Answer: When it’s Jonathan Geltner’s wonderful debut, Absolute Music (2022, Slant Books).
I found this story about a search for the “world behind the world” quite a beautiful read–contemplative, quietly funny, seriously profound, and richly evocative in its descriptions of both physical place and inner life. The narrator McPhail is a struggling fantasy writer, and this narrative–a fictional memoir–is essentially the inescapable procrastination project McPhail finds himself pursuing instead of the overdue second novel of his fantasy trilogy. After an unexpected brush with a tragic memory, what must the artist work through before he can rediscover his art?
The result is a stunning contemplation from Geltner, a translator and self-described amateur philologist (a point of favorable comparison to a certain famous fantasist), on the metaphysics and theology of fantasy, which I would place beside Tolkien’s seminal “On Fairy Stories” as an important contribution to the poetics of fantasy–the modern project of “mythopoetics,” if you will. I understand from his social media posts that the author’s next writing project is in fact a fantasy novel; I eagerly anticipate its release.
If you, like me, find yourself in the slim part of the Venn diagram that appreciates both high culture, serious considerations of theology, and Dungeons and Dragons (McPhail’s DnD group is a treat!), this is the novel for you.