This is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You
By Adam Gnade
Published by Three One G and Bread & Roses Press
225 pages, paperback
Adam Gnade's third novel, This is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You, is held up by a Springsteenian sense of hope and a desire for redemption, of finding glory and escape, friendship and love in hard times. Like Dickens' David Copperfield, Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, this is the story of a human life, kindergarten to adulthood, ratty beach apartment to bohemian party house, feverish basement to ramshackle farmhouse. Through the eyes of Gnade's protagonist, James Jackson Bozic, we see how life scars you, changes you as you fight to find a safe place for yourself. It is, in turn, a murder mystery, a love story, and a vast, sweeping, panoramic look at America on the edge of collapse. It's a story of displacement, strange shores, new mornings. As James says in the book, "I thought of how sometimes in the midst of survival, life will jerk you away from your home, how it will push you out across the map, away from the people you love, or into the path of others." This Is the End ... is about scratching and clawing for a better, safer, more satisfying life, even as the sky comes crashing down.
Praise for This is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You
"Adam Gnade's latest is his best yet. From its hollowed-out towns to its jagged coastlines, Gnade's America—full of wanderers and farmers, lovers and killers—is vibrant and melancholy, glowing with hope and burdened by history. It's a beautiful, crumbling empire, and there are few places better to spend one's time." -Erik Henriksen, Portland Mercury
"This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You is told in memory fragments and conversations. Eloquent, introspective, and charming conversations carry the book, giving you the feeling of camaraderie with the main character, James. This book is beautiful in the way nostalgia takes over your body as you picture enchanting memories, clouded by who you used to be. This book is also filled with an overwhelming sense of hope even in the face of our inevitable fate back into the earth. Adam Gnade has written an endearing and honest coming-of-age story about love and death and the weight of existence." -Rios de la Luz, author of Itzá and The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert
"Adam Gnade saves lives. His books are life preservers, letters from future selves that tell you, it'll be okay, I promise. In This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You, Gnade tunnels through spitfire stories of his hometowns, of friends lost in the headlights of trucks, of fever dreams written in missives on the backs of postcards. This is reportage from a hot-headed angel holding on for dear life to the remote islands that sustain him, those echoes of voices inside his gut that relentlessly holler hope over the waves." -Jasmine Dreame Wagner, author of On a Clear Day
"A poignant pep-talk from the bare-knuckle fist fight of life. An encyclopedia of pain colored pretty. Hemingway at a house show. A beautiful scar left from the wound that took years to heal. Lingering thoughts of Shit, I wish I’d written that. And Mexican food.” -Tanner Ballengee, author of Sixty Tattoos I Secretly Gave Myself at Work
"This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You thrums with manic energy like an oversized moth beating itself to death against the porch light. It's layered like a pile of old sweaters with dreamlike cadences, could-be-my-own internal monologues, the backroads and byways of America, freaks, weirdos, heartbreak, renewal, rebirth, the ashes of glory, hopelessness, and alienation in equal measure. It's a book about everything and nothing told in a way that feels like free-falling through summer sky, muggy and realistic and surrealistic and I love it and will fight you in its honor until you, Adam Gnade, are dead and I can take all your cool rocks." -Julia Eff, author of Don't Piss Down My Back & Tell Me It's Raining
"Gnade's writing has enough heart and soul to last generations." -Michael J Seidlinger, author of Dreams of Being
"Reading This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You is like having a drunken, late-night conversation with an old friend you haven’t seen for years: freewheeling and wild, tender and warm, funny and a little bit sad, and altogether something you won’t soon forget." -Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac
"One of the most remarkable aspects of Gnade's writing is how he's able to juxtapose sentimental, beautiful imagery and striking insight with the often brutal, tragic fate of his characters—sometimes all within the same page. It makes for devastating, memorable prose. This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You exhibits all of this wonderfully; it is undoubtedly his finest novel." -Jonas Cannon, author of Cheer the Eff Up
"You never really can go back to anything, and a large part of This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You is about the protagonist, James, grappling with that most Wolfeian of ideas. You can’t go home again, because when you go back to the places you once called home, they’ve changed. This book details all those changes and losses: buildings torn down, neighborhoods gentrified, friends and family dead or just gone missing from your life. There’s a lot of sorrow and heartbreak in this book, a lot of haunt. James gets hurt, hurts others, makes bad decisions; life beats him down and he beats himself up. Interspersed throughout the hardships are quiet moments of beauty and connection. Trading bad puns with your tour-mate while driving cross-country, sharing a meal with an old friend, even drinking alone by a river in the summer dusk—Adam Gnade describes each moment in such lyrical detail it’s like you’re right there. Ultimately, This Is the End... is about the ways we carry home with us, and that no matter how many people and places we lose, no matter how many times we get beat down or beat up, there will always be another chance to change our lives. As Jeanette Winterson wrote in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 'The whole of life is about another chance and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.'" -Jessie Lynn McMains, author of Wisconsin Death Trip
"This is a book for those of us who barely made it out of childhood alive. Those of us who survived the slings and arrows of growing up only to be cast into an adult world of equally sharp sticks and stones. We survived and emerged stronger in the scarred places. Adam Gnade knows this rebirth by pain and fire as well as anyone. A poignant piece of writing. Heartbreaking. Powerful. You'll feel buoyed by the resonance." -Bart Schaneman, author of The Silence is the Noise and The Green and the Gold
“A book in which its characters, good-hearted—or not so—are shown tenderness and understanding by their creator. One where a resilient vulnerability motions forward, coat collar pulled tight around the neck, through the unrelenting storm of everyday becoming yourself all over again. If you have lived a life on the fringe, if you find yourself surrounded by people who, like you, aim to carve out their own idea of belonging, then Adam is writing to you." -Andrew Mears, Youthmovies, author of Kettledrum
“Adam’s work has this intuitive ability to toss a few pebbles against the windows of your soul and find out if anyone’s home. And it does this long after you’ve put down the book or stopped listening to the song; when you’re alone in your kitchen at night or up before dawn driving a long way to a job you need to keep. This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You is an unsolved mystery textured in a way few stories are. You can run your fingers through its fine sand or huck dense clumps against the seawall. The scars a slick editor might gloss Gnade scavenges, makes time for, makes room for, taping scraps and shells and inside jokes to the pages until something deeper than a scar is revealed. What mystery time makes of the truth. What truths time marks upon us all.” -Rich Baiocco, author of Death in a Rifle Garden
“The writing is so scattered; vulnerable remembrances of a capricious life. It feels less like a complete work and more like a masterful collage. Therein lies the beauty—it feels REAL—like our own memories. It feels like life.” -Rudy Ramos, chef, Vegicano.com blog, author of Vegenaise with a Vengeance
"Gnade does it again. Like Locust House but more visceral, like The Do-it-Yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad but with cowboys, like Caveworld in a year-long game of Dungeons & Dragons on ten hits of acid. His new work is heart-wrenching like a broken spell, but it’s as validating and powerful and exciting as landing your first kick-flip." -Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, author of Wallop
"One of Adam's greatest strengths is his knack for sensory descriptions—simultaneously romantic and yet also brutally honest—dragging the reader effortlessly into his world by way of the clearest colors, the most penetrating sounds, the most nostalgic smells. We feel every one of the narrator's triumphs and heartbreaks, both micro and macroscopic. At one point in This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You, narrator James speaks of his fabled, mysterious uncle Ansel's 'way with the language, the sharpness of his descriptions and the rhythm his words made and the way they became music.' He writes, 'It was intimate and evocative. I felt things from it and saw images blossoming up in my mind, rich and vivid and much more lifelike than what happened in the awful, lonely drabness of my own day to day.' Yes, this is from the perspective of the novel's protagonist, but I'll be damned if it isn't the most eloquent, unintentionally self-referential summation of Gnade's own beautiful style, as well." -Becky DiGiglio, photographer, Born Upside Down
“This is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You opens on a beach in San Diego long after the crowds have died out for the winter. What's left is a life laid bare-open and honest with personal mythology. One where the minor god we meet at the 6am end of a bender is just another wandering soul with a spare cigarette to share and the face of a friend we knew in high school. Adam Gnade takes us on a tour of familiar haunts with the lingering high of the one dose that almost did us in and the sobering alchemy of a rural tent revival or a basement show where the hometown punks play loudest and last." -Nick Bernal, Burn All Books
"Some people from recent generations live straight lives, they graduate high school, go to college, marriage, kids, mortgage. Some people stumble about, ending up in random places on the United States map looking for adventure, some people never pull it together at all, suicide, drugs, prison. It isn't easy to have to be straight, it isn't to be a wanderer and it isn't easy to never pull together. The book has all these characters of American life, Gnade gives them all equal footing, everyone eats burritos and everyone misses someone, everyone stands alone in grocery store parking lots holding plastic bags wondering where that person they used to know back in the day might be on this Earth. This is the End of Something is a history of the comings and goings of everyone who has ever came and went, which is everyone." -Noah Cicero, author of Bipolar Cowboy and Nature Documentary
"Adam Gnade cuts through the clutter of late-capitalism’s excess, exposing the raw, pulsing core of American loneliness and heartbreak. Read this book." - Jim Ruland, author of My Damage: the Story of a Punk Rock Survivor
"The timeline of this book is sweeping and memoir-like, spanning from an opening scene with his first grade teacher reading The Hobbit, through a year-by-year romp of his education, then into the mistakes, moves and dreams of burgeoning adulthood. By the end, we've accompanied James through his obsession with a family mystery and a set of ominous but poetic postcards; we've been through an unrequited love so powerful he settles into a presumed lovelessness; we've been through places that aren't San Diego: Portland, Baja, the desert, rural Kansas; and then, beautifully, we're somehow, sort of, back where we started but new and transformed. The story is strongly rooted in home, but just as powerful is the way these characters are untethered. After a novel's worth of chasing dreams around the country, this city stands triumphant and uncontested, even if someone can't or won't return (or just hasn't yet). We're fed this triumph in small ways, but also in big, proud ways: A slice of a memory of the way Miss Shoac read about Thorin Oakenshield's death in The Hobbit, a long, indulgent discussion of the superiority of San Diego's burritos mere pages from the end, and through it all, there's a type of aimlessness mixed with very specific, wistful aims." - Julia Dixon Evans, NPR, KPBS
