Progress - by Max Lawton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the wake of a big and strange night out in New York City, two young men rise to find cataclysm and must make a modern-day odyssey through a dying America in this dazzling debut novel from a significant talent

It's October, 2020. On a Saturday night, a college sophomore and his best friend engage in an unexpected act of sexual experimentation with their female acquaintance. The next day, a prolonged series of crashes heard through a dormitory window heralds the end of something. In simple terms: all wheels stop spinning and all screens stop shining, nothing turns on, nothing runs. Afraid of this new world and the people they share a city with, the two boys make the precipitous decision to begin walking from their place of study in NYC to the narrator's home in Ohio. As they walk, the formerly platonic contours of their relationship give way to something else. Maneuvering across the concrete skin of America, the boys slumber in the empty belly of a dead country in blissful ignorance of the threat hanging over them. Progress is about what happens when rules change. Conceived of and started before the pandemic, this novel is a particularly relevant read in our current historical moment. Written with the chilly object-fixation of Peter Handke and the wry humor of Will Self, Progress is The Road meets Call Me By Your Name with a dash of Dhalgren. It is a transmission both awful and enormous from the heart of the new American age.

Review Quotes

"Max Lawton's writing explores the borderlands of culture and society... his prose is a true gift."
--Vladimir Sorokin

"The novel is, I think, remarkable: the JG Ballard of The Drowned World and Crash meets the William Burroughs of Queer and The Wild Boys at the place of dead roads - in a pallid world of nice niceness, this is a much gamier proposition than most contemporary fiction... I don't know - I haven't endorsed any fiction for decades now, in any way, so perhaps my opinion will count for something - I appreciate now is a difficult time for launching new and challengi.ng writers, but I believe Max is at the beginning of a substantial career"
--Will Self

"It's a love story, sure, but so much more - Philistine horror and Homeric epic delivered via a romp of hypnotically volatile prose by the formidable Max Lawton."
--Joy Williams

About the Author

Max Lawton is a writer, musician, and translator. He is currently working in close collaboration with Vladimir Sorokin to publish all of his untranslated works in English. Apart from what has already been published, three more books are forthcoming from NYRB Classics and four more are forthcoming from Dalkey Archive. Max is also currently working on translations of works by Michael Lentz, Antonio Moresco, Stefano D'Arrigo, Alberto Laiseca, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Eduard Limonov, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Max's debut novel Progress is coming out with Verso in 2027. His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Harper's, The Baffler, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Joyland.