GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER, by Joseph Earl Thomas
Early one morning my husband asked me if I was enjoying “God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer,” the book I’d spent the last few days reading around the house, sometimes with a look of delight, sometimes laughing or on the verge of tears, sometimes with a look of extreme frustration. “Ask me later today,” I told him, unable to process if “enjoyment” was what I was feeling as I made my way through Joseph Earl Thomas’s debut novel.
The book — which comes after Thomas’s 2023 memoir, “Sink” — invites readers into the life, mind and labor of Joseph, a father, writer, gamer, former Army medic and current graduate student in North Philadelphia who is working as an emergency department tech at a local hospital. The narrative follows Joseph (the author or a character with a seed of the author inside? I think Thomas would like us to question their boundaries) over the course of a long work shift. As the day goes on, it seems Joseph has some personal connection to every other patient he meets, including a man who used to beat him up in middle school and friends of his parents.
That’s the framework of the story, but the real setting of “Otis Spunkmeyer” is Joseph’s mind. He is constantly and rigorously thinking — about what occurs throughout his day; about the general state of his life; about his concerns over money, child support, love, connection, poverty and racism; about his past; about a book he is trying to write; and more. And so, we flash from Joseph’s present back to his time in the military with his best friend, Ray, to scenes of his life with his four children, to his previous relationships and previous work shifts, and to recollections conjured by the steady stream of kin that keep coming through the hospital doors. Here, memory is just as urgent a landscape as the trauma and boredom of the emergency room.
So was I enjoying it? Not at first. I could sense that Thomas was writing with a fierce pen and I knew that I was poring over prose unlike anything I’d previously encountered, prose that felt at times unruly but always athletic in its meta pursuit of clarity. During a conversation between Joseph and his siblings, he thinks: “Was I lying already? Do I keep or leave the gerunds? Is this how I actually talk? Why does this feel better than success? My family makes me hyperconscious.” I knew I was experiencing moments of honesty that left me embarrassed by their vision and resonance. And I knew, about a third of the way into the story, that I was slowly falling for Joseph’s stream of consciousness. But I wasn’t yet convinced.
That’s because of the mode of storytelling. This is a book that’s not afraid of a tangent. It’s a risky quality, one that may prompt some readers to dismiss “Otis Spunkmeyer” as rambly, as I did at first. But there is a great deal of genius in the novel’s sprawl. The narrative’s wildness is a sign of Thomas’s ambition as he tries to render the chaos of the human mind. Through the narration, Thomas is attempting to capture the psyche’s messy shifts between focus and distraction as it is pulled by a taste, a smell, a text, an old pain, a new grief. In Joseph’s case, to ramble is to submit to the gravity of thought.
Anyone who has ever experienced a mental spiral will know that getting lost in your mind is exhausting. So Thomas is asking for a fair amount of trust from the reader when he sends us into the labyrinth of Joseph’s consciousness. But the pace seems to steady as the novel unfolds, even as Joseph’s physical and emotional labor intensifies. In the end, the narrative approach pays off fabulously, especially in the second half of the book, when Joseph’s addiction-plagued mother, his estranged father and Ray enter the hospital and thus into Joseph’s mind’s eye. These characters, and the power of their intimacies with Joseph, disquiet a protagonist already struggling to keep it together. His attempts to love them, connect with them and keep them alive unravel him, culminating in an ending that is absurd, heartbreaking and pitch perfect.
Had I not followed Thomas, had I kept resisting his prose rather than yield to its funk and possibility, I would have missed out on fully appreciating the breathtaking canvas of Joseph’s inner life. Thomas loads his sentences and scenes with so much detail that up close they may feel abstruse, at least initially. But like the work of Jackson Pollock, the novel reveals itself the longer one spends time with it. Keep looking, the chaos will start to show its pattern, its rhythm, its dimension and its awe-inspiring color.
GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER | By Joseph Earl Thomas | Grand Central Publishing | 229 pp. | $28
