Josh Barkan: Blind Speed

“Blind Speed is a rip-roaring read that will propel you to the next page until you laugh your way across the finish line. Rarely does a novel manage to capture so many facets of the culture at large—from political campaigns to rock bands to a fortune-teller in Iowa who creates chaos. This is a brilliant novel of ideas, as American as Kerouac careening along an interstate highway. Cool prose and piercing insights from a hot new talent.”

—Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Prometheus

“Part farce, part political satire, part metafiction, Blind Speed is a rich fictional stew. Josh Barkan has written an energetic modern-day picaresque.”

—Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and Election

“Blind Speed is a crazy-assed adventure of a novel, one that hilariously explores the serious issues of this era and every other: faith, love, ambition and its discontents, the possibility of spiritual regeneration, not to mention sibling rivalry and where to get a drink late at night in Boston. Josh Barkan has written a book that is whip-smart, but whose central allure resides in its oversized heart.”

—Steve Almond, author of (Not that You Asked) and Candyfreak

Josh Barkan was awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2006. He has taught writing at Harvard, New York University, and Boston University and is the author of the short-story collection Before Hiroshima. His first novel Blind Speed was selected as a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Fiction Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Yale, he lives in New York City.

Not since Don DeLillo and George Saunders has a writer caught the humor and irreverent seriousness of our time like Barkan has through his protagonist Paul Berger, a flawed hero whose so-called fate drives him toward enlightenment just as surely as it propels him to destruction. Berger is stunned when he receives an ominous palm reading from a savvy guru at a health retreat in Iowa, of all places. And now it seems the prophecy is coming true. His fiancée, who is about to leave him, is shot at a historic reenactment of the Revolutionary War in Concord. One of his brothers, an astronaut, dies on 9/11 in the Pentagon. And his more famous brother, a lawyer and politician, kidnaps him in a media campaign to win an election. But is Paul’s life really controlled by fate? Or is the prophecy a lie he has latched onto ever since his band went under, leaving him almost famous yet unknown—a teacher at a community college, struggling to keep his job?

Blind Speed is a wildly entertaining exploration of intersecting lives in which what happens is never solely by chance or choice. Barkan has built a uniquely American satirical novel, a thoroughly twisted journey of discovery that pops and fires from its first shot in Concord to its last rifle blast, which echoes across the heartland. With global warming, 9/11, government and corporate deceit, and ecoterrorism, the novel dives into epic ideas, capturing America in all its dangerous myths.

josh@joshbarkan.com