When he buys a used firearm, concealing the gun beneath his bed, we begin to wonder whether Stephen is bent on more destructive forms of self-harm, capable of acting out his rage in public acts of terror. Sprinkled throughout the novel are compound examples of Stephen’s dizzying emotional slippage, his tense outbursts of rage - bloodying a helpless opponent, pounding his ragged fist into a wall. Yet how broken is he? To what great lengths is Stephen Florida capable of going in order to keep his inner world glued together? His scorn for social engagements and the noisy rituals of the weekend, and his biting mockery of his classmates fail to soothe his sensitive psyche. Stephen’s physical grappling becomes an exquisite and complicated metaphor for the emotional and existential struggle of so many young North American men, uprooted and uncertain in a world where celebrity subs in for self-esteem and the competitive crush of the sports arena annihilates the weak and the vulnerable.Ĭaught between the bruising wounds of his past and the uncertain beacon of a championship future, Stephen is emotionally frozen, unable to cope with the collective demands of college life. Habash deftly unpacks the recurring anxieties of millennial masculinity. We learn that cool-as-a-cucumber Stephen is fleeing the horror of his parents’ accidental deaths and the loss of his beloved grandmother - and with those losses, any tethered connection to the wider social world. What begins as a study in Stephen’s take-no-prisoners approach to training and its related deprivations - limited food, a brutal physical regimen, occasional laxative therapy, no sex or masturbation - soon tips into a harrowing study of repression and the emotional and mental dissociative tendencies common to survivors of trauma.

Orphaned and adrift, sleepwalking through his final year of college in a bleak North Dakota anytown, Stephen devotes his energy to one concrete goal: winning the regional wrestling championship.

Consider the most obsessed person you’ve ever met, multiple that obsession a millionfold, and you get Stephen Florida, the eponymous hero of Gabe Habash’s gripping debut novel.

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