If autofiction demands a refraction of reality, “Broken People” reads more like an artful recitation of it. Unlike with other autofictional stories (say, Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” or Edmund White’s “A Boy’s Own Story”), I struggled to accept the conflation between the protagonist and the author of “Broken People.” Readers presume Heti’s and White’s narrators have at least something in common with their authors, but those novels read at once like an abstraction from and a distillation of lived experience. There was one nagging question I had while reading this book, though: Why is it in drag? “Broken People” feels like a memoir dressed up as a novel.
Observing the pampered architect’s stocked, pre-portioned refrigerator stash, Sam asks, “Is it normal to have your transdimensional journey catered?” In Portland, surprised to find no trace of crystals, flowing robes or tinctures at their destination, Sam likens the shaman - dressed in khakis, a collared shirt and a V-neck sweater - to “a substitute teacher, or a suburban dad on a rare night out.”
Sam dons the hair shirt in this novel, but his coiled, bitter angst is tempered somewhat by his sense of humor, as satirical as it is self-aware.
