*Longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction
"A sensitive character study, a wise portrait of a turbulent time, a chronicle of place: Goodman accomplishes so much. Jack Houghteling's voice is both rich and economical, original and familiar with the deepest registers of observation and reflection, illuminating a range of experience, from the technological to the deeply human."
-- Daniel Mason, Author of The Piano Tuner and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a Pulitzer Prize finalist
“Goodman feels startlingly fresh and deep, with a voice beholden to no one else - a challengingly elliptical and sometimes laconic work with dazzling passages and with brilliance on every page. Houghteling roves through so many territories, both cerebral and geographic, and expresses, with authoritative exactitude, what he has seen, felt, thought, and remembered.”
-- Garielle Lutz, Author of Divorcer and Stories in the Worst Way
"If you prefer novels that slot tidily into familiar genre pigeonholes, look elsewhere. Jack Houghteling’s Goodman is a wholly sui generis creation: at once dignified epistle and crackling polemic, quiet domestic drama and comedy of digital manners, Kerouackish ramble across America and Rothian character study. Really, though, you come for the prose, a torrent of neologisms, digressions, nested clauses, bizarrely apt descriptions, and pop-cultural ephemera that overflows this book's banks like a stream in floodstage. Goodman is the linguistically subversive work of a writer who obviously adores the English language, but isn’t afraid to give it the occasional wet willy."
-- Ben Goldfarb, Author of Eager, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
"Goodman is a strange, beautiful, original and inventive journey. Jack Houghteling arranges his sentences like a mad composer. There's true literary power here. I am grateful; I have found a new writer to admire."
-- Gabriel Bump, Author of Everywhere You Don't Belong
"Jack Houghteling's first novel is a fresh take on the Bildungsroman, from a young voice that also gives evidence of an old soul. There's a stubborn, stingingly current tenor to the prose that offers a caught-in-amber portrait of a moment in an extremely literate ephebe's life. Bringing up echoes of such disparate authors as René Daumal and Thomas Wolfe, Goodman fosters a wish that Houghteling go further, write more, and establish a long and successful career in letters."
-- Gil Reavill, Author of This Land is No Stranger and Aftermath
"Showing the real and telling its feel -- this is the task and Jack Houghteling does not shirk from it."
-- Joshua Cohen, Author of The Netanyahus, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Book of Numbers
"Written in a daring high-style, Goodman is a novel I won't soon forget by an author to watch."
-- Elliot Ackerman, Author of Dark at the Crossing, a National Book Award finalist
"In this sensitive portrait of a May-December friendship, Jack Houghteling casts a scrutinizing yet affectionate gaze at his generation's attempts to navigate this bizarre historical epoch. With beauty and wit, Goodman explores the question of how to live an authentic life in the age of technological inauthenticity."
-- Kate Greathead, Author of Laura and Emma