New Year

New Year is a quiet temporal marker in Thelonious Ellison’s account, separating the unnoticed passage of the holidays from the rapid commercial rise of Fuck.

Narrative Placement

Christmas and New Year’s pass without note, just as Thelonious Ellison says he had always wanted them to. The narration gives the holiday no scene of its own; instead, it moves across the interval and resumes in mid-January. By then, Fuck is number one on the New York Times bestseller list and has been picked up by two more book clubs. New Year thus marks an unobtrusive threshold between the holiday pause and the book’s expanding success.