The cover of New Paltz, New Paltz by Mike Powell sets expectations: yellow and purple—color-wheel opposites; cheery and gloomy; a tear suspended on a cheek; a song—or maybe a cry—erupting from an open mouth.
The novel covers a period in the life of the narrator, Ben, when he’s fallen in love with a girl from a small town in upstate New York called New Paltz. Or rather, Ben thinks he’s in love. He isn’t sure—we soon learn that Ben considers everything from all possible angles—because nobody has told him what love feels like: “One day I was shouldering my way blindly through the streets and the next I wanted to do weird things I’d never done before …” Is this love, he wonders? The fact that Ben is reflecting on a time that might have been the distant past probably means something.
At the time Ben might have been in love, he is in his mid-twenties, works as a fact-checker at a gossip magazine in midtown Manhattan, and lives with a gray cat named Annie in an overpriced three-room apartment. At work, people settle into “… grim fugue states: heads down, shoulders hunched, hundreds of fingers typing thousands of meaningless words.” At home, he fights a losing battle against mosquitoes. Thus, the fact that the encounter with the girl from New Paltz makes him “pause to feel the sun” on his face stands in contrast to his life at the time.
The novel is structured around a handful of encounters with the girl, Lucy, whom Ben first meets while he’s watching dogs in a dog run. Watching the dogs is an activity that Ben enjoys—he indulges in it more than once in the course of the book. Ben envies the dogs. “To be a dog,” he thinks. “No money, no badge, no work, no reason.” Lucy is skinny and looks “faintly disappointed by something.” Later in the novel, Ben muses about why he’s attracted to her, or rather “where to place the blame” for his attraction. He wonders whether “… within attraction there always runs some thread of repulsion, because only repulsion can enlighten us to how contradictory and irresolvable attraction is to begin with.” Musings such as these show just how painfully—or happily—introspective Ben is, his eternal mulling both helping and hobbling him. He meets Lucy a couple more times, and then there is a final meeting toward the end of the novel.
Between encounters, the narrative progresses by way of digressions, stories within stories, and, yes, introspection. We meet Ben’s colleagues and follow him as he buys a shirt from an expensive brand because it seems to be the “costume of a more purposeful life.” He mentors an intern and teaches a boy to swim. He is assigned a story about an actress; we, too, get to know something about her. He visits a museum, and a painting catches his eye. The painting captures a meaningless moment and “in its meaninglessness” reminds Ben of the “sea of meaninglessness” that is his life. But it’s not what it seems, Ben assures us. He is not bothered by the lack of meaning; he is touched. Yet elsewhere he confesses, “my loneliness came to me at unexpected times.”
The digressions and stories make this slim book seem longer, in a satisfying way. I should say that I came by New Paltz, New Paltz in a list of Books to Review—that is, quite by chance, which is how I imagine most books published by independent presses come by readers. I have little in common with Ben. I’m of South Asian origin, and an immigrant, and, though I was once twenty-something like Ben, I lived in a small Indian town as different from New York City as can be. At the time, I’d probably never visited a museum or thought about paintings at any depth. Yet, as I read the novel, I remembered making wistful entries in my diary, of an evening, wondering what was in store for me, wanting my life to mean a great deal while knowing—fearing—that it might not. As Ben says, “What if at the end of this long expensive process of self-realization, I discovered that the self waiting to be realized was a self I didn’t want to be … Worse yet, what if I realized that all I was meant to be was what I already was.”
Yet it’s possible that Ben is aware that, if his life is limited, he might be responsible for it—because he fails to see life as a “blueprint of possibilities,” because he takes to everything with “blind acceptance.” In essence, it’s possible that Ben is caught in a self-fulfilling loop of introspection and preemptively tells himself that wherever he ends up is a fine place after all. Might Ben have forged a deeper relationship with Lucy if he’d considered it to be within the range of possibilities? Can we think ourselves into states of acceptance? Perhaps this is the central philosophical question that emerges in the novel. Either way, Ben would like to believe he’s okay with it. Out of life, he says, he wants nothing more than the knowledge that he’s lived it. After all, if you explore his depths, “you would find life wilder than the ocean.” To himself, he is infinite. Perhaps that is all that matters.
New Paltz, New Paltz, by Mike Powell. Berkeley, Tucson: Double Negative, June 2025. 126 pages. $18.00, paper.
Anu Kandikuppa’s fiction and essays have appeared in Colorado Review, New England Review, Story, and other journals. Her story collection, The Confines, was published in March 2025 by independent press, Veliz Books. Her website is anukandikuppa.com.
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