Why National Book Award winner Jason Mott keeps writing Nicolas Cage into his novels
Jason Mott may have found the cure for male loneliness: a cage match.
No, we’re not talking about MMA or pro wrestling. Twice a year, Mott, the National Book Award-winning author, has about a dozen friends over to his house in North Carolina to watch back-to-back Nicolas Cage movies.
That's his kind of “Cage match.” In a culture lacking male friendship amid the ballooning manosphere, these regular marathons are a healthy way for the group of college friends to make time for each other (and nerd out over "Lord of War").
If you’ve read Mott’s “Hell of a Book,” which won the National Book Award in 2021, you know where this is going, because Cage has a presence in that book (though Mott has never met him, he’s just a massive fan). The actor is also mentioned in Mott’s new book, a quasi-sequel called “People Like Us.”
Cage is an apt metaphor for “People Like Us” (out now from Dutton), which often blends the real Jason Mott with a fictionalized version of himself. He’s open about some of the real bits in the novel, like speaking at a university where a shooting has just occurred and signing autographs after getting mistaken for Ta-Nehisi Coates and Colson Whitehead, two award-winning authors who are also Black. He’s coy about others, like when characters mingle with an unnamed French benefactor and an author named “Not Toni Morrison.”
And this book should be Mott’s most meta. “People Like Us” started out as a memoir; a tongue-in-cheek note to readers is signed by “The Author (with legal breathing down his neck)”.
What happens after you win a National Book Award?
In 2021, Mott was sitting alone in an office when he found out over Zoom that he had won the National Book Award.
His “Hell of a Book” is a commentary on racism and gun violence in America, telling the story of a Black author on a cross-country book tour and a Black boy living in a rural town in the past. He was up against bestsellers like “Cloud Cuckoo Land” by Anthony Doerr and “Matrix” by Lauren Groff. When his girlfriend asked if he wanted company during the ceremony, he said no.
“No, when I lose, I want to cry by myself,” he recalls saying. He laughs as he recounts the aftermath. “I wound up sitting alone in an office by myself as I won the National Book Award, which sounds very sad when I say it out loud like that.”
Suddenly, Mott’s quiet year turned into a global tour, “overpopulated with events.” He became part of a small number of people who can say they’ve won the esteemed prize.
In “People Like Us,” Mott’s character “the Author” embarks on a similar tour abroad (called only "The Continent") after winning what’s referred to as “The Big One.” On the cover, a tiny character is crushed by a faux gold award emblem.
In the book and in real life, the book tour tone shifts after the award. Mott had been used to talking about grief, inspiration and writing process on the road for his resurrection novel “The Returned.”
“Hell of a Book” came out just a year after George Floyd was killed. Readers wanted to ask him about race and identity. European readers, he recalled, were curious about what it was like to live as a Black man in America.
“The thing I found that was most intriguing was, more than anything, they wanted me to answer for America's sins,” Mott says. “They would ask questions about why this certain legislature came through, and how I feel about this legislature, and why do I choose to stay in America with all the gun violence? And what does it feel like being a Black person in America, knowing the history of America?”
Jason Mott started writing a memoir. It became his new novel.
After the tour, he needed to reflect and process. He wanted to write about how it felt to come back to a country riddled with gun violence. He wanted to write about how minority authors sometimes feel “interchangeable” to the book world. He wanted to write about the surreal aftermath of winning the National Book Award.
He started journaling. He had enough to write a memoir – so he did. But when he was a few rounds into revisions, he realized the characters from “Hell of a Book” were weaseling their way into his story.
“I struggle with a lot of privacy; I struggle with being in the spotlight too much,” Mott says. “The more I made a memoir, the more difficult it actually became for me as a writer to actually explore the story and explore the ideas.”
He has never been a “sequel guy,” but knew he had more to say with these characters. What would happen if he brought them back and put them into situations he had experienced? He wasn’t sure if it would land with a publisher. Would anyone want to read that?
Luckily, he had the “Big One” under his belt.
In ‘People Like Us,’ Jason Mott leans into a meta story
“People Like Us” is a dizzying fever dream of a novel – captivating with wit, satire and heartbreak. It’s often hard to tell what’s real and not real, but that makes it all the more thrilling to read. Mott, even as a reader, loves "those books that are just on the edge of realism."
Writing this book was “liberating” to Mott, and he took more risks with time jumps, speculative themes and new characters. He could also poke fun at the literary world, which he does heavily.
And he’s prepared for questions on tour about what’s real and what’s made up. After all, there are a lot of shocking, often violent moments in this novel. But he’s playing it cool. He says it’s more fun to let people guess and decide for themselves what he means.
“People oftentimes wonder if there's any pressure that I feel having won the National Book Award, and for me, I think it was exactly the opposite, where any sense of pressure that I might have had about myself as a writer just kind of dissolved into nothing,” Mott says. “For me, I did the biggest thing that I ever had dreamed of doing in writing in winning the National Book Award. And so after I climb Everest, I don't look for Everest Part 2 … that is enough. From here on out, I just get to have fun with my writing, do what I want to do, experiment, be weird.”
Clare Mulroy is Paste BN’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.