Yoram walks around in torn underwear, he stands on his desk, and he worries. He worries about the notes from other men that he finds in his gentile wife’s pockets (“Save Me, Julia”). He worries about his bizarre sexual predilections and how they might derail his wife’s desires to have a baby. He worries that his brother-in-law’s gastrointestinal disease is leading to a morbid end. But most of all, Yoram worries about the novel his agent demanded and he can’t seem to write. Instead of writing a novel, he strings together his quirky essays and stories — ranging in topic from growing up as a Jew in Georgia, to the tale of a futuristic superhero trying to save Earth from being destroyed by an alien race that has already taken over Uranus. By stringing together these stories, Yoram thinks he’s outsmarted his agent. But as the structure of Yoram’s novel falls apart, so does his life. It all shifts when he meets a Palestinian man in the hospital waiting room. This man becomes “too big for the novel” and so Yoram begins the novel again, taking the reader along on his transformation.

Unlike much meta-fiction, which can rely on cleverness at the expense of emotional depth, A Brilliant Novel in the Works makes the “meta” aspect an organic part of the story, drawing the reader into the emotional struggles of the narrator and author.

Here are some excerpts from the novel:

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