Cold Fusion: A Novel

Summary

An offbeat, funny and moving coming-of-age campus novel by a Yale professor and film actor (One Battle After Another, Marty Supreme) in the tradition of John Williams’s Stoner, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.

It’s the start of another fall semester at a midwestern university in the 1990s. Arriving on the foliage-and-flannel-filled campus is an unusual, unnamed freshman. Grieving the recent death of his father, he lives in a hotel instead of a dorm, finds himself afflicted by a mysterious hallucinatory illness with an even stranger home remedy, and is tasked by his wealthy mother to track down the son of a family friend—a charismatic and elusive student rumored to be pursuing “cold fusion.”

As his search leads him through dive bars, bus stations, abandoned churches and other bizarre locales, and he has increasingly disorienting encounters with a variety of eccentrics—including drug dealers and fringe intellectuals—his mental state deteriorates and the boundary between experience and delusion begins to dissolve.

Cold Fusion is a darkly funny fever dream—an absurdist yet poignant examination of the fragile narratives we construct to make sense of an inescapably chaotic world.