A stark, hypnotic exploration of memory, identity, and the fractured stories we inherit, and invent, to survive

Driscoe is a stylistically daring novel that plunges deep into the unstable terrain of memory, identity, and the stories we tell to endure collapse. Hypnotic and recursive, it moves through contradiction as both method and meaning, tracing how belief hardens, fractures, and reforms under pressure. The prose hums with unease, balancing precision and disorientation as certainty dissolves into overlapping versions of the same events.

At its center is Jouska, a man suspended between narratives of success and failure, loyalty and betrayal, progress and ruin. He is pursued by obsessive memories of his ex-wife, his brother, and the elusive figure of Driscoe, by turns entrepreneur, fraud, chemist, builder, trickster. Everyone claims a story about Driscoe. None align, yet all insist on their authority. Entangled in familial conflict and his own faltering recollections, Jouska can neither trust nor abandon any version of the truth.

When Jouska receives an email announcing the death of his superior, the already fragile architecture of his life splinters further. What follows is a journey through a bureaucratic labyrinth where death is both confirmed and denied, and where greed, doubt, presence, and absence pulse relentlessly. Driscoe emerges as a narrative dirge for a collapsing American middle class and the myths that sustained it, tracing the impossibility of aligning personal loss with cultural unraveling. This novel will resonate with readers drawn to literary fiction that is intellectually demanding, formally inventive, and attuned to the psychic costs of living amid social and economic decay.
 

Greg Mulcahy is from Minnesota. He studied at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern Mississippi. He is author of Out of Work, Constellation, Carbine, O'Hearn, and First Trilogy.