Named a Best New Book of February 2019 by the Chicago Review of Books
“This bold, hilarious, and playfully absurd novel asks the biggest questions out there, but does it with such shrewd grace and charming lightness that you won’t feel the existential weight until it’s already crashed down upon your head. A perfect amalgamation of the tragicomic and the potentially uplifting, Joseph Scapellato’s writing is in the imaginative vein of Jesse Ball and Charlie Kaufman, but with a tenderhearted spirit that is uniquely his own.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
"An experimental and existential noir . . . [The Made-Up Man] keeps its pages turning with absurdist comedy, committed throughout to the idea espoused by Stanley’s late grandmother that whatever else he may be, 'Man is a beast that laughs.'"
—Kathleen Rooney, The Chicago Tribune
"Joseph Scapellato's The Made-Up Man reminds me of a bacon-topped doughnut—a mixture of incongruent elements that somehow work well together. And like that sweet treat, Scapellato's blend of existential noir, absurdist humor, literary fiction, and surreal exploration of performance art merges into something special. . . . The Made-Up Man is a rare novel that is simultaneously smart and entertaining."
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR
"The Made-Up Man is a darkly comic, noir-styled novel powered by an energy that’s equal parts mischief, good humor, and measured cynicism. Based on conventions lifted out of the old detective story playbook, the novel is told from the perspective of a slippery narrator, whose sense of identity expands, collapses, and shatters against a series of nagging moral questions that are less situational than they are existential. The result is an intoxicating alchemy, something genre-blurring and philosophically riveting."
—Kate Watson, Longreads
"A Czech-based film noir of which Kafka himself would be proud."
—Jon Doyle, Review31
"Wholly original . . . the deviously warped literary noir The Made-Up Man is an unpredictable and thought-provoking tale of deception, love, and identity."
—Nicholas Litchfie, Lancashire Post
"Joseph Scapellato's novel The Made-Up Man is one of the most fun books I have read all year, a smart and absurdist take on noir."
—Largehearted Boy
"This absurdist comedy/noir/coming-of-age novel follows Stanley after he agrees to participate in his Uncle Lech's performance art project in Prague . . . Merging the ludicrous and the melancholic, the odd premise provides many laugh-out-loud moments and some curious insights and enables Stanley to explore and understand why he performs the same role each and every day."
—Alexander Moran, Booklist
“In Joseph Scapellato’s terrifically innovative and existentially rich debut, a young man gets ensnared in a performance art project that soon upends his life—and uncovers some bold new truths along the way. Playful, striking, and wholly original,The Made-Up Man is an engrossing mystery of the self, the rare kind of novel that challenges the way we see the world.” —
Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
“Joseph Scapellato’s The Made-Up Man is a mystery, a playful essay on performance art, and a meditation on the instability of selfhood. It’s also great fun. Scapellato is the rare author unafraid of intellectualism but just as invested in storytelling. This is a novel like no other you’ll read this year.”
—Kerry Howley, author of Thrown
“To read the The Made-Up Man is to move through a labyrinthine hall of mirrors in which every reflection holds Joseph Scapellato’s hilarity, verve, curiosity, and compassion. Stanley’s unpredictable journey is set within a beautifully off-kilter context (he’s the unwilling and resistant participant in his uncle’s complex piece of performance art), and here Scapellato’s storytelling feels to be an analogue to Escher’s artful tessellations. And, like those drawings, Scapellato relies on an uncanny and mathematical precision as he investigates and illustrates Stan’s fitfully emergent self-recognition. The Made-Up Man is delightfully inventive and dizzyingly original.”
—Alexander Parsons, author of In the Shadows of the Sun
“The Made-Up Man reads banal nightmare like Kafka, and neurotic human chaos like Joy Williams. But this is no derivative novel—Joseph Scapellato writes like no other American writer, full of harnessed energy, compassion, and deeply disquieting dread that somehow combines the best of the European nihilists with the outlandish optimism that American writers do so well.”
—Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World
“Joseph Scapellato’s The Made-Up Man is wild and deep and entrancing fun. Having lost T, the woman of his dreams, Stanley doesn’t know who he is, and his life suddenly becomes a Kafkaesque canvas for someone else (his strange performance artist uncle Lech). Scapellato’s kinetic prose leapfrogs us into moments both disturbing and startlingly familiar—there’s ache inside this comedy, and comedy inside this ache. Read it and be punctured with amazement.”
—C. J. Hribal, author of The Company Car
“The Made-Up Man is an amazing book. Its subtle buildup of invention astonished me. Artists are supposed to probe the sociocultural enclosures that imprison us all. They’re supposed to plan escapes, to break out and mark a pathway for the rest of us. Joseph Scapellato is different. This book is proof that his deep, dervish mind has never known captivity.”
—Alfredo Véa, author of Gods Go Begging
2018-11-13
A mopey 20-something of Polish-American origins agrees to take part in his eccentric uncle's latest performance-art project.
Here we have a story so common and oft-told it might as well have been pried out of Joseph Campbell's mitts and summarized down through the ages as "disaffected dude experiences existential angst." Scapellato (Big Lonesome, 2017) follows up his short story collection with a debut novel about that particular male archetype navel-gazing through his past during a visit to Prague. There's not much to first-person narrator Stanley, an archaeology-school dropout and historically bad boyfriend prone to saying glum things like "That was when a window in me broke," and "The space at the center of myself that wasn't me had expanded." The only interesting thing about Stanley is the strange set of circumstances he finds himself in. He's been offered a paying gig by his oddball Uncle Lech: travel to Prague, sit in an apartment for three days, and facilitate a new tenant's move-in. It sounds simple enough, but Stanley is aware that his wealthy and unethical uncle is prone to staging elaborate events that "hit the intersection of performance art, conceptual art, and the plastic arts." What might have developed into an elaborate head game doesn't add up to much—a couple of noir-tinged encounters with camouflaged figures meant to evoke Stanley's feelings about others and the delivery of envelopes marked "Evidence: Complete Explanation of the Made-Up Man." Stanley fills the rest of his journey sulking about his ex-girlfriend T, who's in town to attend a festival, bombing drunkenly around Prague with T's glib friend Manny, who's staying with Stanley, and remembering mundane encounters with his girlfriends, brother, and family. By the end, readers will likely agree with Stanley's mother: " 'You're in your twenties,' she said, meaning, You're a dupa jasiu." That dismissal is a Polish colloquialism that translates roughly to "ass."
An aimless story about an aimless young man.
