With Debut Novel The Slip, Lucas Schaefer Pens an Austin Epic

Boxing. Self-discovery. The immigration process. The police system. Societal complacency. Austin’s melting pot. These are just a few things that encompass The Slip, Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel, out June 3 via Simon & Schuster.

“I wanted to write a complicated story, a big story, a story you had to sit with,” Schaefer says.

But it took a while for the sprawling, Austin-centered epic to come together. Schaefer began writing fragments of the novel over a decade ago while in The New Writers Project, UT’s fiction and poetry MFA program.

At first, he wanted to create a collection of stories surrounding a boxing gym. When the author moved to Austin in 2006, he spontaneously took a boxing class, and, beyond the workout, he ended up loving the people he spent time with.

“In so many places, including in Austin, there's a lot of racial segregation, a lot of class segregation … what happens when those things, when those barriers, break away?” Schaefer asks. “That, to me as a writer, is super interesting ground, and going to the gym, that's a place where truly everyone was there.”

This inspired Schaefer to place identity at the forefront of The Slip. The novel’s central conflict occurs in the summer of 1998, when 16-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein disappears, which gives it an overarching foreboding feel. But its zest is in the characters, who are connected to the disappearance and evolve in the years following. Most of them cross paths with Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym, whether regularly or just once.

There’s Alexis, a young, carefree boxer who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border at 14; X, a teenager undergoing a gender identity crisis; and Bob, Nathaniel’s investigative uncle who frequents the gym, to name only a few in the large ensemble. There’s also David, a Haitian immigrant whom Schaefer argues is the heart of the novel since Nathaniel becomes his mentee and aspires to have his charisma. In writing all of these characters as a white man, Schaefer wanted to ensure that he portrayed different identities organically and respectfully.

“I was very aware of writing outside my experience,” Schaefer says. “If it's going to work as a novel, you have to really care about these other people … If you don't figure out who these different people are, in a way that feels true, it's just not gonna come together.”

Perhaps the standout character, though, is the city of Austin. It’s the glue that allows the novel’s multitude of plots to weave together naturally, making Nathaniel’s fictional disappearance feel all the more real, like something bleeding through the veins of everyday life. It also makes the characters feel familiar to any Austinite; David lives in a Hyde Park bungalow, X lives in a condo on South First, the gym is located along North Lamar, and so on.

“I feel like people complaining about Austin changing is just part of the DNA of Austin,” Schaefer says. “For a book about identity, Austin was kind of the perfect city, because everyone is transforming.”

Despite The Slip taking place in the late Nineties and the early years of the new millennium, it reflects and coexists with today’s cultural landscape, where a swarm of experiences and perspectives meld and clash. Because of this, Schaefer looks forward to conversations the novel provokes.

“[I wanted to] let people think about it and converse with it … I just think that's what I love about books, and I think that's important in our culture right now,” he says. “I want people to engage with [the novel’s] complication.”

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Lucas Schaefer will appear at BookPeople on June 3.