Arts Alive San Antonio

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN

The Slip by Lucas Schaefer   
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

             
            On August 8, 1998, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein disappeared. A troubled soul, he had left his home in Newton, Massachusetts to spend the summer with his uncle, Bob Alexander, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He passes his days in Texas working as an assistant at a nursing home and working out at a boxing gym. He also repeatedly, compulsively, calls a telephone sex line, where he establishes a personal relationship with a Slavic-sounding voice that goes by the name of Sasha Semyonova.

In 1998, when it was still possible to find a convenient place to park and an inexpensive place to live, Austin was in the process of being transformed from a somnolent college town into a pricey, high-tech metropolis. In his sprawling first novel, The Slip, Lucas Schaefer examines the drama of transition – in a city, a culture, and an adolescent. The internet was just starting to change lives, and the complexities of gender identity were just beginning to be acknowledged.

At the heart of the story is the mystery of what happened to Nathaniel – not only where he vanished to, but how he was transformed. During his summer in Austin, Nathaniel becomes so fixated on David Dalice, the charming Haitian immigrant who is his supervisor and mentor at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, that he tries to emulate him in every way. He adopts David’s speech patterns, follows him to the boxing gym, and even tries, chemically, to turn his own white skin black. More than a decade after Nathaniel’s disappearance, Uncle Bob is sent an anonymous clue in the mail.

Nathaniel is absent from most of the novel, but Schaefer populates it with many, many other striking characters. They include a teenager, Charles Rex, who, of ambiguous gender, insists on being known as “X”; a zealous rookie cop named Miriam Lopez; professional boxer Alexis Cepeda, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border disguised as a clown; and Belinda St. James, who left Sweetwater, Texas for the skin trade and transitioned into phone sex. But the most remarkable character in The Slip is the city of Austin, whose familiar landmarks such as Scholz Garten, Hippie Hollow, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, and Hyde Park serve as backdrop to the drama.

Austin is course the seat of Texas government, and, given Schaefer’s prodigious ambitions, it is a wonder that state politicians do not intrude, as they do in such other ATX novels as Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, Karen Olsson’s Waterloo, and Lawrence Wright’s Mr. Texas. Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, where many of the characters, including homeless Ed Hooley, who lives there, converge, is fictional, but it is described as “an Austin institution: pros and amateurs jab-jab-jabbing alongside clean-cut Dell executives and retired hippies, a jumble of humanity all sweating it out at once.”

This cross-section of humanity is jumbled across almost five hundred pages of sometimes arresting prose. In a published interview, Schaefer revealed that the novel began as short stories he was working on while earning his M.F.A. from UT Austin. And the finished novel, which it took twelve years to write, still seems like short fictions awkwardly stitched together, or else a series of trailers for half a dozen separate novels. Some of the minor characters cry out for further development. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi, a vociferous retired psychologist who belatedly asserts her Italian identity during her reluctant residence at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, is one. Another is Pat Spackleman, one of several middle-class Jewish women enrolled in Austin’s Citizen Police Academy.

The perspiration at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym oozes out on the page, as does the sweat equity Schaefer put into this epic. During twelve years of rumination, he multiplied subplots and flashbacks and inserted an alternative history. He weighs in on the sex trade, criminal justice, racism, illegal immigration, and the bittersweet science of boxing. He continually switches the narrative point of view and offers side trips to Massachusetts, Kenya, and the Mexican border. Schaefer confirms William Blake’s insight that: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

——————————————————————————————————————The Slip; by Lucas Schaefer; Simon & Schuster; 2025; $29.99The Slip by Lucas Schaefer   
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

             
            On August 8, 1998, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein disappeared. A troubled soul, he had left his home in Newton, Massachusetts to spend the summer with his uncle, Bob Alexander, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He passes his days in Texas working as an assistant at a nursing home and working out at a boxing gym. He also repeatedly, compulsively, calls a telephone sex line, where he establishes a personal relationship with a Slavic-sounding voice that goes by the name of Sasha Semyonova.

In 1998, when it was still possible to find a convenient place to park and an inexpensive place to live, Austin was in the process of being transformed from a somnolent college town into a pricey, high-tech metropolis. In his sprawling first novel, The Slip, Lucas Schaefer examines the drama of transition – in a city, a culture, and an adolescent. The internet was just starting to change lives, and the complexities of gender identity were just beginning to be acknowledged.

At the heart of the story is the mystery of what happened to Nathaniel – not only where he vanished to, but how he was transformed. During his summer in Austin, Nathaniel becomes so fixated on David Dalice, the charming Haitian immigrant who is his supervisor and mentor at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, that he tries to emulate him in every way. He adopts David’s speech patterns, follows him to the boxing gym, and even tries, chemically, to turn his own white skin black. More than a decade after Nathaniel’s disappearance, Uncle Bob is sent an anonymous clue in the mail.

Nathaniel is absent from most of the novel, but Schaefer populates it with many, many other striking characters. They include a teenager, Charles Rex, who, of ambiguous gender, insists on being known as “X”; a zealous rookie cop named Miriam Lopez; professional boxer Alexis Cepeda, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border disguised as a clown; and Belinda St. James, who left Sweetwater, Texas for the skin trade and transitioned into phone sex. But the most remarkable character in The Slip is the city of Austin, whose familiar landmarks such as Scholz Garten, Hippie Hollow, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, and Hyde Park serve as backdrop to the drama.

Austin is course the seat of Texas government, and, given Schaefer’s prodigious ambitions, it is a wonder that state politicians do not intrude, as they do in such other ATX novels as Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, Karen Olsson’s Waterloo, and Lawrence Wright’s Mr. Texas. Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, where many of the characters, including homeless Ed Hooley, who lives there, converge, is fictional, but it is described as “an Austin institution: pros and amateurs jab-jab-jabbing alongside clean-cut Dell executives and retired hippies, a jumble of humanity all sweating it out at once.”

This cross-section of humanity is jumbled across almost five hundred pages of sometimes arresting prose. In a published interview, Schaefer revealed that the novel began as short stories he was working on while earning his M.F.A. from UT Austin. And the finished novel, which it took twelve years to write, still seems like short fictions awkwardly stitched together, or else a series of trailers for half a dozen separate novels. Some of the minor characters cry out for further development. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi, a vociferous retired psychologist who belatedly asserts her Italian identity during her reluctant residence at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, is one. Another is Pat Spackleman, one of several middle-class Jewish women enrolled in Austin’s Citizen Police Academy.

The perspiration at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym oozes out on the page, as does the sweat equity Schaefer put into this epic. During twelve years of rumination, he multiplied subplots and flashbacks and inserted an alternative history. He weighs in on the sex trade, criminal justice, racism, illegal immigration, and the bittersweet science of boxing. He continually switches the narrative point of view and offers side trips to Massachusetts, Kenya, and the Mexican border. Schaefer confirms William Blake’s insight that: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

——————————————————————————————————————The Slip; by Lucas Schaefer; Simon & Schuster; 2025; $29.99The Slip by Lucas Schaefer   
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

             
            On August 8, 1998, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein disappeared. A troubled soul, he had left his home in Newton, Massachusetts to spend the summer with his uncle, Bob Alexander, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He passes his days in Texas working as an assistant at a nursing home and working out at a boxing gym. He also repeatedly, compulsively, calls a telephone sex line, where he establishes a personal relationship with a Slavic-sounding voice that goes by the name of Sasha Semyonova.

In 1998, when it was still possible to find a convenient place to park and an inexpensive place to live, Austin was in the process of being transformed from a somnolent college town into a pricey, high-tech metropolis. In his sprawling first novel, The Slip, Lucas Schaefer examines the drama of transition – in a city, a culture, and an adolescent. The internet was just starting to change lives, and the complexities of gender identity were just beginning to be acknowledged.

At the heart of the story is the mystery of what happened to Nathaniel – not only where he vanished to, but how he was transformed. During his summer in Austin, Nathaniel becomes so fixated on David Dalice, the charming Haitian immigrant who is his supervisor and mentor at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, that he tries to emulate him in every way. He adopts David’s speech patterns, follows him to the boxing gym, and even tries, chemically, to turn his own white skin black. More than a decade after Nathaniel’s disappearance, Uncle Bob is sent an anonymous clue in the mail.

Nathaniel is absent from most of the novel, but Schaefer populates it with many, many other striking characters. They include a teenager, Charles Rex, who, of ambiguous gender, insists on being known as “X”; a zealous rookie cop named Miriam Lopez; professional boxer Alexis Cepeda, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border disguised as a clown; and Belinda St. James, who left Sweetwater, Texas for the skin trade and transitioned into phone sex. But the most remarkable character in The Slip is the city of Austin, whose familiar landmarks such as Scholz Garten, Hippie Hollow, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, and Hyde Park serve as backdrop to the drama.

Austin is course the seat of Texas government, and, given Schaefer’s prodigious ambitions, it is a wonder that state politicians do not intrude, as they do in such other ATX novels as Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, Karen Olsson’s Waterloo, and Lawrence Wright’s Mr. Texas. Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, where many of the characters, including homeless Ed Hooley, who lives there, converge, is fictional, but it is described as “an Austin institution: pros and amateurs jab-jab-jabbing alongside clean-cut Dell executives and retired hippies, a jumble of humanity all sweating it out at once.”

This cross-section of humanity is jumbled across almost five hundred pages of sometimes arresting prose. In a published interview, Schaefer revealed that the novel began as short stories he was working on while earning his M.F.A. from UT Austin. And the finished novel, which it took twelve years to write, still seems like short fictions awkwardly stitched together, or else a series of trailers for half a dozen separate novels. Some of the minor characters cry out for further development. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi, a vociferous retired psychologist who belatedly asserts her Italian identity during her reluctant residence at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, is one. Another is Pat Spackleman, one of several middle-class Jewish women enrolled in Austin’s Citizen Police Academy.

The perspiration at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym oozes out on the page, as does the sweat equity Schaefer put into this epic. During twelve years of rumination, he multiplied subplots and flashbacks and inserted an alternative history. He weighs in on the sex trade, criminal justice, racism, illegal immigration, and the bittersweet science of boxing. He continually switches the narrative point of view and offers side trips to Massachusetts, Kenya, and the Mexican border. Schaefer confirms William Blake’s insight that: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

——————————————————————————————————————The Slip; by Lucas Schaefer; Simon & Schuster; 2025; $29.99The Slip by Lucas Schaefer   
Reviewed by Steven G. Kellman

             
            On August 8, 1998, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein disappeared. A troubled soul, he had left his home in Newton, Massachusetts to spend the summer with his uncle, Bob Alexander, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He passes his days in Texas working as an assistant at a nursing home and working out at a boxing gym. He also repeatedly, compulsively, calls a telephone sex line, where he establishes a personal relationship with a Slavic-sounding voice that goes by the name of Sasha Semyonova.

In 1998, when it was still possible to find a convenient place to park and an inexpensive place to live, Austin was in the process of being transformed from a somnolent college town into a pricey, high-tech metropolis. In his sprawling first novel, The Slip, Lucas Schaefer examines the drama of transition – in a city, a culture, and an adolescent. The internet was just starting to change lives, and the complexities of gender identity were just beginning to be acknowledged.

At the heart of the story is the mystery of what happened to Nathaniel – not only where he vanished to, but how he was transformed. During his summer in Austin, Nathaniel becomes so fixated on David Dalice, the charming Haitian immigrant who is his supervisor and mentor at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, that he tries to emulate him in every way. He adopts David’s speech patterns, follows him to the boxing gym, and even tries, chemically, to turn his own white skin black. More than a decade after Nathaniel’s disappearance, Uncle Bob is sent an anonymous clue in the mail.

Nathaniel is absent from most of the novel, but Schaefer populates it with many, many other striking characters. They include a teenager, Charles Rex, who, of ambiguous gender, insists on being known as “X”; a zealous rookie cop named Miriam Lopez; professional boxer Alexis Cepeda, a Mexican immigrant who crossed the border disguised as a clown; and Belinda St. James, who left Sweetwater, Texas for the skin trade and transitioned into phone sex. But the most remarkable character in The Slip is the city of Austin, whose familiar landmarks such as Scholz Garten, Hippie Hollow, Umlauf Sculpture Garden, and Hyde Park serve as backdrop to the drama.

Austin is course the seat of Texas government, and, given Schaefer’s prodigious ambitions, it is a wonder that state politicians do not intrude, as they do in such other ATX novels as Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place, Karen Olsson’s Waterloo, and Lawrence Wright’s Mr. Texas. Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, where many of the characters, including homeless Ed Hooley, who lives there, converge, is fictional, but it is described as “an Austin institution: pros and amateurs jab-jab-jabbing alongside clean-cut Dell executives and retired hippies, a jumble of humanity all sweating it out at once.”

This cross-section of humanity is jumbled across almost five hundred pages of sometimes arresting prose. In a published interview, Schaefer revealed that the novel began as short stories he was working on while earning his M.F.A. from UT Austin. And the finished novel, which it took twelve years to write, still seems like short fictions awkwardly stitched together, or else a series of trailers for half a dozen separate novels. Some of the minor characters cry out for further development. Dr. Gloria Abruzzi, a vociferous retired psychologist who belatedly asserts her Italian identity during her reluctant residence at the Shoal Creek Rehabilitation Center, is one. Another is Pat Spackleman, one of several middle-class Jewish women enrolled in Austin’s Citizen Police Academy.

The perspiration at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym oozes out on the page, as does the sweat equity Schaefer put into this epic. During twelve years of rumination, he multiplied subplots and flashbacks and inserted an alternative history. He weighs in on the sex trade, criminal justice, racism, illegal immigration, and the bittersweet science of boxing. He continually switches the narrative point of view and offers side trips to Massachusetts, Kenya, and the Mexican border. Schaefer confirms William Blake’s insight that: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

————————The Slip; by Lucas Schaefer; Simon & Schuster; 2025; $29.99———————