The opening line of Lucas Schaefer’s novel The Slip concerns the smell of shit: a bold first impression for a debut author. Luckily, reading the book provides a far more pleasant sensory experience. The Slip—set in Austin, Texas, between 1998 and 2014—is part boxing novel, part mystery, part exploration of the vagaries of identity. It centers around the disappearance of teenager Nathaniel Rothstein, and features rich subplots, compelling side characters, and five twists that will catch you off guard for each one you guess. It wraps up at 484 pages. Should this sound daunting, rest assured Schaefer’s audacious, often laugh-out-loud funny prose is a swift and gentle guide.
Schaefer doesn’t shy away from boxing’s cruelty—a chapter is called “Tomato Can,” named for hopelessly and often dangerously overmatched opponents used to juice up a hot prospect’s record, who are “called such because dropped ones leak red”—or its absurdity. In one scene, a sham of a professional bout in Africa is literally washed into the sea by surging tides. A fighter named Carlos Ortega floats away on the ring without a care, shadowboxing into the storm. And yet boxing also offers camaraderie, primarily at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym.
Ortega is not the only character Schaefer paints as adrift. Throughout the novel, various people pursue their ideal versions of themselves by boxing, cross-dressing, masquerading as another person during phone sex, and, in one particularly misguided instance, doing blackface—the white Nathaniel darkens his skin to appear more like his Haitian mentor, David Dalice.
Recently, Schaefer joined me on Zoom for a broad conversation about the book, boxing, writing sex, and the troubled, isolating times we live in now. The interview has been edited and condensed.
How have you felt about the reception to this book so far, and has anything surprised you?
It’s been great! I don’t know if it surprised me, but it’s been interesting. There’s been all this dialogue now about “Are men reading?” I have gotten a lot of feedback from men, some of whom have said they’re not generally fiction readers or maybe literary fiction readers, but really responded to this book. So that’s been nice. I don’t buy the whole “Men aren’t reading” thing in the first place, but given that that seems to percolate in the discourse with some frequency, it’s been interesting to see that.
I think the other thing is, and I knew this writing the book, that this is a boxing book that hopefully would appeal to people who don’t know anything about boxing or maybe don’t have interest in boxing, as well as people who do. So far, at least, I’ve had some readers who initially were a little bit unsure whether they wanted to read a book about boxing who I managed to hook in the end, so that’s been satisfying.
It struck me that there are two worlds of boxing represented in the book: One is this gym culture, which I think has quite a positive connotation and can foster really strong community, and the other this brutal, inhumane, often absurd world of professional boxing. Does that breakdown sound right, and how do you feel about each of those worlds?
Oh, that’s an interesting one. I’ve never thought about it that way. I’m sure subconsciously, that is totally how I feel. I feel like I know much more about boxing gym culture than about professional boxing culture. I moved to Austin in 2006. I was 24, I didn’t really know anyone, and I saw an ad for an evening class at a boxing gym, and went, having never boxed before, knowing nothing about boxing, and was just immediately enamored with this place. The gym I went to is called Lord’s Gym, it’s still around on Lamar Boulevard, North Lamar.
The thing I love about boxing gyms is that they’re just these places where everyone goes. The gym had people like me, who’d just moved to Austin. There were people who were born in Austin, who’d been there for 30, 50, 60 years. Every race, every religion, every profession, every age. I think unlike some other sports, there’s an element of meritocracy to it. You don’t have to buy skis, or buy golf clubs, or have access to a swimming pool.
Professional boxing, I knew less about as a writer, but definitely had some skepticism about the seedier, seamier aspects of that world. As I got to know boxers at the gym, I realized I didn’t really like watching boxing—in part because I started to know boxers, and I was like, I don’t really want to watch someone punch you in the head! This is sort of unsettling. I’ve always kept a little bit of a distance from that more professional world.
On that seedier side, something I really appreciated that you touched on in the book was the tomato can. I covered one show in person, and I interviewed someone who was a tomato can and there to be food for this 18-year-old prospect—he was a barber and had been boxing for 10 months. They really do throw anyone in there. There’s a conversation really early in The Slip where someone is trying to sell Terry Tucker on an opponent who has “a very mild palsy” for his fighter Alexis Cepeda. I can’t speak to those conversations, but I read that, and I was like, Yeah! It does seem like that kind of is how it goes.
I remember going to a match at one point—I think it was two women—and this woman threw one punch at her opponent, who just fell over and threw up over the side of the canvas, and that was sort of it. I always thought of that when I was working on some of the tomato-can stuff. It’s kind of just an appalling thing, that there’s this world of putting people in the ring essentially to lose—not that they’re intentionally throwing the matches, but they’re not equipped. But I was very interested with this character, David, who’s the tomato can in the book—a character who’s thrown into this world of boxing, basically, on a lark, because he’s this big guy who looks like he could do some damage even though he doesn’t have any skill for the sport—but then really letting him fall in love with boxing, and start to feel like, Oh, maybe I can make it! And then the heartbreak of, no, the role you were cast in in terms of boxing is the role you are. That, to me, was dramatically compelling. I’m trying to think of an analogous situation in other realms of life, and it’s hard to come up with something like the tomato can. It seems very true to the boxing world.
You mention that he gets knocked out via a liver shot early in his career, and somehow this makes him want to keep going, even though body shots are famously an excruciatingly painful way to get knocked out. I feel like boxing has an addictive quality to it even though it inflicts a lot of pain, and I don’t really understand that phenomenon even though I know it exists. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on that.
I went to this boxing gym very consistently for four or five years strictly for the workouts. But even at that level, there’s something that happens when you’re hitting the heavy bag, or when you find the rhythm with the speed bag or the double-end bag, that, to me, is kind of the magic of boxing and a boxing workout: this feeling of transcending yourself. A lot of characters in this book are experimenting with who they are. Is who they think they are who they are? Is there a version of themselves that’s bigger or stronger or different in some way then how they’ve perceived themselves before? It’s a lot of characters trying on different personalities and personas, and sometimes trying on personalities that are their true personality—what they’ve been wearing before has been something false. I think there’s a link between that and that experience of throwing punches. There’s kind of nothing like it.
A scene that I really loved was Carlos Ortega floating off into the sea, throwing punches. This sport, professionally, is so absurd. The ring washing away feels entirely in-character for boxing to me. It felt realistic in this world, even if it wouldn’t be so in any other world.
I love to hear that, thank you. One of my goals for this book was that I intentionally didn’t want to write a satire in the traditional sense. I wanted this book grounded in reality. Outlandish things happen in the book, and if it succeeds, the reader believes that they’re happening. Taking away the spectacle of boxing, just on a fundamental level, what the sport is is insane. You’re going into a ring and just fighting. It’s crazy! I think this is why I don’t always like to watch it—I’m like, Oh god, this is brutal! But that’s what it is. That’s what it is.
This is maybe a moment when it tips slightly into satire, but it’s when this minor character Felix is going to Africa to fight a guy called “The Butcher,” I’m thinking, Oh god, he’s gonna get slaughtered. But he’s called that because he is an actual butcher and has never fought before!
[laughs] There were definitely elements and aspects of satire. I’ll give you a quick anecdote. One of the big boxers at Lord’s Boxing Gym when I was there was Jesus Chavez, who had a very storied career. There was about a week in the four or five years I was there when I was like, I’m gonna start sparring. So I put on the body cup and the headgear and get my little mouthguard, and all of this. I ended up sparring twice, and the second time I did it, I was sparring with a guy who was maybe 20 years older than I was. He said, “You’re interested in being a writer, right?” after we sparred. I said, “Uh-huh.” He said, “I would do something else. You kind of need your brain for that.”
Around that time, I was in the gym in my whole getup, and Jesus Chavez was working out. There were a bunch of people like me sparring—hobbyists, not even amateurs. He had all of us get in the ring and he was gonna spar with each of us for 30 seconds. Real light, real light. There were seven or eight of us. The first guy goes in, does it, then the second guy, the third guy. They get through seven, and I’m the eighth guy. When it gets to me, I just don’t go in the ring. I’m like, “I’m good. I’m good.” Afterwards, he came up to me and said, “Why didn’t you come in the ring?” I mumbled some excuse, but later on, I was thinking, Shouldn’t the question be, why did the seven people get in the ring? Isn’t that the true question? This is sort of one of the animating questions of the book: Why are you doing this? And people have lots of good reasons for doing it, and feel very powerful doing it. But it’s still a little bit insane.
To transition into some other parts of the book, multiple characters have crises of masculinity, and I sort of connected that in my head to boxing creating a culture of hypermasculinity, even if not all these characters are involved with boxing. Why did you choose that as a recurring theme throughout the book?
I think as a writer, I’m interested in the big questions facing us now, and I think that is a question facing us now: What is our relationship with masculinity in 2025? It seems like it’s not going well. [laughs] From what I can tell. But I think this question of who we are, and figuring out who we are, is tied up in masculinity for a lot of the characters in the book. Nathaniel, who’s our protagonist, he’s the pudgy kid. He wears this big sweatshirt because he’s embarrassed about his looks. He loves musicals, but he’s so embarrassed of that, because it seems gay to him, essentially. The boxing gym is really attractive to him, because it seems like this tough place where guys are guys. Of course, that’s not really what is happening at the gym. He finds a version of himself. The funny thing about Nathaniel is that he’s doing something that’s very healthy: He’s experimenting with who he is in the context of this gym, but then he’s also engaging in behavior we would probably describe as problematic in terms of imitating David.
With many of the characters, I do think there is a question of “What does it mean to be a man?” As they seek answers to that question, they make different decisions, some of which turn out well, and some of which turn out less well.
To that point about issues facing us now, even though it’s set from 1998 to 2014, many issues in the book are directly relevant in 2025. How important was the setting, and to not have 2025 characters facing 2025 issues?
Very important. When I first sold the book, it went to 2024. When you get to the women of the Citizen Police Academy, they’re wearing masks, because it’s in COVID. My editor was just like, “Dear god, no. People’s eyes are gonna glaze over at this. It’s too recent.” The 1998 parts of the book felt very textured and worn. I’d written them over a lot of years, it was a lot of years ago, that’s a nice feeling, I think, for fiction. And the 2024 stuff … this snow is too fresh. So I moved it back to 2014, and it was a great decision. I think it’s very hard to write about 2025 set in 2025.
But I also think one of the advantages of setting the book from 1998 to 2014 is that it allows us to not only think about the issues facing us now but how we got there in the first place. Particularly with something like immigration. A lot of the issues the characters are facing in the book are in the news all the time now, because the Trump administration is completely over the top in their immigration terrorism. But those things had been happening before, just on a smaller scale—to varying extents depending on the specific issue. So I thought that was interesting to think about. How did we wind up in this?
I couldn’t stop myself from thinking how these characters might cope in today’s world. I feel like there’s this ongoing dialogue of, are things worse now than they were two decades ago, or are things actually better than they’ve ever been? X is a really interesting character in this regard, because he is struggling with his gender identity, and there’s all of one book in the library that affirms his existence. Is that better than today, when teenagers are much more able to access information about being trans but are also subject to these vicious attacks from politicians? That ran through my head when reading that bit.
X is an interesting character, because, and I say this in the book, any conversation about transness, he has never been a party to. He doesn’t know any trans people, he hasn’t heard about trans people. So I wasn’t really focused on “Is it better then, or is it better now?” as much as “What would it be like, then, to be going through these questions about your gender and have no reference point whatsoever?” And I think as someone who’s not trans, that also forced me to get inside X in a deeper way than I might have had he had access to all those conversations. I really had to sit with that and think, What, moment by moment, might this feel like, to be navigating this in Austin, Texas in 1998? Every time you’re writing someone who’s different from you, you want to do that with care, and I think the 1998 setting forced a level of care on me that was helpful to the narrative.
I didn’t really answer your thought about masculinity in X, but the other thing I’d say specifically about that is just that the two activities that occur numerous times in this book are boxing and sex, because those are two activities where you do, again, transcend yourself. There aren’t that many things we do day-to-day where you can really try on a new persona, or experiment boldly with a new facet of yourself. Throwing punches, having sex? Yes. Other things, maybe not.
I am curious about writing sex, because it’s a tricky thing—I’ve heard Sally Rooney say before that it is difficult to describe sex in a way that is familiar to the reader without becoming repetitive. I think you’re sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum, to an extent. There’s a line that made me laugh about people who call a phone sex hotline—I think the phrase you used was “pervy piggies pounding their Pomeranians”?
Oh yes. That is the phrase. [laughs]
How did you get to that approach of writing sex or sex-adjacent parts of the book, and did you struggle with it at all?
Those parts of the book I had a lot of fun writing. It came naturally to me for whatever reason. The book is definitely maximalist. I sort of wanted to go for it on all levels, so the same applied to sex. Nathaniel and X are both 16. One of the things I wanted to make sure came across in this was how gross it is to be 16. I think we forget—it’s a lot of fluid and smells, and you’re just figuring it out. It’s a little bit icky, but also exhilarating, and interesting, and new and different. I wanted to make sure I didn’t sanitize the sexual experience too much in that way. The other aspect of writing sex here is so many characters, as they’re having sex, are not ostensibly themselves. I think all of us, as we’re growing up in adolescence, do that to some extent, and do it in the sexual realm, where you’re figuring it out, you’re pretending. But that also is the reality, because that’s what you’re doing. So it’s this interesting contradiction that I thought was worth exploring. But, you know, adolescence, it’s a little bit gross.
A white person pretending to be Black is a very thorny issue—how did you approach that, and was there any hesitation there, particularly when it came to Nathaniel getting his comeuppance and how you ended his story?
I didn’t have hesitation with how I ended it. The book took about 12 years to write, but that existed from very early on. I wrote the book with a lot of intention. I was very interested in this dynamic that I saw when I was in high school, and I also used to be a teacher, so I saw this among students: white kids who aspired to Blackness, particularly when it came to athletics. They idolized Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Serena, but also were a little bit racist, or had preconceived notions about Blackness or people of color that were just not accurate. This contradiction was one that seemed important to explore to me. I felt like if I did that earnestly and with a sense of curiosity and openness, I could do it in a way that was truly exploring and investigating these issues as opposed to just being offensive. I also had no contrarian aspirations with this. This was not a book where I sat down to write this, and it’s like, “Why are you writing this book?” and the answer is “Because I can.” The answer is because these issues of identity and how we engage with each other across our different identities—that, to me, is the core question facing us right now. How do we all live together? It seemed to me that if I was honest and thoughtful about how these characters would explore those questions, it would be hopefully received that way.
There are a few lines in the book, of Nathaniel’s, or things that Nathaniel was thinking, where multiple people across readings were like, “Is there any way you can get rid of this line? It’s just so cringey.” There’s one line where Nathaniel gets a C+ on his paper, and it says “Come see me.” There’s an African-American student next to him who also got a C+, and it says “Great effort, keep going.” Nathaniel says, “Was slavery the reason that this happened?” Such a cringey line. A number of different readers said, “Oh god, it makes my stomach turn reading it.” My question was always, Is this what Nathaniel would have thought at that time? Is it what he would have said? And if the answer was yes, it seemed important to me to keep it, because it’s hard to explore those tensions that I’m thinking about if I’m not being honest about what he is actually thinking, as ill-informed as it is. And there were also things I had in there that I did end up cutting, because I thought, Ah, this is too much, or this is beyond what he would actually think.
One of the reasons I had Nathaniel come from Newton, Massachusetts, which is the town where I came from, was because I knew I could get the details about his racial outlook correct. An early draft of the book had him from suburban Houston; initially my thought was that he just needs to come from the suburbs and be transplanted into Austin, and he needs to be going from this more buttoned-up community to this looser community. But it didn’t really work, because I didn’t know those specifics about how the kids in his friend circle would perceive race in America at that time. So I was like, You know what, I’m just gonna make it Newton. Because if I’m going to have him saying offensive things, I want to make sure they’re the things he would actually think. I’m not going to have offensive things in the book just for the sake of seeming offensive. I want to get that element right.
In terms of the ending, the only thing I’d push back on a little is the word “comeuppance.” Because he certainly has a comeuppance in terms of how he ends up where he ends up.
That’s true.
One of the themes of this book is the ways in which our judgments about each other based on identity—particularly racism, but not only that—can just rot our brains. So a lot of characters, when confronted with facts that should lead them to the proper conclusion, just can’t get there because they can’t get past their own notions of how the world works. One of the questions I think I’m asking is, Does the world work that way? Are we being a little reductive here?
I really love The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul—these TV shows where process is so central. If you kill someone, it’s not just go to the next scene, it’s, what do you do with the body? What do you do with the shoelaces? What do you do with the head? One of the ways I approached this book, including in these more provocative sections, is just, what would happen next? What would really happen next? So it was less a question of what does a character deserve, or what does a character learn, it was just simply, what happens next? And taking that to what seemed like a conclusion that is logical based on the different characters and their objectives, and their lines of thinking.
I think for those of us who have come of age as writers with Twitter, with all of this social media out there, there’s this tendency to have a million caveats before you say whatever you’re gonna say. You don’t want to be misinterpreted. So you’re gonna have this almost-treatise about what you’re not saying before you say what you are saying. None of this is good for novel writing. You’re not writing a treatise when you’re writing a novel, you’re writing a story. So I had to resist the impulse at times to sort of temper Nathaniel’s racial views, or say, “I just want to make clear, as the writer, that this isn’t what I believe.” You just have to do away with that, and work to make the reader understand what you’re up to. It was very intentional to not do that long preamble about, Hey, some uncomfortable things are going to happen, but let me tell you a bit about me. My bio in the book says nothing. It’s just like: This is my first novel. And that was partially, I think, a response to that idea. I’m just going to let this story speak for itself, and these characters speak for themselves, and let people react as they react.
Speaking of the social media age—now that we’re in the present, and things are getting more absurd, and unlike in your book we have Trump and Twitter attacking from all sides, how do people find their identities?
Oh, god! We’re in a very looking-inward period, but not in a good way, where you’re being introspective and thoughtful. More in a way of turning away from each other. Everything is like an individual sauna. Can I get into a car where there’s no driver? How can we avoid each other as much as possible? I think self-optimization culture has an element of that, where you’re focusing on you and not really thinking of anyone else. One of the themes of this book is, what happens when we look out instead of looking in? What happens when we start to find ourselves in each other? To me, one of the interesting aspects of identity in terms of this book is that many of the people are coming to terms with who they are by relating to other people and finding aspects of themselves in those other people. For all of Belinda’s questionable parenting choices, X does see some of himself in Belinda and does admire some of how Belinda operates in the world. Nathaniel sees in David things he desperately wants to be. So I think there’s something powerful in that, in relating to each other in that way. In this period of looking inward, I wanted to look out. Part of that was having this very wide cast of characters, many of whom are not like me, at least on paper. I’m not in the advice/counsel-giving business, but I do think there’s something to be said for, in this moment, finding aspects of ourselves in each other.
