I Couldn’t Talk Myself Out of Selecting this Sam Richardson Finalist

It really is that good

NOTE: This post is about my favorite of the finalists in the Samuel Richardson Prize for Best Self-Published Literary Novel. Each of the judges will announce their top choice among the finalists, with the competition winner coming later. Before reading this, I suggest you read my earlier post, announcing Here, The Bees Sting as the novel I moved along to the finalist round.

Of the ten Samuel Richardson finalists, three novels – Here, the Bees Sting by Will Caverly, Drive A by Merritt Graves, and Cubafruit by Alexander Sorondo – quickly rose to the top of my list. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), they were near equal in my mind; each had their own particular strengths and weaknesses, but it was hard to determine which should be weighted more heavily in determining a winner. Before I get to my decision, I want to give a quick plug for each book:

Here, the Bees Sting is the most proficiently written of the three. That is to say, if I were assigned as editor to these books, I would have the fewest notes on this one. I could find something to edit (you hire an editor, you get edits!) but I don’t think it really needs them. The pacing is great, on both the individual scene and full book levels. The characters are vibrant and compelling. It plays with interesting thematic ideas and incorporates inventive narrative structures through the bee colony chapters. The primary argument in favor of the other two books is that they’re a bit more ambitious in scope, more attuned to the big issues facing the world today. As an individual evaluation, this is no knock against Caverly’s novel – there’s no requirement that a book speak to “the issues of our time” – but in a competition, it helps.

Drive A is compelling, incredibly relevant and timely, and very confident in its vision. It’s a science fiction novel, set in a future where one of the leading financial industries is “human capital” – basically, individuals can sell shares in themselves, in their own future economic output. When they go public, those shares can be traded on the open market. Shares gain or lose value based on how they’re trading, along with infinitely complex analysis of the individual’s life choices. It’s the inverse of corporations-as-persons; now, individual persons are governed by the laws of corporations. It’s a great premise, with relevance to everything from social media influencers to student loan debt to office politics. The plot is compelling and focused on character conflicts within this fictional world, without straining too much for real-world parallels. Graves trusts his reader to follow along with complicated financial concepts. It’s all deftly handled.

It’s also unnecessarily long and complicated. In addition to fictional legal constructs, Graves adds in fictional virtual reality and holograms and pharmaceuticals and so on. At some point it becomes distracting. Moreover, I often felt that each scene could have been cut ten or twenty percent – and I’m the kind of person who finds office politics and economics very interesting. In many ways this book was made for me, and I thought it was too long. That is a problem.

Cubafruit is the kind of book that earns its length. It’s roughly as long as Drive A, yet I flew through it in a week. Sorondo tells the story of a Robert Caro-esque biographer, working on a multi-volume account of a fictional US Vice President who facilitated a genocide in San Mara, an analogue to Cuba, except his biography series is really more about the San Maran warlord than the American VP. While waiting for a radio interview to begin, the biographer receives a phone call from a former San Maran rebel, who says that she has a sniper rifle pointed at him and wants to hijack the interview.

This is a great setup for a thriller, and it’s easy to imagine a novel that follows the biographer closely as he tries to worm his way out of this sticky situation, inevitably making mistakes and complicating it in the process. This does happen, but that’s not really the book that Cubafruit is. The biographer’s chapters are really only a small portion (twenty percent? less?) of the text. Soon, the narrative goes back and follows the rise of young Omar Basto, who later becomes the warlord. Now you think, ok, the biographer is a frame story, and the real narrative is Basto. Except that’s not right either – Sorondo skips over significant portions of his rise. Instead, we follow a young FBI agent, a young mercenary in Basto’s employ, a young San Maran rebel, and so many others. Many of these characters don’t make it through the book alive (or simply disappear from the narrative once their role is complete). Then there are weird diversions, such as the chapter that reads like a magazine article about weird poisonous fish native to the island’s waters.

There’s a lot going on here, and you might think that would make for a confusing and disoriented book – but you’d be wrong. I was never lost, because for the time I had the book open in front of me, I was living in Cubafruit. It was one of the most immersive literary experiences I’ve had in a long time.

Sorondo’s unique prose plays an important role here. It’s frenetic, filled with vivid imagery and weird metaphors, and it really does pull you in. Here’s an early section, following young Omar Basto:

Day Seven as a dropout and Omar’s got time to spare. Money to spend. He buys periodicals with his discount and takes them to a coffee shop where armchairs are positioned in a circle, and older men sit around reading all morning. Arguing. Conversation swells like a wave every few minutes, talkers get hot and bothered and brainy and vulgar, and then it crashes into murmurs. Shrugs. They all go back to their papers.

What a way to describe a conversation! The beach metaphor (appropriate, given the setting) bookends the image. Inside that metaphor, the talkers “get hot and bothered and brainy and vulgar,” entire arguments and conversations evoked in one short phrase. The whole passage feels, on a visceral level, like a wave. This is the work of a great prose stylist. A few pages later:

Omar gestures at a chair. Caesar collapses that way. Sits at the edge with elbows on his knees. Hands in his hair. “I can’t get a job. I’m fucked. Either my mom’s kicking me out or I gotta go back and do sophomore year again.”

“Where’ve you applied?”

“I just left the French place.”

Omar’s brow makes punctuation shapes. Thinking. French place…? Then slackens. “Wait.” Remembering. “The Bolivian one?”

Sorondo’s narration is all quick images and sentence fragments, weird metaphors and perfect characterization details. A quick impression, then you’re on to the next thing. Staccato writing. I chose these passages basically at random, scrolling to any old page in my ebook then searching around for a minute. I could have chosen anything. The whole book reads like this, whether it’s the biographer frame story or the Omar backstory or the FBI agent or any other weird detour Sorondo takes us down. At times, it’s like you, the reader, are intoxicated on Cubafruit, the titular alcoholic drink that’s also possibly a hallucinogen. I was sober while reading, except of course that I was intoxicated on Cubafruit.

The more I dig into Sorondo’s prose, the more I understand what Cubafruit is, and what it isn’t.

This is not really a book about any particular character – Omar Basto, the biographer, the rebel, the FBI agent, they’re all interesting enough to carry the plot along, but they aren’t developed enough to make for a literary character study. The novel doesn’t spend enough time with any of them, and it skips over parts of their respective narratives. This is fine – thriller characters usually aren’t particularly well-developed.

This also isn’t a book that captures the on-the-ground, day-to-day experience of living through political turmoil, such as Half of a Yellow Sun. Nor is this a book that makes a cogent political argument – the politics around Obregon Themus’ interest in San Mara are well wrought and seem accurate enough, but careful arguments are not the book’s aims.

What Cubafruit is, really, is a truly literary thriller. Here’s what thrillers do: they keep you “on the edge of your seat,” unable to put the book down. They build suspense, through carefully-constructed stakes and cliffhangers and deftly-written action set pieces and easy, swift-moving prose. They keep you reading, so that you can pass the time while waiting for your plane. Cubafruit is not exactly like these airport thrillers. The writing moves fast, but it isn’t clean and easy, it’s weird. Action scenes are confusing and loud, highlighting the brutality of violence. At times, it doesn’t seem like the book is carefully constructed at all (though I’m sure it was). It feels a bit more like Sorondo is a madman, and I’m just along for the ride.

But it keeps me reading nonetheless. I’ve thought for a while that Sorondo’s writing, on his blog Big Reader Bad Grades, has a sort of internet quality to it (without being an “internet novel”). The succession of short thoughts and observations mimics a Twitter feed, except focused and all directed towards a single point. Like a feed, it captures the attention, requiring you to keep reading and see what’s next. Cubafruit does this continually, from cover to cover. That staccato writing, those flashing images carrying quickly-multiplying plot threads, sort of puts a spell on the reader, to where you can almost think of nothing else but the island of San Mara. It is the literary counterpart of “edge of your seat” writing. It compels the reader: don’t look away.

This is, of course, what the former rebel wants from the biographer. She believes that, in framing his story around Vice President Obregon, he has directed attention away from Omar Basto and, more importantly, away from his victims. The victims, she says, are the story, and you cannot look away. The biographer objects, arguing there’s value in writing a comprehensive and neutral historical account, that it’s for others to do the analysis and tell you where to look. Cubafruit, it seems, takes an “all of the above” answer. You can look any number of places, just don’t look away.

I’ve long since buried the lede here, but you’ve probably guessed how this ends: my vote for Samuel Richardson winner is Cubafruit, by Alexander Sorondo.

I deliberated over this, for several reasons. First, Cubafruit feels somewhat less self-published than the other two, if that means anything. The book got Sorondo an agent, who shopped it around as a “prestige debut,” believing that it could get a $250,000 advance. The agent failed to sell the book, and the partnership ended. In many ways, I can imagine this is a much more difficult experience than being passed up by agents – to come so close! – and yet, Cubrafruit had the benefit of a professional editing process, as Sorondo worked with the agent. It undeniably got more recognition from publishing professionals than Drive A or Here, the Bees Sting.

Yet, it was not traditionally published. Cubafruit was self published, and there’s no value in splitting hairs. A second, and even less important, hesitation came from its association as a “Substack Novel.” Sorondo runs a popular Substack blog and regularly writes for The Metropolitan Review. Cubafruit has already been positively reviewed by many other Substack blogs. For a time, I felt like choosing Cubafruit risked making this into the “Substack Novel Prize” instead of the “Self Published Novel Prize.” But that’s not really a good reason to deny it the prize.

The best reason to choose something else was that the competition really was good. I thoroughly enjoyed both Here, the Bees Sting and Drive A, and both books were comparatively more polished than Cubafruit. The staccato writing can, at times, be a lot, and it’s used almost identically no matter the character or the scene. This may not work for every reader, and had it made it through to traditional publication, an editor would almost certainly have left their mark. They would have fixed errors and cleared up some confusing passages and occasional cliches. Along the way, they would almost certainly have sanded down what makes Cubafruit so good.

But you know that thing, where you give yourself so many reasons to not do something, then realize that this in itself means the thing ought to be done? That’s what was happening here. While deliberating, I chatted with another Samuel Richardson judge about my top three choices, hoping they could help break my mental logjam. This judge made the case against selecting Cubafruit, saying, essentially, “the flaws with Here, the Bees Sting and Drive A could easily be addressed with a good editor, making either into better versions of themselves, but the flaws in Cubafruit could not be addressed without fundamentally changing the book itself. The book’s flaws are intrinsically tied to its strengths.”

This was well argued, and to be honest I couldn’t exactly disagree. Yet, it helped me finally feel secure in my selection. If Cubafruit’s flaws are inseparable from what made it so good, that’s only because Sorondo was aiming high, trying to create something new, and I believe he largely succeeded. If only one novel or literary project from this loosely-connected Substack self-publishing scene survives and is remembered, it may very well be Cubafruit.