Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space

Ngamije (The Eternal Audience of One) serves up an occasionally dazzling but ultimately diffuse collection about the woes of a 20-something novelist. It’s framed as a “literary mixtape” and arranged by alternating A-side and B-side stories (the former comprise a linked narrative while the latter each stand alone). The unnamed novelist reflects in “Crunchy Green Apples” on how he grew apart from his mother as he entered into a “tribe called cool.” “The Sage of the Six Paths (Or, The Life and Times of the Five Os)” covers his teen years, as he gets into trouble with his fast-moving and mischievous friend group before finding “another way of being” through literature. In “The Hope, the Prayer, and the Anthem (Or, The Fall So Far),” he considers his elusive dreams for “a modern house,” “a wife,” and an “acclaimed novel.” B-Side tales include “Wicked,” narrated by a woman who feels a “selfish hope” that her married lover won’t leave her. Ngamije turns heads with his clever and energetic wordplay (the novelist’s promiscuous milieu is prone to “souped-up STI Golfs revving from gonorrhea to HIV in sex seconds flat”), but the structure is a bit confusing, leaving readers who remember mix tapes to wonder why the A-side and B-side tracks are alternated, and the conceit feels more gimmicky than essential. Ngamije has done better. Agent: Cecile Barendsma, CBL Agency. (Dec.)