The Meat and Spirit Plan
A SEARING COMING-OF-AGE NOVEL SET TO THE MUSIC OF CHANCE.
In lyric, diamond-cut prose, Selah Saterstrom revisits the mythic, dead-end Southern town of Beau Repose. This time, the story follows a strung-out American teenager influenced by heavy metal, inspired by Ginger Rogers, hell-bent on self-destruction, and more intelligent than anyone around her realizes. She is forced into rehab and private school, and her life, at least on the surface, changes course, eventually leading to theology studies in Scotland. But as the feverish St. Vitus’s dance of her adolescence morphs into slow-motion inertia abroad, an illness brings her home again—to face the legacy of pain she left behind and to find a way to become the lead in a dance of her own creation.
An heir to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, Saterstrom soars above the traditional boundaries of the American novel with “exquisite, cut-to-the-quick language” (Raleigh News & Observer) that makes her novels “impossible to put down.” Spare, raw, and transcendent, Saterstrom’s unflinching examination of modern-day Dixie and contemporary adolescence lights up the dark corners of the American experience.
REVIEWS
Saterstrom’s coming-of-age narrative is tough and unblinking, and the moments of clarity provide immense satisfaction. —Publisher’s Weekly
Like an experimentally inclined Annie Proulx, Saterstrom tersely renders the effects of social violence on individual lives . . . the effect is shattering and transcendent. —Modern Times Bookstore newsletter
What Saterstrom achieves here is really rare: it’s moving, entertaining, challenging, serious, and deeply, almost unbearably funny. —Scott Bryan Wilson, Quarterly Conversation
praise
The Meat and Spirit Plan is ferocious and dazzling, the work of a savage poet. Every scene is a hard polished gem of raunch and revelation. Strung together they build a force of piercing tenderness. It’s an impressive achievement, and a real pleasure to read. —Katherine Dunn
The Meat and Spirit Plan is simultaneously unspeakably funny and devastating—the way Artaud is funny and devastating. It is also wildly entertaining, exultant, and sublime—it's razors tempered with lucency.” —Rikki Ducornet