[close] Jim Fog is marooned in a small Midwest town shortly after his divorce, succumbing to purposelessness and nostalgia. His ex, Sarah Car, has moved to New York City with the ambition of skipping over any mourning for their marriage. An old friend, ignorant himself of his action’s consequences, enables Fog and Car to move through and haunt each other’s lives. Eventually Fog and Car chase this friend, who is disguised to both of them, and the momentum of that chase pushes the two characters out of their static life-cages towards different unreal conclusions.

Fog & Car begins with the alternating voices and perspectives of a Mr Fog and a Ms Car. Eventually this symbolic dialectic—which examines a tension in the novel’s tradition, the engineered ride of some narratives versus the associative cloud of others—collapses. The narrative’s shifting styles finally find an equilibrium in a troubled and subversive escapism.

In this astonishing, assured first novel Eugene Lim intertwines elegant poetics with a fantastic plot, rife with love, mystery, malaise, and the supernatural. His gift for ingenious, startling permutations of language and plot make for a memorable, mesmerizing read. It was hard for me to put Fog and Car down; harder for me to stop thinking about. —Lynn Crawford

The events of this novel take place in a space contrary to action, illuminating the silences of the page and the nothing that haunts the borders of “doing something.” A beautifully paced and thoughtful work. —Renee Gladman

In Fog & Car Eugene Lim scalpels deep into the loneliness of coupledom, into divorce, into obsession and stalking, into casual hookups, into homoerotic shocks. The book slowly heats its duos until they come to a rolling boil, blistering out surprises and unexpected complexities. Mr. Lim is definitely a writer to watch. —Steve Katz

In Fog & Car, Eugene Lim renders the uncanny convergences of the lives of partners and strangers in a language entirely new. This is a deep, engulfing novel of breathtaking, even spooking precision—an altogether heady and heart-shaking debut. —Gary Lutz


Eugene’s writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Boog City, sonaweb, Harp & Altar, Sleeping Fish and elimae. He works as a librarian in a high school and lives with the poet Joanna Sondheim in Brooklyn. [close]