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The Material

A Novel

ebook
11 of 12 copies available
11 of 12 copies available
A single momentous day transforms the lives of students and professors at a school for stand-up comedy in a novel that “[brims] with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Insightful, compassionate, biting and honest.”—The Washington Post
“Brilliance is on display here.”—Percival Everett, author of James and The Trees
ONE OF SLATE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Longlisted for the New American Voices Award
Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade.
Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there’s a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punch line will either get you to a punch line or force you to be one.
They’re all afraid to be one.
Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students’ respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent.
Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks.
Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh and the longing to make others laugh even harder.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 29, 2024
      Bordas (How to Behave in a Crowd) sets her clever twist on the campus novel at the country’s first MFA program for stand-up comedy. Unfolding over a single December day at an unnamed university in Chicago, the narrative begins with a faculty department meeting and progresses to a student workshop. Everyone involved in the program is nervously anticipating the arrival of a controversial guest lecturer, recently disgraced comedy legend Manny Reinhardt. Dorothy, the only female faculty member, hopes to make a comeback in her comedy career, while her colleague Kruger dreams of quitting teaching and ascending to movie stardom. Among the students, Artie fears he’s “too good-looking to be funny,” while Jo is constantly on the lookout for Andy Kaufman, who she thinks is still alive. A subplot involving reports of an active shooter on campus feels unnecessary; more successful are Bordas’s explorations of what a stand-up routine requires of its writer and what, if anything, is off-limits, either because the subject is too offensive or because the material belongs to someone else. Occasional moments of broad comedy, like an embarrassing bathroom scene, spice up the observational humor incorporated throughout. It’s a knockout. Agent: Jackie Ko, Wylie Agency.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from June 1, 2024
      A riffy, funny, whip-smart novel about comedians and their art form. The nearly 10-year-old Stand-Up MFA program is housed--awkwardly, a little resentfully--within the English department of a Chicago university. Bordas' novel begins in a most inhospitable place for comedy, a faculty meeting: worse, a faculty meeting in which people are waxing indignant about the impending hire of a visiting professor, scandal-ridden celebrity comic Manny Reinhardt. The novel spans a single Wednesday, and its point of view moves freely among those in the program: faculty members, students (Olivia, who's reluctant to mine her trauma for laughs; Phil, who's too hesitant to offend; Jo, who's obsessed with Andy Kaufman and believes he's still alive and 40 years into the deep, dark, edgy bit of his "death"; sweet, accommodating Artie, who's hampered by being too handsome), and Reinhardt himself, who's on his way to Chicago a bit early and may get to meet his new students at a late-night competition they're having with an improv troupe. Though there are minor disasters and sources of anxiety aplenty, this is not a book that hinges on plot events or reversals. Instead, Bordas wittily constructs her narrative out of minor encounters, incidents, riffs, meditations. Stand-up, we learn, isn't any of the cliches, a craft or a knack or a calling; for these practitioners, it's less a way of making a living than a way of living. Bit-writing, funny-making, is the lens they use to understand themselves and the world. What makes the book work, first and foremost, is that it's funny--fast and fizzy and dangerous in the way the best stand-up feels improvisatory without ever actually being improv (a discipline for which they feel mostly contempt). But beneath the laughs and digressions lies a surprisingly profound book about the costs and consolations of art. Does doing comedy make these people's lives better? The question is moot, pointless. The last word of that question falls away, has to; the material and the life are the same thing. Can a K�nstlerroman also be a gas? Yes!

      COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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