Census: A Novel

Jesse Ball

Mar 2018 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

After a devastating revelation, a father and son journey across a tapestry of towns in award–winning author Jesse Ball’s thought-provoking novel Census.

When a widower learns he doesn’t have long left to live, he wonders who will care for his adult son whom he fiercely loves—a son with Down syndrome. With no recourse in mind and a desire to see the country, the man becomes a census taker for a mysterious governmental bureau and takes his son on the trip.

Traveling into the country, through towns named only by ascending letters of the alphabet, father and son encounter a wide range of human experience. While some townspeople welcome them into their homes, others who bear the physical brand of past censuses on their ribs are wary of their presence. Pressing toward the edges of civilization, the landscape grows wilder, and the towns grow farther apart and more blighted by industrial decay. As they approach “Z,” the man confronts a series of questions: What is the purpose of the census? Is he complicit in its mission? And just how will he learn to say good-bye to his son?

Mysterious and evocative, Census is a novel about free will, grief, the power of memory, and the ferocity of parental love.

“A vital testament to selfless love; a psalm to commonplace miracles; and a mysterious evolving metaphor. So kind, it aches.” —David Mitchell

“[Jesse Ball] has combined Kafka’s paranoia with Whitman’s earnest American grain to found a fictional kingdom of genial doom and melancholia.” —New York Times

“Truly otherworldly writing in the best ways that Borges and Calvino have shown to be possible.” —Forbes

Ratings and reviews

One of the best works of contemporary fiction. Ball is able to access a liminal space that haunts and stains you long after you finish. Reading Census is like experiencing a dream you keep waking up from, and forcing yourself back into because you want so desperately to absorb the meanings and symbols presented.

About the author

Jesse Ball is the author of fifteen books, and his works have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award.