Early in Mike Powell’s slender debut novel, New Paltz, New Paltz, the protagonist establishes his affinity for escalators. “That feeling of moving without moving,” he remarks, “Like how an angel might move.” This divine eclipse with the material world is one of several instances in which the novel briefly punctures its own reality–one that traverses bingo nights and dog parks, a Fourth of July party. It is more than just the mystical and the mundane butting heads, however. As you read it, New Paltz, New Paltz, begins to feel more like a procedure in trying to ascertain what even can be considered ‘mundane’ or ‘mystical’ to begin with, and how we might discriminate between the two. The effect is dizzying while striving for clarity, like being taken through a washing machine cycle with some acid for detergent.
Set in New York, New York, sometime around the late 2000s or early 2010s, the novel follows Ben, our unreliable narrator who also happens to be a fact checker at a gossip magazine. There is a sense Ben wishes to practice his fact-checking on other, more abstract aspects of the human condition. From the very opening page, there is as much a longing to grapple with consensus or truth as there is a skepticism to either’s existence: as quickly as Ben qualifies he fell in love, he then clarifies he only thinks he fell in love, since “nobody comes around to confirm one way or the other.” Much of the novel resides in this
purgatorial headspace of not knowing, of not being able to progress logically until one gets to the bottom of a feeling, desire, or conviction. The subsequent paralysis is punctuated by the love interest in question—Lucy—who, unlike the uncanny, divine eclipses Ben observes, is able to force some actual answers out of him. These instances provide some of the best and funniest passages of the novel, particularly in cases where Ben is pushed into a place of committing to something conceptually: “She interrupted one of the letters to ask if I considered myself a feminist. I said no, because I never felt I belonged to anything. She rolled her eyes and said I couldn’t be that stupid.”
And yet, to say this is a novel about a love interest doesn’t feel quite true. Unlike your standard love- interest narrative, New Paltz, New Paltz spends a fair share of its brief innings with other fleeting connections Ben sees as significant. These include Hakim (a boy he befriends at a chlorinated lake), Dr. Khadivi (a therapist he sees who later turns out to be a cowboy). A neighbour who needs help fixing her internet, a new hire at his work whom he feels a mix of resentment and sympathy for. On the one hand, the time the narrative spends with these characters could be viewed as its unwillingness to discriminate between actual connections (Lucy) and other, more fleeting ones. But part of the novel’s draw is this spiralling ambivalence it forces upon us: Does Ben even like Lucy? What moved him to see a therapist in the first place? These are questions the narrative doesn’t answer directly, but ones we are forced to infer from its protagonist’s mechanical way of rendering what he does and doesn’t view as desirable. In the material world, this comes easier to him: he can discriminate, with confidence, the drinking fountains in Manhattan thanks to the temperature of their water, while also being able to tell whether a party is for him or not based on the particular volume of the dance music being played. In the case of life’s bigger questions, however, this logical procedure comes undone. Arguably, this is the relatable irony of the novel: despite his concerted effort to try to locate a cause and effect in the world around him, Ben is largely a living and breathing non-sequitur, taking us from the museum to the chlorinated lake to a bar where people drink shandies from styrofoam cups and shoot digital deer on a buck-hunting game.
While New Paltz, New Paltz feels to come from a time in New York many may view with nostalgia today, the debilitating and self-defeating irony that burdens Ben feels contemporary. For some readers, there is potential that this purgatorial purview Powell lays out may feel all too familiar, with Ben being another protagonist bogged down by an iteration of the capitalist hellscape à la Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, or Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel. But Powell avoids letting New Paltz, New Paltz ecosystem of inertia consume the prose. The narrative is refreshingly honest at times, balancing Ben’s curt and absurdist detachment towards urban minutiae with moments of introspective clarity. How he comes upon these moments is at the unpredictable discretion of this slim but tangential novel: “I wanted that sometimes. To know and know I knew,” he muses after having a conversation about the cost of a shirt sold by a Swedish menswear company—a shirt he later verifies by physically visiting the store. A shirt he then buys and quickly stains. A stained shirt that he works out, through his $28 an hour job, cost him many perfect hours, as though such hours are a scarce commodity to him.
New Paltz, New Paltz is more than these small-scale tragedies, however. Rather than peel back layer upon layer of irony, Powell presents us with a character who is genuinely trying (in his hyper-fixated mode) to figure it out, broaching a kind of sincerity that feels somewhat fresh again in 2025. In our ever-increasing hyperindividualized world, the narrator in New Paltz, New Paltz provides some curiously radical tonic: “What if,” he says, “the self waiting to be realized was a self I didn’t want to be?”
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New Paltz, New Paltz
by Mike Powell
Double Negative, 126 p.