Human Highlight Reels
Reviews
By Ryan Ridge
For fun, let’s indulge the old literary trope that every narrative falls into one of two categories: someone comes to town or someone leaves. If we’re feeling fancy, we add a third option—someone comes to town, then leaves. In Sean Ennis’s fragmented novel Hope and Wild Panic, the unnamed narrator—a Pennsylvania transplant in Water Valley, Mississippi—manages to embody all three arcs at once. Newly married, sober for several years, underemployed yet teaching college athletes how to shape ideas into essays, he’s forever perched at the threshold between arrivals and departures, both literal and metaphorical. And here’s the rub: Ennis’s novel refuses to neatly slot into any tidy narrative categories. Good ones never do.
If conventional wisdom says all stories are variations on coming and going, John Hawkes’s edict suggests something else entirely: the experimental novelist once quipped that “the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme.” Indeed, Hope and Wild Panic brims with distinct personalities, recurring motifs, and a sense of place so vivid you can almost smell the kudzu. But if you’re looking for a straight storyline, you’ll be squinting to detect even the faintest traces of a plot. Unburdened by this typical narrative convention, Ennis lets loose with eighty kinetic vignettes that vault Hope and Wild Panic into the pantheon of great plotless wonders—think Speedboat, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Sophia, and Ray. As with Adler, Markson, Bible, and Hannah, voice and verve propel these pages, thrusting readers straight into a mind in time and delivering sly sentences that turn on a dime. Not only is Ennis funnier than hell, but he’s also wise—and besides, who needs a plot when you can write sentences like these? Consider, for example, a handful of aphoristic gems plucked at random from my annotated copy:
So true that what pleases upsets some.
I was in the concussion protocol of the soul.
Blood pressure is low except when it’s checked.
Cut, the yard somehow looks worse, but I’ll call it a lawn.
The future is important, but not urgent.
It’s tempting to categorize Hope and Wild Panic as a comic musing on recovery, and in some ways, it is. Like Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties, another standout from 2024, Ennis’s novel taps into the unsettled, temperate mood of the current cultural moment and confronts the difficulty of forcing coherence onto the slippery narrative of “clean living.” Both voice-driven books reject the tired spiral-and-redemption arc. Instead, they trust that any grace to be found emerges episodically, syntactically, and unconventionally. In that sense, Hope and Wild Panic doesn’t merely reflect the recovery process—it amplifies it, line by magnificent line, plunging readers into that liminal space between healing and the potential horrors of relapse, where the contours of progress remain almost impossible to map.
Of course, this is all happening against the backdrop of a vibe shift. Post-pandemic, our American thirst for booze has dried. Folks are pulling back—many are quitting altogether—and as a result, the non-alcoholic beer market is now a 7.2-billion-dollar industry. Collectively, it feels like we’re all sobering up as the republic rolls into its afterparty. But before the panoply of news headlines announced the so-called “sober curious” movement and the NA beer companies began raking in the dough and our social media feeds filled with wellness influencers sharing mocktail recipes and touting the wisdom of dry months, Ennis’s protagonist was already on the wagon, questioning what it means to live mindfully in a mostly mindless world. In this sense, Hope and Wild Panic anticipates the cultural recalibration outside its pages. The narrator embodies this shift in values we now see playing out all around us. “The ice maker makes little frozen bullets,” the narrator observes midway through the book, “which could be a metaphor if I felt like talking about how I used to drink too much and was unkind.” Here, the protagonist refuses to soapbox and instead leaves us to ponder what’s left when the old stories no longer apply and the new ones have yet to arrive.
The late, great Kurt Vonnegut famously warned writers against including love stories in novels. “Once that particular subject comes up,” he insisted, “it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers . . . go gaga about love.” But Ennis isn’t losing any sleep over Vonnegut’s dictum. In Hope and Wild Panic, the narrator is nothing if not head over heels for his wife, Grace, openly cherishing her in a way that would have old Kurt arching an eyebrow and lighting a Pall Mall. So it goes. The narrator is committed and affectionate, and without apology. But rather than smothering the story, the narrator’s earnest devotion becomes another avenue of authenticity and heft, an anchor. Take the story “Source and Scale,” where the narrator describes his wife: “I like to watch Grace try on new clothes, even the junk from Old Navy. Sometimes she says the word ‘panties’ or inadvertently touches her breast. I say, ‘Yowza.’ She’ll return half of it—she’s no fool.” The vignette concludes: “There’s a trust one must have when completing jigsaw puzzles, and this is what we had. I stopped watching the news right after they reported that plants can see and feel pain.”
Beyond the protagonist, his wife, and his son, the setting itself does a formidable job of filling the role of the fourth main character. While the novel does feature a few quick side quests to Birmingham, Charleston, Mobile, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, its feet are firmly planted in Water Valley, Mississippi. Nestled in the storied Hill Country—a region that’s produced more than its share of literary and artistic geniuses (Larry Brown, R. L. and Cedric Burnside, William Faulkner, Barry Hannah, and Junior Kimbrough, among others)—Water Valley radiates a fertile and feral energy. None of these luminaries appear in the book, but their presence is sensed and felt.
Here in Water Valley, Ennis’s narrator, a displaced Yankee (an outsider’s insider), becomes our unlikely tour guide while riffing on the town’s flora and fauna, its eccentric cast of artists and oddballs, delinquents and lawyers, as well as the local politics. At a town fair, we encounter vomiting children, homemade pickle stands, and “hermit crabs with Confederate-flag-painted shells.” We more than once tour the Piggly Wiggly and pop into the local art gallery before driving to the Sonic to order “something bright blue, potentially cancerous, and delicious.” Yes, place looms large here, as heavy as the humid air, and the possibility of catastrophe is never far off. Tornado watches whip through five separate chapters, reminding us that the land itself can turn unfriendly at any time. In this tension, Water Valley asserts itself as a vibrant, fierce force in the book.
Media consumption also hums throughout Hope and Wild Panic, and the characters aren’t just idly scrolling on their phones, either. Their steady media diet runs the gamut: network news, grim nature documentaries on malnourished chimpanzees, cautionary tales of substance abusers, high-stakes political theater (including Trump’s impeachment trial), and more surreal fare—like a sci-fi film in which astronauts lose their minds in outer space after Earth explodes.
In “When Animals Tour the Zoo,” the narrator yearns to improve his cooking skills but ends up trapped in a YouTube loop: “I had been watching a video over and over where a zookeeper introduces an iguana to a seal,” he confesses. The chapter ends with the protagonist feeling as pent up as the animals: “And a few more weeks of this and I may be that heartsick reptile not even fathoming the lovely seal behind glass.”
Similarly, in “The Ambit of Our Friendship,” the narrator tutors a student named Wes, who watches his recent college football highlights online rather than working on his research paper. The scene turns strange when Wes types the narrator’s name into the search bar and summons a human highlight reel of ordinary instances. These clips aren’t triumphant touchdowns but direct moments of everyday life: a complicated martini order, a failed attempt to change a flat tire on a Louisiana overpass, and the narrator’s private thrill at learning his wife is pregnant. These fleeting micro-moments of joy and terror might never endure the high-gloss treatment we lavish on celebrities and influencers and celebrity influencers. Yet that doesn’t mean they’re any less worthy of our attention. In fact, the opposite is true. Ennis seems to suggest that with the right set of eyes, we’re all human highlight reels.
In the end, Hope and Wild Panic isn’t just a novel—it’s a kaleidoscopic collage of a life in transit, a collection of vignettes that resist any easy summary. Stories don’t boil down to a simple choice of coming or going, as we pretended at the jump. Instead, they unfold somewhere in that messy middle ground where a character can do all three things at once or none at all. Ennis knows this, and by the final chapter, it’s clear: some stories, the ones worth telling, refuse to play by any rules. They invent their own.
Ryan Ridge is the author of five chapbooks and five books, including the story collection New Bad News (Sarabande Books, 2020) and the poetry chapbook Ox (Alternating Current, 2021). His collaborative collection Climate Strange, written with Mel Bosworth, is due in 2026 from Astrophil Press. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and plays bass in the Snarlin’ Yarns, who have released two albums on Dial Back Sound.
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