dolphins-what does that even mean?) for their own glory and diversion, offering, in return for those mortals' health and safety, sometimes handsome rewards and sometimes nothing. They watch from skyboxes. Their powers breed in them more impulsiveness than sagacity; they can be hotheaded, lusty, intemperate, and rivalrous, qualities for which their subjects usually pay the price.

Worthington Gill is the name of the elderly owner of the Dallas Cowboys in the alternate universe of Sergio de la Pava's third novel, "Lost Empress" (Pantheon). His children, obedient but dim Daniel and rebellious but brilliant Nina, are summoned to his lawyer's office for a Lear-like premortem division of his estate, wherein Nina does not get the one bequest she wants. She pleads with her brother: transfer ownership of the Cowboys to her, and she will forswear any claim to every other asset in the Gill empire, "your little oil wells and leveraged derivatives or whatever." His refusal is the beginning of the story rather than its end, for it turns out that, in the way of the obscenely rich, Worthington Gill owned many things that he was not even aware he owned. Nina's patrimony includes the rights to a failing franchise in the all but defunct Indoor Football League, in the similarly dormant-seeming metropolis of Paterson, New Jersey. When the N.F.L. owners lock out their players for demanding too large a share of the league's gargantuan revenue, Nina announces that the I.F.L.-with a handful of available players, seemingly no staff, and no TV contract-has been reborn and will start a sixteen-game season in the fall. In the reception area of her father's lawyer's office, she collars a delivery girl in a college sweatshirt and then introduces her to the press as the league's deputy commissioner. The episode is played for laughs, but it is also true that sometimes things are so because people like Nina Gill have the power to make them so.

Nina cares little about Paterson's gritty charms (or, presumably, its extensive literary pedigree), but, when her whim moves her attention there, so, too, moves the action of the novel. The pro-football intrigue with which the story begins is really something of a Shakespearean overlay, a sur-plot, like the wedding of the royals in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." A host of intertwined characters-mostly working class and nonwhite-makes up the novel's true community and the more self-consciously realistic thread of its narrative. De la Pava's expansive cast includes priests, 911 operators, criminal-defense lawyers, E.M.T.s, jail guards, single mothers, and fatherless children. It is also salted with the sort of slightly heightened figures for whom their author has a particular fondness, characters who perform mundane jobs with an almost superhuman talent or fervor. There is, for instance, Jorge de Cervantes, a Colombian immigrant who, late in life, discovers in himself a genius for the complicated math and "chessy maneuvering" involved in the flawless running of a Manhattan parking garage. Or Sylvester Scarpetti, the greatest, most intuitive 911-call transcriber in the history of the art, whose ego starts to get the better of him as his reputation spreads. At the other end of the talent spectrum is Travis Mena, an unfortunate emergency-room resident at Bellevue, who is only a doctor at all because his father was one, and whose medical career ends after a disastrous morbidity-and-mortality conference following the death of one of his patients.

That patient, as it happens, is Jorge de Cervantes, who, while waiting at a bus stop at the end of his shift, was struck and killed by a car. In truth, there is nothing that Dr. Mena, incompetent though he is, could have done to save Jorge's life, since he arrived at the E.R. impaled by a metal beam. Still, it is Jorge's death that draws the novel's disparate figures into a sort of causal web, as those who knew him try to impose meaning on this random tragedy by turning it into a question of justice, an attempt to name the party or parties responsible and mete out punishment. After the funeral, Jorge's thirteen-year-old son, Nelson-a boy so sensitive that he titles an essay "Emily Dickinson Is Saving My Life and I Can't Even Thank Her"-is surrounded by cousins who tell him that he must avenge his father by seeing to it that the driver of the fateful car pay for Jorge's life with his own.

The cousins know just the guy for the job. He is Nuno DeAngeles, and he happens to be incarcerated at Rikers Island at the moment; so is the driver of the car. Nuno awaits trial for a crime that is initially undisclosed but is infamous enough that the other inmates and even the guards recognize his name.

Nuno, like Nina, is not conceived as a strictly realistic character. He is more akin to a superhero, an avenging angel. He has no race. He can and does kick the ass of anyone in jail who tries to cross him, but he also demands that his court-appointed lawyer bring him Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" and Sabato's "The Tunnel"-and "in the original German and Spanish like we agreed because translations are for pussies." He out-argues a Rikers chaplain on the subject of the Prodigal Son. He files his own brief with the court-reproduced in the novel in its entirety-asking for his indictment to be dismissed on account of centuries of racial prejudice in the form of slavery and the mass incarceration of people of color. In matters large and small, he takes it upon himself to determine, and to administer, justice. The crime of which he is accused turns out to be an absolute epic, a sort of moral and philosophical conundrum worked out through the medium of horrifying violence, confronting real-world genocide with vigilante law.

De la Pava himself can seem like an avenging angel, at least for those with a certain view of what ails contemporary American literature. He exists off the literary grid, which is to say that he lives in the real world and has a real job-as a public defender in the criminal courts of Manhattan. He has no M.F.A., no teaching post. The academy hasn't laid a finger on him. He self-published his first novel, "A Naked Singularity," in 2008, after eighty-eight agents turned it down. Against all odds, it found a literary audience, and when the University of Chicago Press republished it, in 2012, it received the PEN/Bingham Prize as the best debut fiction of the year. Undaunted by such recognition, he self-published a second novel as well. "Lost Empress" is his first book under the aegis of a commercial publisher.

This outsider status is something of which de la Pava appears to be obliquely proud. The biographical note for "A Naked Singularity" reads, in its entirety, "Sergio de la Pava is a writer who does not live in Brooklyn." And early in "Lost Empress" (which, in what cannot be a coincidence, is broken into eighty-eight numbered chapters) Nuno delivers a hilariously profane rant against a writer who shows up at Rikers as part of an outreach program. It seems fair to impute at least some of Nuno's energetic contempt to de la Pava himself:

This twee fucker in a vest, the kind of douche who corrects someone calling him a writer by specifying he's a novelist. Really, fuck? Where can I pick up your intergenerational saga spanning the great panoplic expanse of the world from Connecticut all the way to Wall Street? Or your other one. You know, where the narrator's marriage dissolves over that one fateful summer in Martha's Vineyard while her daughter burgeons into womanhood? Fuck off's what I'm saying.

So does de la Pava's old-school autodidacticism mean that his work is uncontaminated by influence, something new under the literary sun? In most ways no, but in some important and thrilling ways yes. In the context of current American fiction and the directions in which it's moving, de la Pava can look like a throwback-an unabashed believer in empathy, in gigantism, in the ability of a novel to contain the whole world. (And that means the whole world; one of the novel's narrative threads traces the growth of a glioblastoma in a character's brain.) There is more contained in the six hundred and forty pages of "Lost Empress," formally speaking, than one review can comfortably synopsize. There are, for instance, extended, song-by-song analyses of the uvre of Joni Mitchell. There is an exhaustive history of the 3-4 defense. The novel incorporates all sorts of documentary-style narration: transcripts of 911 calls, the New York City Department of Correction Inmate Rule Book, legal motions, lectures on the existence and nature of time, even a page of rejected Paterson city mottoes that were part of a failed rebranding effort. Would four or five mottoes have sufficed? Yes, but thirty-three is funnier.

The style, of course, is the extraordinary thing, as it would need to be to unite all the elements of a novel of this length and sprawl. It is colloquial in tempo yet nerdy in content, divinely detached yet intimately casual in tone, impossibly learned and improvisational at the same time. If de la Pava has a signature move, it's to zoom out from a highly specific action or bit of characterization in order to generalize about or extrapolate from it, while still holding on to the speech-replicating sentence structures that ground that action in a kind of conversational specificity:

Because it turns out that human reactions to certain mildly complicated activities, like answering 911 calls for a living, disturb in their lack of significant variance. Which explains why someone interacting with an experienced 911 operator will almost certainly be struck by what seems to be their pretty blatant rudeness but is in fact just the gem the activity builds through constant, call-by-call, polish.

There are, to be sure, trace elements in "Lost Empress" of David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis and other postmodern giants. What's unusual-electrifyingly so-is to see this kind of polyphonic, self-conscious literary performance and all-stops-pulled-out postmodernist production value brought to bear on underclass lives, and on questions of social justice that tend not to penetrate the soundproofing of the ivory tower. Within its first few pages, "Lost Empress" describes itself as both "an entertainment" and "a protest," and that seems about right.

Nina Gill is quite a creation: a charismatic, uncompromising titan who dominates "Lost Empress" even during the long stretches when she is absent. Much of her thread in the novel is rendered on the page screenplay-style, nearly every line a Preston Sturges-worthy wisecrack or pun or both. If she is part vengeful goddess-sending ill-prepared men into dangerous combat in order to spite her handful of peers-she is equally a cheerful amalgam of every screwball-comedy/sports-movie cliche ever. She can outdrink you. She has rejected ten marriage proposals. Despite her heart-stopping beauty, she has a masculine affect; despite her masculine affect, she struggles to be taken seriously by the world of men. She pledges that I.F.L. revenue (should there be any) will go to the players; she has no need of it, anyway. She is always smarter than everyone else in the room, and grotesquely underestimated by the billionaire boys' club that is the N.F.L. ownership. And so we root for her, even though she is also a ruthless one-per-center with no regard for anyone's point of view or well-being but her own. We root for her even after we learn that she is aligned with a shadowy criminal syndicate known as the Absence, through which she seeks the theft of an obscure painting by Salvador Dali that languishes in, of all places, the Rikers Island jail complex. (This part of the novel is founded in unlikely fact: Dali really did donate an original painting to Rikers, where it hung for nearly forty years before it was stolen. Though guards were ultimately convicted of the theft, the painting has never been recovered.) "If you want something enough," Nina explains at one point to her de facto deputy commissioner, "you first have to identify who can procure it, easier today than ever before, then you do something that looks like asking, but a special asking that I admit can become costly."

And therein lies the inevitable connection between the novel's two poles, Nuno and Nina. For it is Nuno who has been commissioned by the Absence to steal the Dali painting-no mean feat, since it will involve not just obtaining the canvas but then breaking out of Rikers with it. If Nuno can pull this off, he will be free and rich. If he fails, he will be killed.

It's the only time when we see Nuno accept a role as a character in events and not as their architect. The theft of the Dali is in no way a matter of justice. It's not as though Nina were its rightful owner. She just wants it. But motive isn't always about free will; sometimes the Nina Gills of the world drive the action, supersede the motivation, in art as in life.

Plots themselves are a kind of justice system, whether of the literal or the poetic variety. De la Pava lets all his characters, from the priest to the lawyer to the mourning child, try to put various narrative frames around the suffering they encounter-their own or others'-as a way of making that suffering signify. He does this even as he points out the relativity of "justice" itself: viewed from afar, or, indeed, from up close, all lives pursue the same path and meet the same end anyway. Take the case of the driver who killed Jorge:

Let the punishment fit the crime is a thing, right? But with so many blameless people being punished, and severely, worrying about proportionality for this guy seems dumb. The worst things imaginable can happen to this guy for no reason at all without violating any natural law. What then is allowable where such ample justification exists? Why then not allow the universe to dispassionately handle this question of justice? That's what it does. . . .

One needs to adopt, in other words, a particular squint in order to detect the workings of "justice" at all. This accounts, in a philosophical sort of way, for de la Pava's explicit embrace of the principles of screwball comedy-specifically, its reliance on the idea of coincidence. In a world in which every single horrible outcome eventually can and will happen, how are you going to complain about a plot seeming unlikely?

Which brings us back to football. "Lost Empress" joins a long roster of literary meditations on the meaning of the game. You could draw a line backward to Don DeLillo's "End Zone" and Robert Coover's "Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?," though it would also have to pass through pop-culture baubles like "Remember the Titans," "Any Given Sunday," "North Dallas Forty"-pretty much every post-Vietnam football movie ever made.

Why should the postmodernists be so drawn to the gridiron? It seems like an odd attraction. Football is ripe for satire, of course, with its undisguised militarism, its unfamiliarity with the language of irony, its Lombardi-esque moral elevation of stakes that are, in the end, imaginary. De la Pava is certainly interested in the workings of the human brain, and that offers a timely thematic link to big-time football, in which human brains are considered a kind of depreciation expense. It is also true that the novel's two main fields of inquiry-professional football and the criminal-justice system-both profit hugely from exploiting the bodies of men of color. But de la Pava never really goes there, although Nina does recruit one player directly from the gates of Attica. Financial gain, to her, is incidental. What she's after-what she's willing to trade her wealth for, in fact-is creative control.

Ultimately, football, just like the rest of the sports-entertainment complex, enacts a very postmodern battle between narrative closure and narrative chaos. "The overwhelming majority of people devote their energies to endeavors that have no clear-cut winners or losers, no scores," Nina tells the members of her team before the season opener. "Part of what that means is they can fool themselves if they have to. You won't have that luxury. . . . Every Sunday a score will be created and it will tell you your worth as a craftsman. At the end this team will have a record and it will tell you even more. That's why you win a championship, to know that about yourself."

Contrast this with the lives of the novel's less powerful characters, and the fervor with which they try to turn incident-the death of Jorge de Cervantes-into plot by their efforts to identify and punish the guilty. It would be wrong to say that their efforts get them nowhere, but the places their efforts get them have little or nothing to do with their own will or with the moral or narrative control they are trying to exert upon the determining events of their lives. Nelson's cousins cry out for eye-for-an-eye retribution. Dr. Mena's superiors blame him for his lack of agency. The E.M.T. who treated Jorge tries to contact his widow to report his last words, thinking that they must be significant. As for Nuno's quest to put the whole world right, it consists of some losses and some victories, which to him is pretty much the same as no victory at all.

The only figure in "Lost Empress" who can make human events cohere in a morally comprehensible way is Nina Gill. She is such a deity in her world that she makes the weather: despite the fact that all I.F.L. games are played indoors, before each game something called the Weather Wheel is spun to create artificial blizzards, rainstorms, extreme winds, etc., within the arena, inappropriately dressed spectators be damned. In the end, Nina engineers exactly the championship game she wants. That's why she knew from the beginning which of her father's holdings was the prize. An oil well is just an asset, but a football team is a story.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jonathan, Dee. "Offensive Formation." The New Yorker, 7 May 2018, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539669723/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1fb66260. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A539669723

Tick, tock; Maximalist fiction
The Economist. 427.9090 (May 5, 2018): p82(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
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Full Text:
ON A one-way bus ride to Rikers Island, New York City's infamous prison, Nuno DeAngeles's thoughts turn to Rene Descartes, whose "mind-body dualism" is "the only out he sees right now…There's two of him and only one's going in." Descartes and Rikers are among the unlikely conjunctions in Sergio de la Pava's expansive new novel, "Lost Empress", a 600-page melting pot of criminal-justice policy, American football and metaphysics.

When her ailing father divides up his football empire, Nina Gill inherits the underdog team, Paterson Pork, while the Dallas Cowboys are left to her brother. Nina vows to usurp the NFL with a rival football league. She also has her eye on a different prize: a long-lost painting by Salvador Dali, hidden somewhere behind the barbed wire of Rikers. Nuno, a brainy criminal, aims to retrieve it for her before time runs out.

Literally. As well as a searing critique of American society, "Lost Empress" is a countdown to the apocalypse, an impending doom that rests on parallel worlds, a football pass and a biblical flood. The book oscillates between hilarious surrealism and shocking reality. As in his first novel, "A Naked Singularity", Mr de la Pava (a public defender) deploys his expertise in a maximalist form reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Legal transcripts jostle with diagrams of "Time" and the prison's "Inmate Rule Book".

Besides Nina's and Nuno's, other stories unfold. A 911-call operator reaches breaking point. An Italian pastor attempts to bring God to the incarcerated. Cancerous cells multiply in a young man's brain. Occasionally the tone of the hyperintelligent narrator blurs the distinctions between the characters. But Mr de la Pava's psychological insights compensate for that glitch.

With messianic fervour, he conjures up marginalised voices and the horrors of mass incarceration, against a backbeat of sporting thrills and that apocalyptic crescendo. Describing a court motion of Nuno's, the narrator enjoins readers to "think about a literary work undertaken in the literal pursuit of freedom, which is to say life". They will not have to think for long: they are reading one.

Lost Empress.

By Sergio de la Pava.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tick, tock; Maximalist fiction." The Economist, 5 May 2018, p. 82(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537178288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bac0e04. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A537178288

A Naked Singularity
Sergio De La Pava
New Statesman. 142.5175 (Sept. 13, 2013): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
A Naked Singularity was originally self-published by its author, a New York public defence lawyer, in zoo8. The University of Chicago Press republished it in 2012 after a positive reaction online and slowly growing sales. Now, the book is front and centre in indie bookshop windows across Europe, bolstered by praise from critics who applaud De La Pava's Pynchonian energy, inventiveness and hysterical cast of lawbreakers (and makers). The novel tells the story of Casi, a lawyer on the front line of America's war on drugs, licking his wounds after his first defeat. The narrative takes the form of a slippery, disorganised projection of the New York justice system, a verbal descent into madness.

MacLehose Press, 864pp, [pounds sterling]20

De La Pava, Sergio

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
De La Pava, Sergio. "A Naked Singularity." New Statesman, 13 Sept. 2013, p. 58. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A344840615/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=06e4ce5c. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A344840615

QUOTED: "It is as if there are three separate novels trapped between two covers, or as if, fearful of never appearing in print, De la Pava thought he'd better get in everything, including the kitchen sink and the history of kitchen sinks. Sometimes, more is less. Caveats aside, this is a compelling debut. Ambition might outweigh execution (and indeed does so literally in the plot), but thank goodness for such ambition."

Review: FICTION: The law is an ass: Stuart Kelly enjoys the raggedy brilliance of a publishing sensation: A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava 876pp, MacLehose Press, pounds 18.99
The Guardian (London, England). (Aug. 31, 2013): Arts and Entertainment: p13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Stuart Kelly

Self-published in 2008 and this month awarded the PEN prize for debut fiction, A Naked Singularity has had a long, slow burn. Gradually it garnered online reviews in which it was compared to Dickens, Melville, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Lethem (and the Coen Brothers, Police Academy and The Wire), before being taken up by Chicago University Press and now the MacLehose imprint of Quercus (the publishers of Stieg Larsson). It is currently the favoured stick with which to beat conventional publishing - proof, we are led to believe, that the soulless minions of orthodoxy can't distinguish between Henry James and EL James. It is ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction. I would also say that now Sergio de la Pava is part of the Corporate Behemoth of Old-Fashioned Publishing, his next book will be far, far better. As much as I loved it, I wished he had had an editor.

A Naked Singularity might be considered part of the "maximalist" tradition, or even what James Wood described as "hysterical realism". After all, we have Casi, the child of Colombian immigrants and a New York public defender, whose life intersects with an experiment to turn one of the characters of The Honeymooners into a real person; the perfect heist devised by a perfectionist; people called Melvyn Toomberg, Troie Liszt and Devin Quackmire; a child who has gone mute during her mother's pregnancy; experiments on rats; hair cancer; a recipe for the perfect empanadas; a child who has been abducted by children; boxing; a death row inmate with the mental capacity of a child; a strange freeze incapacitating the city; some quantum physics; more pondering on genetic manipulation; judges called Cymbeline or Sizygy; hotel managers called Big Mac Wideload Santageleeskees and gangsters called Ballena (Spanish for whale: cute Moby-Dick reference); and a TV show based around Catholic confessionals. The frenzy is fabulous, but the energy, at points, lacks direction. The opening scene, where Casi is defending a series of unfortunate, bewildered individuals, is excellent in its surrealism. The hoops which must be jumped through, the simple, complex silliness of the judicial process, is rendered in delightful and stiletto-sharp detail. At one point Casi has to deal with an HIV-positive client who will have to go to prison if his health improves; another case rests on whether or not a truck is legally a building.

Among all the comparisons, it is curious that William Gaddis is not mentioned more frequently. Like Gaddis, De la Pava uses speech to giddying effect; not just as dialogue but in set-piece speeches and deranged polyphonies, with characters intercutting, talking over, and glancing against each other. Moreover, the law's asinine tendencies were also the subject of Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own

The zany proliferations of the book are not in themselves a problem. Rather, it's the shifts in tone between them that appear awkward. At one moment we have social realism and a genuine, emotionally urgent social conscience, albeit with a carapace of cynicism - the reader will care and despair about the clients as much as Casi does - then, with a shriek of crunching gears, we're into offbeat comic cadenzas on, for example, why the phrases "fat chance" and "slim chance" have an identical meaning, or what happened on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Then it's grand guignol stuff as Casi gets drawn into his acquaintance Dane's plan to steal millions of dollars from a drug cartel. It is as if there are three separate novels trapped between two covers, or as if, fearful of never appearing in print, De la Pava thought he'd better get in everything, including the kitchen sink and the history of kitchen sinks. Sometimes, more is less.

Caveats aside, this is a compelling debut. Ambition might outweigh execution (and indeed does so literally in the plot), but thank goodness for such ambition. I would rather have the raggedy brilliance of A Naked Singularity over the pursed and smirking lips of much contemporary British fiction any day of the week. More than that, A Naked Singularity poses moral questions far more thorny and vexing than most, and to some extent the disparate, centrifugal elements of the plot are tethered to one question. The Dantean chilly setting, many of the debates (such as has the Second Coming already happened?), the inability of the law to be graceful, all tie back to a quotation from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus that seems the hidden epigraph of the book: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it."

To order A Naked Singularity for pounds 15 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

Stuart Kelly

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: FICTION: The law is an ass: Stuart Kelly enjoys the raggedy brilliance of a publishing sensation: A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava 876pp, MacLehose Press, pounds 18.99." Guardian [London, England], 31 Aug. 2013, p. 13. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A341437055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6bd6e752. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A341437055

QUOTED: "page after page of superbly alive and intelligent writing that circles the deep and proper subjects of human nature, which are the deep and proper subjects of any writer who takes their work seriously."

Review: FICTION: Between Sartre and Stoppard: Edward Docx isn't sure this is a novel - but he likes it: Personae by Sergio De La Pava (224pp, Chicago, pounds 12)
The Guardian (London, England). (Nov. 23, 2013): Arts and Entertainment: p12.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Edward Docx

This is a tricky novel to review. I'm not even sure it is a novel. And I'm not certain as to whether its fragmentary nature belies an organic structure of astutely sewn intention or is merely a disingenuous device to conceal a let's-get-something-out cobbling together of unpublished material lying around the writer's desk. What I can tell you is this: I was powerfully engaged and richly entertained by Personae

Some brief background: a few months ago, Sergio De La Pava was awarded the prestigious PEN prize for his debut novel, A Naked Singularity, which he self-published in 2008. His work has, therefore, adorned many a told-you-so banner in the great forward march of internet publishing, where he has been championed as literary fiction's answer to the delirious smutathon that is EL James. For the record, De La Pava lives in New York where he is a lawyer appointed to represent people who cannot afford to hire lawyers. He is of Colombian heritage and cultivates something of an outsider persona: "Sergio De La Pava", says the jacket, "still does not live in Brooklyn."

But let's get back to the work. A reductive summary of Personae might describe it as a postmodern text that begins with the investigation of an "unnatural" death by a preternaturally intelligent and attractive concert pianist turned police detective, Helen Tame. (De La Pava is forever playing with fiction's types and tropes as well as its form.) The body belongs to an elderly unknown writer, Antonio Acre, who has been discovered on the floor of his apartment aged 111. Tame finds what remains of Acre's notebook and tells us that it "can be seen as a kind of warming up to [his] subsequent works that form the greater part of [her] report".

Thus De La Pava has Tame's "report" comprise Acre's "works": a short story, "The Ocean", a play, "Personae" and an unfinished prose work called "Energeias". These pieces have nothing overtly to do with one another and feature characters described as "A Person", "The First Person Plural" or an "immense" and "serenely malevolent" "Figure" that metamorphoses into a dying dog. Interspersed are the obituaries of both Tame and Acre, as well as some of Tame's reflections on the incomparable JS Bach and his great interlocutor Glenn Gould.

Perhaps the best way through the initial confusion of such a book is to abandon any traditional expectation and read in the spirit that one might approach a collection of short stories. Indeed, this is not much of a mystery story at all; the death, investigation and notebooks are something of a distraction and hint at a covert anxiety to bind these disparate works, even as an overt stance is being taken against such "symmetry, narrative propulsion, cheap suspense, or any other decor generally sought by eyeballs like yours". That said, on a second reading, it starts to make more sense as a whole. Is it, I found myself wondering, a form of meditation on the time- and geography-defying potency of art itself - on creation and interpretation? Tame is certainly Acre's ideal reader. His death has no power to prevent her connection to his work, just as the Atlantic has no power to prevent mine with De La Pava.

OK, maybe; but what's to love? Well, what I want to celebrate is the extraordinary energy and commitment of the writing within each fragment. Personae the play, for example, was pure reading pleasure. Somewhere between Sartre and Beckett and Stoppard, and yet nothing like any of them, it is crammed with thought, feeling, intelligence, wit and the sheer exuberant joy in the writing of lines. The drama of the characters' incarceration turned out to be about more or less everything I find interesting: democracy, art, human frailty, history, geography, belief, religion, violence, philosophy, psychology, falsity and authenticity, love and mortality.

And that's what Personae, the book, is about, too. Page after page of superbly alive and intelligent writing that circles the deep and proper subjects of human nature, which are the deep and proper subjects of any writer who takes their work seriously. At one point, I was reminded of Donne's lines from his third "Satire": "On a huge hill, / Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will / Reach her, about must and about must go, / And what the hill's suddenness resists, / win so." But almost immediately, I met De La Pava coming the other way - for this is Tame's obsession, too; she's not after resolution but "truth in its multifarious instantiations". Meanwhile other characters recapitulate the same theme in different keys:

Ludwig: You could intelligently say about [truth], and everything surrounding it, that it is meaningless.

Adam: But would that be true?

Then again, De La Pava writes: "The author's task is not to invent or even discover but to reassert, in compelling fashion, what we've long known to be true." On these criteria, Personae is a resounding success - as well as being, for this reader at least, a compelling and inventive discovery.

Edward Docx's latest book is The Devil's Garden (Picador). To order Personae with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

Captions:

Playing with fiction . . . Sergio De La Pava

Edward Docx

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Review: FICTION: Between Sartre and Stoppard: Edward Docx isn't sure this is a novel - but he likes it: Personae by Sergio De La Pava (224pp, Chicago, pounds 12)." Guardian [London, England], 23 Nov. 2013, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A350137737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2667398. Accessed 15 July 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A350137737

QUOTED: "The incredible multiverse he constructs in this book establishes him as one of the most fearsomely talented American novelists working today."

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Print Marked Items
Lost Empress
Publishers Weekly.
265.14 (Apr. 2, 2018): p41+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Lost Empress
Sergio de la Pava. Pantheon, $28.95 (640p) ISBN 978-1-5247-4722-0
In his extraordinary new novel, de la Pava (A Naked Singularity) weaves together several story lines
centered around Paterson, N.J. Nina Gill is a preternaturally gifted football strategist. She stands to inherit
the Dallas Cowboys, but instead ends up with the family's far less desirable Indoor Football League
franchise, the Paterson Pork. However, an NFL lockout gives Nina the opportunity to build an absurd
alternative for showcasing the sport she loves. A few miles from Paterson, Nuno DeAngeles sits imprisoned
in Rikers Island. An out-of-place intellectual, Nuno is able to manipulate his lawyer and eventually lands in
the somewhat cushier Bellevue Hospital while he conspires with his fellow inmate Solomon to commit a
mysterious crime. Between these two worlds, de la Pava takes readers into the lives of ordinary
Patersonians who work as EMTs, 911 operators, and a pig-suit-wearing mascot. Like his previous work, de
la Pava's novel employs a variety of narrative forms, including legal briefs, sermons, phone transcripts, and
the text of a prison handbook. De la Pava is a maximalist worldbuilder, and the incredible multiverse he
constructs in this book establishes him as one of the most fearsomely talented American novelists working
today. (May)
Caption: Sergio de la Pava's extraordinary new novel, Lost Empress, weaves together the stories of several
characters in Paterson, NJ. (reviewed on p. 41)
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lost Empress." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 41+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f0d8a703.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A533555585

QUOTED: "a whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprising—and a lot of fun."

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de la Pava, Sergio: LOST EMPRESS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
de la Pava, Sergio LOST EMPRESS Pantheon (Adult Fiction) $28.95 5, 8 ISBN: 978-1-5247-4722-0
If Thomas Pynchon and Elmore Leonard had conspired to write North Dallas Forty, this might be the result:
a madcap, football-obsessed tale of crossed destinies and criminal plots gone awry.
You know you're in fictional territory when the Dallas Cowboys are portrayed as a winning team; the world
is veritably upside down when things like that happen. That's one of many conceits de la Pava (Personae,
2011, etc.), New York City public defender by day and shaper of the modern canon by night, plays with in
this loopy yarn, which embraces surrealist art, the law, theoretical physics, politics, and just about
everything else under the sun. But especially football: At the heart of de la Pava's shaggy dog tale, overlong
but not overworked, is an unabashed love for pigskin. Young Nina Gill hauls up the underdog Paterson Pork
team from deepest obscurity in a scenario out of a gridiron version of King Lear after having been shoved
aside from inheriting said Cowboys after her father dies; in grim revenge, Nina decides to take the indoorplaying
Pork to the NFL championship, an impossibility, of course. She's an encyclopedia of the game:
"Before 'seventy-eight defensive backs could hit receivers with impunity all the way down the field
provided the ball hadn't been thrown," she tells sidekick Dia Nouveau, who's scrambling to keep up with
"the various permutations of football knowledge that woman is essentially compelling her to acquire." Dia
has bigger fish to fry, though, and so does Nuno DeAngeles, street philosopher and would-be crime lord,
who's gotten himself tucked away on Rikers Island and finds that his "only ally now is Rene Descartes,"
inasmuch as Cartesian dualism allows his mind to flow freely out into the boroughs to work mischief until
his body can catch up. Parts of the story are seemingly the standard aspirational sports rah-rah, but turned
on their head, and the caper that plays out alongside Nina's championship run, laced with philosophy and
cornerbacks, is a blast to watch unfold.
A whirling vortex of a novel, confusing, misdirecting, and surprising--and a lot of fun.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"de la Pava, Sergio: LOST EMPRESS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d404c877.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700559

QUOTED: "Inventive and unconventional, de la Pava's second novel is chock-full of surprises."

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Personae
Miriam Tuliao
Booklist.
110.3 (Oct. 1, 2013): p32+.
COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Personae. By Sergio de la Pava. Oct. 2013. 224p. Univ. of Chicago, paper, $17 (9780226078991).
Personae is an artful, ambitious--albeit enigmatic--sampling of slice-and-dice fiction blending mystery,
musical theory, existential drama, aphorisms, and numbered lists. The book opens with the gifted detective
Helen Tame reporting on the death of a 100-plus-year-old John Doe in a Manhattan apartment. Her
investigation leads to the discovery of an odd collection of writings scribbled along the margins of a TV
Guide, in a marbled notebook, and on a roll of paper towels. Inventive and unconventional, de la Pava's
second novel is chock-full of surprises, touching on the absurd (a scholarly article starts amusingly, "In the
beginning Man had fur. And his stomach hurt"); referencing artists (Milton, Dickinson, Glenn Gould) and
pop culture iconography (a spongy, yellow Twinkie; a laminated lunch menu; a Cuban sandwich);
proffering abstract generalizations ("character is foundational"); asking probing philosophical questions
("Are we to believe that all this--Life--is a mere question of geography?"); and proposing poetic invitations
("immerse yourself, your self, in the River and wade in its water").--Miriam Tuliao
Tuliao, Miriam
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Tuliao, Miriam. "Personae." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2013, p. 32+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A348978722/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dd0a62a2.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A348978722

QUOTED: "Game readers should have as much fun with this clever experiment as the author seems to have had inventing it."

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Personae
Publishers Weekly.
260.33 (Aug. 19, 2013): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2013 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Personae
Sergio De La Pava. Univ. of Chicago, $17 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-0-226-07899-1
De La Pava's (A Naked Singularity) shape-shifting latest is, in part, an upbeat existentialist comedy. We
meet Detective Helen Tame (in a chapter titled "Our Heroine and Her Work," no less) as she investigates a
crime scene, before diving into the writings Tame discovers at the victim's house. Notebook scribblings
include pronouncements against "filling [writing] with allusive arcana for dimwit professors." Next, a short
story depicts a professor musing about loss and posterity as, during a swim, the tide carries him farther and
farther from shore. Then, a play, making up almost half the book, presents personae with descriptions like
"A person," "Another person," "The first person plural"; sometimes they alternate identities (Adam and
Not-Adam are one and the same). The characters are trapped, a la No Exit, in an unidentifiable "here,"
debating Sartrean questions about where, who, and why they are, misunderstanding and echoing one
another at a hilarious, absurd pitch. But then the novel changes tone, which is appropriate considering it's
already run the gamut of perspectives, genres, and techniques. The conclusions for Helen and the victim,
and especially the novella, which wraps up the book, are darker, and more touching. Game readers should
have as much fun with this clever experiment as the author seems to have had inventing it, and be
challenged by his more serious and troubling questions. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Personae." Publishers Weekly, 19 Aug. 2013, p. 38. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A340422582/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=eeac151a.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A340422582

QUOTED: "ambitious, inspired and always humorous novel of ideas."

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De La Pava, Sergio. A Naked Singularity
Jack Shreve
Library Journal.
137.12 (July 1, 2012): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
De La Pava, Sergio. A Naked Singularity.
Univ. of Chicago. 2012. c.698p.
ISBN 9780226141794. pap. $18. F
De La Pava's ambitious, inspired and always humorous novel of ideas reflects the cynicism and worldweariness
of our civic and cultural life. The son of Colombian immigrants, protagonist Casi is a New York
public defender who has never lost a case--until he does, and then he compensates by taking a detour into
the realm of what is not at all legal. Interwoven within this gripping legal thriller are meditations of the
nature of television, the Human Genome Project, the career of boxer Wilfredo Benitez, and the gruesome
nature of Alabama's death row. Many of the 33 chapters are introduced by quotations from the likes of
Galileo, Rilke, Bacon, Descartes, and Wittgenstein. VERDICT Although this work was self-published in
2008, it was discovered and republished by the University of Chicago and is now inviting comparisons with
Pynchon and Dostoyevsky. For readers who love the challenge of intellectual fiction.--Jack Shreve,
Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
Shreve, Jack
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Shreve, Jack. "De La Pava, Sergio. A Naked Singularity." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 74. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323858141/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1ed61f55. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A323858141

QUOTED: "one of those sprawling, hyperverbal stream-of-consciousness epics that sometimes seem infatuated with their own cleverness but ... capture something profound."

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A Naked Singularity
Brendan Driscoll
Booklist.
108.15 (Apr. 1, 2012): p28+.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
A Naked Singularity.
By Sergio de la Pava.
May 2012. 696p. Univ. of Chicago, paper, $18
(9780226141794).
In a narrow yet vital sense, this is a crime novel about one Casi, a precocious young public defender who,
beginning to strain under the weight of his profession and his perfectionism, loses his first case and happens
upon the opportunity to get away with the perfect crime. It is also one of those sprawling, hyperverbal
stream-of-consciousness epics that sometimes seem infatuated with their own cleverness but in their best
moments manage to capture something profound about our sprawling hyperverbal stream-of-consciousness
world. The story is anchored by notes of gritty realism-de la Pava clearly has an insider's knowledge of the
Manhattan criminal-court system--but Casi and his interlocutors are as likely to veer into digressive
philosophical banter about Hume or 7he Honeymooners as they are to throw around the legal jargon you'd
hear at an arraignment. There are some hilarious moments and more than a few heartbreaking ones
involving a mentally handicapped man on Alabama's death row.
Although David Foster Wallace fans will likely notice his influence on de la Pava, the better comparison
may be to Evan Dara's The Lost Scrapbook (1998), which, like this book, developed a major following after
originally being self-published.--Brendan Driscoll
Driscoll, Brendan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Driscoll, Brendan. "A Naked Singularity." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2012, p. 28+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A286390570/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8d86e9c8.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A286390570

QUOTED: "Its crazy, contemporary voice is so compelling and audacious that plodding through it to the end has its rewards."

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A Naked Singularity
Publishers Weekly.
259.10 (Mar. 5, 2012): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Naked Singularity
Sergio De La Pava. Univ. of Chicago, $18 trade paper (696p) ISBN 978-0-226-14179-4
Originally self-published in 2008, this leviathan novel is not for the fainthearted, although its crazy,
contemporary voice is so compelling and audacious that plodding through it to the end has its rewards.
Narrator Casi is a brilliant young public defender whose hilarious interactions with criminals and colleagues
are so absurd, and justice so often fleeting, that an existential angst quickly takes hold, morality is turned on
its head, and nothing much is funny anymore. Plot strands abound, among them Casi's defense of a
terminally ill drug addict, his advocacy of a Skittles-loving death row inmate whose execution might be a
better fate than life in his dark cell, and a fellow lawyer who dreams up the perfect crime, which, despite its
implausibility, gives the story momentum. Casi is humanized in scenes with his extended Colombian
family--complete with a mute niece and a thoughtful sister--and with his friends, although his neighbors in
Brooklyn are little more than surreal mouthpieces for the author's philosophical musings. In Casi's twisted
postmodern world, the justice system is a farce, the heroes mostly aligned with the accused, and a person
can care desperately but have so little power that his life becomes heavy enough to collapse into itself.
(May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Naked Singularity." Publishers Weekly, 5 Mar. 2012, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A282512495/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=32c751e5.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A282512495

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Sergio de la Pava. A Naked Singularity
Tim Feeney
The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
31.2 (Summer 2011): p198+.
COPYRIGHT 2011 Review of Contemporary Fiction
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/review
Full Text:
Sergio de la Pava. A Naked Singularity. Amante, 2008. 689 pp. Paper: $23.99.
The behind-the-scenes story here is that de la Pava self-published this novel through print-on-demand
service Xlibris and has been slowly sending copies to potentially interested parties, many of whom have
reported back with modifiers usually reserved for best-of-the-decade lists and comparisons to authors of
exalted sprawling bricklike novels. Some of these reviewers are overexcited, perhaps at the ostensible
novelty of a do-it-yourself author worth reading, but their praise isn't too far off the mark, and the
comparisons aren't either. A Naked Singularity 's narrator is Casi, a twenty-four-year-old public defender in
Manhattan, who gives us tour-de-force dialogues between himself and his clients and colleagues, torturous
philosophizing with his college-age neighbors, a gripping biography of half-forgotten boxer Wilfred
Benitez, depictions of a citywide blackout during the coldest winter in memory, day-by-day accounts of the
public's gleeful fascination with a horrific child-abduction case, an inside look at pro bono work on a deathrow
case involving a mentally challenged inmate, and the proverbial "much more." Casi's voice is the
combination of brashness and world-weary humanity you'd find on a cynic who'd been scratched to reveal
the disappointed idealist beneath. About a third of the way through, something close to a main plotline
blurps slowly to the surface, one involving a huge upcoming drug deal and the various interests surrounding
it, which develops into its own tachycardiac narrative amid everything else. The whole feels like The
Recognitions as legal thriller, a glorious mess with dashes of Powers, minor Pynchon, and White Noise ,
among many others. It's both that good and not--the novel could've benefited from a serious editorial
scrubbing, and while few scenes are entirely cuttable, many could've been trimmed substantially. But all the
same, in its ambition and shortcomings and shaggy glory, A Naked Singularity is perhaps most reminiscent
of The Broom of the System. So that bodes well.
Feeney, Tim
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Feeney, Tim. "Sergio de la Pava. A Naked Singularity." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 31, no. 2,
2011, p. 198+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A273789283/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e9cadd2e. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A273789283

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[STAR]De La Pava, Sergio. Lost Empress
Henry Bankhead
Xpress Reviews.
(June 8, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
Full Text:
[STAR]De La Pava, Sergio. Lost Empress. Pantheon. May 2018. 640p. ISBN 9781524747220. $29.95; ebk.
ISBN 9781524747237. F
Set mainly in Paterson, NJ, and on New York's Rikers Island, this multifaceted tour de force from De La
Pava (A Naked Singularity) waxes both hilarious and tragic in equal measure as it oscillates among several
fascinating and interrelated characters. Football genius Nina Gill, witty scion of NFL aristocracy, the new
owner of the Indoor Football League's (IFL) Paterson Pork, is using the IFL to challenge the dominance of
the NFL. She is joined by Dia Nouveau, her sidekick and also the former partner of Nuno DeAngeles,
currently incarcerated at Rikers. Sharon Seaborg is a 911 operator, haunted by her experiences, whose
handling of the call from a fatal accident provides a tragic counterpoint to the more comic aspect of Nina's
and Dia's shenanigans. Sharon's ex-husband, Hugh, a guard at Rikers, and a slew of other minor characters
add leavening. Sprinkled throughout are supporting metatextual materials including a 911 transcript and a
Rikers Island Inmate Rule Book, as well as relevant medical and legal documents.
Verdict De La Pava's compelling narrative poses some deep questions, e.g, Can some murders be
justifiable? And can the Paterson Pork prevail against the NFL? The result is a powerful statement about
values; highly recommended.--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bankhead, Henry. "[STAR]De La Pava, Sergio. Lost Empress." Xpress Reviews, 8 June 2018. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242996/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dff7f039. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242996

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A Naked Singularity
Small Press Bookwatch.
(May 2009):
COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
A Naked Singularity
Sergio De La Pava
Amonte Press
110 Wall Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10005
c/o Xlibris Press
1663 Liberty Drive, Suite 200, Bloomington, IN 47403
9781436341998, $23.99, www.xlibris.com
What's behind the nature of selfishness? "A Naked Singularity" is a novel about boxer Wilfred Benitez.
Using Benitez as the stage, author Sergio De La Pava writes a story that gives readers something to think
about. Speaking on the nature of evil, human nature, psychology, Hispanic life, and much more, Pava picks
at the readers mind as the story rolls on and hopes to leave them wiser having read it. "A Naked
Singularity" is a fine and highly recommended read.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Naked Singularity." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2009. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199588765/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=83492be0.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A199588765

Jonathan, Dee. "Offensive Formation." The New Yorker, 7 May 2018, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539669723/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1fb66260. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Tick, tock; Maximalist fiction." The Economist, 5 May 2018, p. 82(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A537178288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4bac0e04. Accessed 15 July 2018. De La Pava, Sergio. "A Naked Singularity." New Statesman, 13 Sept. 2013, p. 58. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A344840615/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=06e4ce5c. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Review: FICTION: The law is an ass: Stuart Kelly enjoys the raggedy brilliance of a publishing sensation: A Naked Singularity by Sergio de la Pava 876pp, MacLehose Press, pounds 18.99." Guardian [London, England], 31 Aug. 2013, p. 13. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A341437055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6bd6e752. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Review: FICTION: Between Sartre and Stoppard: Edward Docx isn't sure this is a novel - but he likes it: Personae by Sergio De La Pava (224pp, Chicago, pounds 12)." Guardian [London, England], 23 Nov. 2013, p. 12. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A350137737/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2667398. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Lost Empress." Publishers Weekly, 2 Apr. 2018, p. 41+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A533555585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "de la Pava, Sergio: LOST EMPRESS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700559/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Tuliao, Miriam. "Personae." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2013, p. 32+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A348978722/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Personae." Publishers Weekly, 19 Aug. 2013, p. 38. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A340422582/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Shreve, Jack. "De La Pava, Sergio. A Naked Singularity." Library Journal, 1 July 2012, p. 74. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A323858141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Driscoll, Brendan. "A Naked Singularity." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2012, p. 28+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A286390570/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "A Naked Singularity." Publishers Weekly, 5 Mar. 2012, p. 47. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A282512495/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Feeney, Tim. "Sergio de la Pava. A Naked Singularity." The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, p. 198+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A273789283/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Bankhead, Henry. "[STAR]De La Pava, Sergio. Lost Empress." Xpress Reviews, 8 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242996/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "A Naked Singularity." Small Press Bookwatch, May 2009. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A199588765/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

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