The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

November 26, 2012
Jansma’s arresting debut follows the real and imaginary tales of an unnamed narrator whose ambition skyrockets after meeting the wealthy and gifted writer Julian McGann in college. The young men become friends based on a fierce competition to outwrite each other. “Somewhere, once, I read that the only mind a writer can’t see into is the mind of a better writer. When I watched Julian watching the world, I was always reminded of this.” Along the way, the narrator falls desperately in love with Julian’s beguiling friend Evelyn, and in the run-up to her wedding begins sleeping with her. As Julian’s writing attracts the kind of fervor that happens rarely, the narrator plods along in the man’s overpowering shadow until his own behavior, and what it brings out of Julian, wrench the two friends apart. While keeping an eye on Julian from afar, the narrator struggles to develop himself as a separate individual from Julian, an effort that seems all but impossible as the two men would have been formless without the impact of each other. Jansma’s characters deftly explore the blurred lines between fact and fiction, discovering the shades of truth that lie in between. Agent: Chelsea Lindman, the Nicholas Ellison Agency.

January 1, 2013
A self-referential first novel about truth, plagiarism, identity and writer's block. He's 8 years old, with only the kindly concession holders in the airport terminal to look after him; his mother, a flight attendant, has left him in their charge. (His father was a one-night stand during a layover.) What kind of a woman would treat her son like that? We'll never know; she never appears. Jansma is not interested in character-building, let alone plot. What's more consequential is that the kid writes his first story in the terminal: It's about a boy detective hiding in a trash can. Then (irony!) a real-world policeman sweeps it into the trash. Omens like these provide the novel's steppingstones. Eight years later, the nameless narrator has an after-school job in a North Carolina art museum; keep in mind the 1863 portrait in gold of a nude woman. Next, the Nameless One is at a college in the Berkshires, where he becomes friends with Julian, another aspiring writer who's gay, and the beautiful actress Evelyn. Later, Julian will publish a wildly successful novel; all the wretchedly unproductive Nameless can get published is a short story in an obscure journal. It's a mashup, Julian as Anton Chekhov, and there's a story-within-the-story about an 1863 gilder. Jansma is enamored of these echo-chamber effects; years later, the American gilder has become a Tamil on a DVD. The characters remain without substance. Evelyn may be the love of the narrator's life, or she may be a fantasy, as much a fantasy as her eventual husband, who morphs from a Hindu geologist into a prince of Luxembourg. The narrator assumes a buddy's identity, does some plagiarizing on the Internet and keeps moving, from Dubai to Sri Lanka to Ghana to Iceland to Luxembourg. Jansma has a ways to go before he can master postmodern technique.

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October 15, 2012

Why am I highlighting this contemporary picaresque? Jansma was a finalist for BOMB magazine's 2011 fiction contest. Sales reps are already raving, as are their customers. And the story sounds so absorbing. The bright-eyed young narrator, an aspiring writer (yes, this is a debut novel), looks up to the gifted Julian McGann and falls hard for Julian's lovely friend Evelyn. When this triangle implodes, the narrator attempts to sort himself out by traveling the world, from Sri Lanka to Manhattan's jazz clubs. A writer to watch.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2012
Online columnist Jansma performs a veritable circus act here, cramming his first novel with literary allusions until it's like a small car stuffed with clowns, who then first burst forth to cavort and turn balloons into poodles. This canny, seductive, and utterly transfixing tale about the magic of storytelling and the misery of writing is told by an itinerant, chameleonic writer who calls himself Nobody. The fatherless son of a flight attendant, he relies on and cares for his rich, gay, and unstable best friend, who turns out to be a truly gifted novelist, and falls hopelessly in love with an actress so beautiful that princes propose marriage. Like a magician pulling a seemingly endless string of colorful scarves from a hat, Jansma streams stories-within-stories-within-stories, each a diabolically clever homage. As Nobody juggles false identities and survives near-catastrophes in New York, Las Vegas, Iceland, Luxembourg, Dubai, Ghana, and Sri Lanka, readers will detect riffs on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Truman Capote, Bob Dylan, Tolstoy, Salinger, Borges, Kipling, and many more. To add to the droll, romantic, and boldly creative sorcery of it all, Jansma riffs on plagiarism as the new American art form and ponders the paradoxes of literary fame. A first novel with the strength and agility of a great cat leaping through rings of fire.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2013

The turbulent relationship among three college friends is the raw material of this captivating first novel. While attending a small Massachusetts college, the North Carolina-born narrator, an aspiring writer, meets the talented but troubled Julian, also a writer, and they quickly become friends as well as artistic competitors. Julian introduces him to the mercurial Evelyn, a beautiful, young New York actress, and the two become lovers. After college, all paths lead to New York City; later, there's an eventful trip to the Grand Canyon for Evelyn's wedding and a decade's parting. The unnamed narrator then embarks on travels through Asia, Africa, and finally to an Icelandic writers' colony where he reunites with Julian. VERDICT Jansma explores how events are shaped into a work of fiction while also showing how we weave the reality of our lives into our own personal narratives. Ultimately, he's concerned with discovering the truth of the self that lies both within and beneath that narrative. A smart, searching debut about art and identity. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/12.]--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.