Winner of the Kirkus Prize 2025 and listed among the 100 notable books of 2025 according to the New York Times, The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, published by NN Editore and translated by Michele Martino, is a powerful debut as decisive as the boxing blows it describes, a choral novel set in Texas, in Austin, between the late 1990s and the early 2000s.
An eccentric Austin community, grappling between weirdness and gentrification
With a mosaic structure, every chapter, every point of view, is a piece, a clue, to reconstruct the motivations behind Nathaniel Rothstein’s disappearance, a Jewish sixteen-year-old from Massachusetts, sent to Texas for summer vacation at his Uncle Bob’s house after an incident of assault against a classmate. Lost and seeking answers, Nathaniel crosses the threshold of adolescence while volunteering at a nursing home.
For Lucas Schaefer each character is a pretext and he uses the technique of digression to tell a slice of American life, slipping into people of different ethnicities and ages: a mirror of Austin’s cultural vivacity, always a haven for runaways and dreamers, artists and musicians, a metropolis that in recent decades has undergone a demographic and economic boom (thanks to the arrival of big tech companies from the Silicon Valley, such as Elon Musk’s Tesla) and today fights against gentrification to never lose that “weirdness” that has always distinguished it.
Questions of race and fluid identities are the central theme of the novel
Questions of race and fluid identities are the central theme of the novel, and a boxing gym serves as a connective tissue for all the stories, a site of release and acceptance, where humanity meets and forges unexpected connections.
Among the main characters: David Dalice, an exuberant Haitian immigrant and Nathaniel’s mentor, who enjoys provoking the youths by talking about sex; Charles Rex, a transgender teenager who goes by X, and his mother Belinda, who makes ends meet by entertaining men with paid erotic phone calls.
The Slip plays with identity swaps not as a mere narrative device, but as a symptom of a deep need among the youths to have positive male role models. In an intricate and unconscious game of mirrors that unfolds through the erotic hotline, Nathaniel seeks to become David, a Black, charismatic and seductive man, while X feels the need to enact her female gender identity under the name Sasha.
A revelatory coming-of-age novel
Schaefer sketches the portrait of an eccentric Austin community that gravitates around a boxing gym, alternating narrative lines between past, present and future, between flashbacks and tense moments, with masterfully built pivotal scenes that unfold before innocent spectators, yet guided by clues, with twists and sudden revelations, like in the best thrillers.
Free sexuality is addressed both as a major taboo and as an exploration of inner identity and concerns both Nathaniel and X in their adolescent phase of discovering their bodies.
In this light, The Slip is a revelatory coming-of-age novel that plays with fluid identities to denounce the inadequacy and rigidity of labels and social constructs, investigating race, masculinity, inner loneliness and the need to feel loved and recognized by others.
