In God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central, June 14), debut novelist Joseph Earl Thomas turns a keen eye to the “day-in day-out grinding” of Philadelphia residents as narrated by a Black Army vet, Ph.D. student, and emergency department tech also named Joseph Thomas. The novel, which a Kirkus critic called “just stunning,” is one of our best books of the year. Author Thomas answered questions via email.

What was the original idea/character/scene that started you working on the book?

I was thinking about institutions first: the prison, the hospital, and the military (though never forget the school), and how they traffic in similar modes of subjection for people who are permanently outside the sphere of proper literary concern; folks who can’t be used to demonstrate good politics in public, or whose stories or deaths can’t be shared on the internet for clear social advancement. I’m asking what kinds of thinking are possible if we sit with them—which is really an us, given my own background—and take them seriously on their own terms without infantilization or lead-up to valorization. Then there’s the reinvention of Holmesburg Prison, which looms large in the other Philadelphia. The father figure emerges from my ongoing concern with finding ways to live with rather than punish people for our own safety or satisfaction, even when they do horrible things. This is tied in with our failure to think about how relations to power work and change depending on position, and are not permanent based on identity, career, or wrongdoing. 

The North Philly setting is alive in the novel, made livelier still by the narrator’s frequent anecdotes about its landmarks and residents. Why was it important that the book take place there?

There’s lots of love, and lots of barriers to that love, in North Philly and in the world, which define the major tensions in the book. In some ways, I’m a theory head, but in order to take big ideas seriously, you also have to take people and their contradictions seriously. Building an imaginary architecture of a place you know well is a good way to start; it’s also just as funny as it is sad to play out. As we overlook these contradictions in real time toward a kind of annotated progress, I like to think about what and who is, by necessity, getting left behind. For that, I need as intimate a canvas as possible. Generalities won’t do. 

Where and when did you write the book? Describe the scene, the time of day, the sounds, the necessary accoutrements or talismans.

For much of the first and second drafts, I, the real Joseph, was still working as an emergency department tech and Ph.D. student in English, so I was standing up at the nurse’s station like the narrator does, Twizzlers behind the screen and cranberry ginger ale by the keyboard—all day, every day, between patients—usually on 7 a.m.–7 p.m. shifts when I didn’t have class and did have childcare, or otherwise 7 a.m.–3 p.m., and sometimes overnights. Covid-19, to say the least, did not help, and so there ended up being a seed of it at the beginning of the novel, looming over the narrator and [staying until] the end.

What was most challenging about writing this book? And most rewarding?

I’m interested in questioning narrative and critique as forms, rather than purely telling a good story or making a good argument directly about the things we already know to be true. This turned out to be the most rewarding, though, transforming that into a voice and a style that I can be proud of beyond a particular moment or topic.

What books published in 2024 were among your favorites?

Mariana Enríquez’s A Sunny Place for Shady People [translated by Megan McDowell]; Ours by Phillip B. Williams, and Butter by Asako Yuzuki [translated by Polly Barton].

Nina Palattella is the editorial assistant.