Abstract

Rumble Hill is a novel set in the future in a small town in the middle of a desert where each year townspeople vote on the ten happiest and ten saddest people in the town. These lists dominate the town’s collective imagination. The unnamable narrator has just been named the fourth saddest townsperson and is distraught. He has lost his job working on a tube that snakes through the desert delivering water to the town. He spends his days answering questionnaires that the town sends him about the nature of his sadness. His life changes when he meets the town’s painter, who paints portraits of the ten happiest and ten saddest townspeople each year for the town’s records, but is creatively blocked. Together, the narrator and the painter decide to subvert the town’s happy/sad binary, plunging the town into chaos.

Rumble Hill is a novel of skepticism towards language and narrative. It examines the power of naming and styles of expression. It is a novel about climate change and environmental estrangement. It’s about the ability of stories and jokes to share otherwise non-communicable truths. It draws inspiration from the clipped, uncanny style of the English Standard Version translation of the parables of Jesus, the unfinished novels by Franz Kafka, and Robert Walser’s wandering, despondent first-person narrators.