The most prescient aspect of Body is its fascination with self-invention. Its world of bodybuilding and gym obsessives is full of post-Reaganites and proto-Rogan listeners, deep in the blue collar “have-nots” landscape, but with some of the white collar “haves” already aspiring to Silicon Valley, South Beach, and corporate Vegas glitz, the “I’ll live forever and stay young and good looking ‘til the end”sters who think supplements, cold plunges, and unironic mustaches will carve a path to their own deification and immortality.

Within this setting, we’re still a couple of years before The Real World and RuPaul, before The Crying Game winning awards and Kurt Cobain donning dresses, and before the arrival of other pop-culture entities that would collapse binaries and unlock new frontiers of weirdness while mainstreaming the underground. Crews hones in on the fear of dying unknown; a pre-smartphone, pre-internet herald of Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” gone meta (and Meta). The enlightened reality-makers and deluded reality-deniers of Body constitute its cast of characters: Caucasian protagonist Shereel Dupont (nee Dorothy Turnipseed), competing to win the title of Ms. Cosmos, her coach Russell “Muscle” Morgan, her Black opponent and that opponent’s Black coach, Marvella Washington and Wallace “The Wall” Wilson, and our protagonist’s white trash family with their fear of cultural change and a “make American great again” worldview long before the rise of that northerner Donald Trump, whom Crews met personally and who’s much referenced in Body.

Real-life Trump, then in his Atlantic City hotelier and casino-operator phase, escorted Crews to his front-row seat alongside Madonna and Sean Penn for the Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks bout in 1988, and Body embodies the fight, the war, the contentiousness that is our current-day (and eternal) currency. “Few writers are so relentlessly concerned with the physical rather than the intellectual,” John L. Williams argues in 3:AM Magazine. The blackest of comedies, Body is grim at times, hilariously unfiltered at others, ecstatic and anything but congenial.

By the late eighties, we’d had the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Pumping Iron (1977), the subculture of Mr. Olympia competitions and their ilk, a period documented in George Gallo’s Bigger, the 2018 movie about Joe Weider and his brothers founding the International Foundation of Bodybuilders and launching the gym movement as much as Jane Fonda did. Readers may also conjure up 2024’s Love Lies Bleeding, a 1989-set LGBT crime-romance directed by Rose Glass starring Kristen Stewart as a woman in love with an aspiring female bodybuilder, 2023’s Magazine Dreams from Elijah Bynum and starring Jonathan Majors as a Black man navigating the world of bodybuilding celebrity, or even Rocky IV (1985), where Russia provides the antagonist via Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago, signaled as evil because he uses steroids.

Crews wasn’t a mainstream filmmaker repositioning the Cold War, nor a genre-postmodernist breaking down signified and signifier. He was a survivor who loved gladiatorship, boxing, and martial arts, as seen in his books Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971) and The Knockout Artist (1988). One of the few literary works that serve as a real antecedent to Body is Leonard Gardner’s sole novel, the boxing classic Fat City (1969). By this point in his career, Crews was wearing a slightly ridiculous mohawk alongside his scars and grizzled countenance and, yes, still had an earned toughness that’d make anyone who’d glance twice extremely unlikely to call him out on it. But by the time he hit his mid-50s, he was closer to a traditional professor, no longer galivanting into days-long benders with hillbilly carnies or Alaskan pipeliners. Crews’s spin on Walter Pater’s quote, “All art aspires to the condition of music” is “All sporting endeavor aspires to the condition of a fight.”

Body opens with a sex scene (and love scene, and battle-of-wills scene) between coach and pupil. The comedic conceit has Russell “Muscle” Morgan literally screwing his prodigy Shereel DuPont in order to sweat her down under the weight limit for her class. He provides instruction, guidance, funds, and protection amidst quasi-criminal surroundings—cheats and scammers within and without the bodybuilding world—bringing to mind the numinous nature of the Southern mafia, redolent of songs by Jason Isbell and Drive-By Truckers, the noir-tinged novels of John Brandon, the film-worlds of Jeremy Saulnier, and the new-canon nonfiction of John Jeremiah Sullvan.

Immersing the reader in turn-of-the-nineties capitalism, Body’s men peacock and display value. They’re often war veterans. Women are often secretaries, and Dorothy/Shereel is a secretary-turned-superstar. The tactile sensations of stardom invoke both the Warholian and, well, let’s call it Dana White-ish, Vince McMahon-esque; the worlds of MMA and WWE are brewing here. As is the female combatant narrative, where films like Karyn Kusama’s Girlfight (2000) and Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004) and novels like Erika Krouse’s Contenders (2015) and Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot (2024) would burble forth in coming years.

Body’s subtitle is “a tragicomedy.” This term encompasses a lot in 2025—from the films of Alexander Payne to the novels of Jonathan Franzen to the TV program The Bear—but there are few middle or upper classers here, no northeastern, Californian, or midwestern cities. This is the humidity-drenched deep South, a realm of redneckery and constant racial and gender tensions, where Sean Baker’s film The Florida Project (2017), and his trans-focused and sex-worker-humanizing filmography, bears mention as well.

Conflations of strangeness are a vital locus of development, and permeating Body there’s an unremittent raucous quality that an author unfamiliar with poverty and Southern life would’ve mangled, but Crews grants his characters, however low class and callous, dignity: these folks are every bit as worthy of both empathy and satire as anyone. It’s a picaresque burlesque, downright slapstick at times, as early in the book a hotel manager named Lipschitz tries to curtail the just-arrived Turnipseed family from tearing up the Miami hotel hosting the worldclass bodybuilding event while Shereel’s coach Russell—a former amateur Mr. America who failed at the professional level and then became an exploiter of the talents of others, reminiscent of the trainer in the aforementioned Fat City—squares off against the competition’s coach and muses aloud about how Wallace “The Wall” positions himself as a Black liberationist (Wall is the proprietor of a gym called Black Magic) but will kowtow to whites when it benefits his business. Meanwhile, Wall and Marvella threaten to reveal that glamorous Shereel DuPont was formerly podunk Dorothy Turnipseed, and take note of the names, from a Black woman’s appropriation of both the American capital and slaveowner George Washington to The Wall’s invocation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (a war famously opposed by Black nationalists like Muhammad Ali) to Shereel (she’s real) DuPont (of the bridge, between male and female). In these opening scenes particularly, the manic energy of a shredded Melissa McCarthy comes to mind, as does the homonymically named Terry Crews (who’d be perfect as Wall).

The post-Vietnam legacy of almost every action movie of the eighties is instrumentalized in the character of Nail Head, Shereel’s fiancé who accompanies her family to watch her compete for the first time. “Russell knew immediately why he was called Nail Head. It had to be because of his eyes, flat and without light and solid black…His face was as empty of expression as his eyes.” Nail is a PTSD’d psychopath who in one scene literally undresses Shereel (whom he likes to call Sister Woman) with his ever-present knife, a giant switchblade.

Miami as locale employs familiar-now tropes of superficiality, “body over brains,” vapid and ostentatious, a more tropical Las Vegas or Los Angeles not as tied to the casino or movie industries, and though the South Florida setting is prevalent, we don’t get much sun and fun. If it were a screenplay, almost all the shots would be interiors. “The dark” is omnipresent, though “dark humor,” as it’s used today, wasn’t a widespread term at the turgid turn of the nineties. Body’s blurbs, however, provide a thrum of the dawning zeitgeist. The Chicago Tribune deems Crews “the resident storyteller of today’s South,” knighting him with a mix of the masculine and the feminine: “muscular, belligerent, but also touching.” The New York Times Book Review calls him Swiftian, a comic moralist defined by ferocity and Wildean wit. And The Philadelphia Inquirer praises the author as colorful, unpredictable.

The white-trash stereotypes are profluent: Nail the murderous post-Vietnam psycho, Shereel’s near-deaf father Fonse (short for Alphonse, though she calls him Daddy) who imposes his right-to-privacy-and-to-pay-cash smalltown values on the big city and its corporate hotel, and Shereel’s sister and mother Earline and Earnestine as the women who run the household and merit from their menfolk (brothers Motor and Turner, along with Fonse and Nail) an odd blend of genuflecting respect mixed with the constant threat of a backhand should they misbehave.

These figures are still with us, even as country music now encompasses everyone from Beyoncé to Darius Rucker, from Lil Nas X to Shaboozey, from Taylor Swift to Post Malone. Country and hip-hop are both deeply tragicomic genres that embrace extremes, laden with “trad” and “toxic” masculinity run amuck, often depicting murderous rage and violence. If the works of Larry McMurtry present a sort of dying South, Crews presents the insuppressible and unkillable zombie South, complete with a jawbone full of chaw, spitting tobacco juice and the n-word with equal disdain, enemy of Yankee northernness, enforced “progress,” or really any externally defined values at all, the land of “rebels” who never wanted your colonization and “education” to begin with, tetchy from being part of the American empire, a secessionist core to the superstructure that’s contemptuous and unapologetic, repudiating the urbane and polished. At one point Nail opines that it always comes down to the knife eventually, so why all the platitudes and fake politeness?

This is sometimes posited as the appeal of Donald Trump: the unapologetic swaggerer who exhorts others not to apologize, a throwback to a rougher, crueler, lie-filled but somehow more “honest” time of social-Darwinist excess. Trump receives his first mention in Chapter 9, after Wall introduces his protégé, the antagonist Marvella, kin to the word-averse Drago of Rocky IV and the “bad wrestler” archetype in the Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991). Marvella’s a doper, and her lineage is contrasted with real-life bodybuilders Frank Zane, Lou Ferrigno, Lee Haney, and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger (a Trump predecessor in some ways). The time is one wherein the gender dynamics of women’s bodybuilding were shifting away from the first-ever Ms. Olympia Rachel McLish—“she was muscular, and also perfectly symmetrical and coordinated, but most of all she could be put in a dress and taken home to mother. But in a short period of time following Rachel McLish’s reign as world champion, if you put a world-class female bodybuilder in a dress, she could not be taken home to mother or many other places because they looked like men tricked out in women’s clothing.” There’s even an explicit comment that the judges and fans of the sport are in the process of deciding “what the ideal woman ought to look like.”

Wall and Marvella are willing to cheat (like a Machiavellian politician or sports dynasty) to procure the win, and Wall all but predicts the POC Trump voter in lines like “He had decided it was the American way. Where was the American who owned anything that he did not wish was bigger? Wall’s waking hours were haunted by Donald Trump, and his dreams were shot through with whole populations of Donald Trumps.”

Russell has bet his life on Shereel because she maintains her femininity. He thinks the “bigger is better” ethos is done: “he knew in his blood that bigness was finished.” The million megatons of warheads in the US can’t even get Khaddafi, he thinks, and the country’s still reeling from what he sees as defeat in Vietnam. Men, in his view, perceive a future that’s female and are trying to regain their “balls.” A middle-class paycheck-to-paycheck survivor less entrepreneurial than his counterpart Wall, Russell still recognizes Shereel as his meal ticket.

Shereel, in contrast to Marvella, is drug-free, or “natty” as they say on the Reddits and Instas. Crews’s preternatural gift for the darkly comic and truly America-skewering runs deep in these Trump-alluding chapters where he sets up the novel’s conflict: the “good” white bodybuilder who looks like a trad woman vs. the “bad” Black bodybuilder who looks like a trans-male. Marvella’s an antagonist but not a villain. She’s a victim of the patriarchy too. Wall constantly talks about how he trains Marvella like a horse and owns her like a slave, claiming to own her sisters as well, “the way Jesus owned the disciples.” Wall, Marvella, and her sisters hail from Detroit, and the sisters are named Starvella, Shavella, Jabella, and Vanella; the last “the lightest-skinned by far, and the most beautiful,” in a vicious satire of colorism. Wall repeatedly claims ownership over women, but what owns him? The quest for Trump and company’s atavistic “great”ness, fame and fortune, the American dream. He and Marvella’s motto? “Greatness or death.”

Wallace’s objectification and animalization of Marvella manifests in his speech patterns. “Come get it, Champ,” he says, like someone talking to a pet dog, and he’s not referring to his phallus but to the insertion of the steroid needle. “Give it to me,” says Marvella, “her own voice husky now. ‘Give it all to me.’” He replies by burying the needle deep into her and admiring her hindquarters. This method of administering the shot to gluteus instead of hip, the novel reveals in yet another brilliant gut-punch metaphor (this time to a pimp drugging and brainwashing young prostitutes), “was the way it had always been done, over a period of seven years now, since the time she was fifteen years old.”

The abiding corporeal awareness in Body manifests in forms both hilarious and searing. The novel’s main subplot is a love affair between a petite but sculpted male bodybuilder named Billy Bat, who seduces Shereel’s obese sister Earline. This inverts traditional gender dynamics as it’s Billy who has the eating disorder, bulimia. He admires Earline’s girth because it represents freedom he doesn’t have—to eat whatever he wants—and she’s enamored of him because of his physical strength, an ability to be lifted off the ground for the first time since she was a prepubescent girl lifted up by her father.

Nail’s Vietnam vet is the wild boy who becomes the legitimately crazy and homicidal man, at one point admitting to murdering a fellow American soldier who pissed him off in the jungles of Vietnam just because he could. Abreacted from the constraints of civil society and processed by the trauma of both the war machine and combat itself, Nail represents the dehumanization of young American males, turned into killing machines to support the military-industrial complex.

Crews really cooks up the Great (Southern) American Novel here, putting everything into it—all the people and history and concepts. When Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon does this, it’s called a “systems novel,” while writers like Crews are often regionalized or minimized by a literary community unlikely to grant him the accolades hurled at writers like DeLillo or Pynchon. Not that these authors are in any way undeserving, but they have far fewer scenes like one where Russell looks at Shereel’s foil Marvella with “asexual admiration. He would no more have thought of fucking her than he would have thought of fucking a statue of General Lee in a public park.” The faint of heart might lament the directness of Crews’s language, but I dare them to find me in American literature a macho “alpha-male” comparing the perfect form of a Black female athlete to a statue of the most infamous internal antagonist in US history or the audacity and perspicacity to compare the Turnipseeds hooting and hollering at Billy Bat’s flexing and crabbing to the roars of adulation that once attended American lynchings.

For all his murderous sociopathy, Nail accepts Shereel’s name, and a turning point comes when she grabs his omnipresent knife and threatens to remove his too-earnest penis as it attempts to interrupt her training regimen and sanctified physical state as she preps for competition. Billy grows from comic relief into Earline’s suitor and boyfriend. He explains the mechanics of competitive bodybuilding to the Turnipseeds, Nail included, by alluding to celebrity. He sees Dorothy’s transition to Shereel as that of a stage name: “You ain’t heard of no movie star with the name his mama given him, have you?”

He calls Shereel Dupont the “name of a champion,” (satirizing also the billionaire Dupont family and its legacy of war profiteering and other deadly scandals) certifying long before the mainstreaming of trans-identity issues a major reason trans individuals so proudly pronounce their new (real) name and call attempts to refer to their old (unreal) name “deadnaming,” a concept echoed in the classic conversion from slave name to liberated name. Already at that time, sports were often the tip of the progressive spear, desegregating long before American society as a whole and providing examples like Cassius Clay becoming Muhammad Ali and Lew Alcindor becoming Kareem Abdul Jabbar to pair with the worlds of politics and literature—Malcolm Little’s conversion to Malcolm X and Leroi Jones’s to Amiri Baraka. But that’s not enough, as Maud Newton puts it in her reading of Body: “Crews suggests that you can change your name and revamp your physical self, but unless you deal with your innermost neediness, the ways life has broken you, all this transformation is counterfeit. Neither your old self nor the new one you’ve erected on top of it will be strong enough to survive the crap the world throws at you.”

Crews also tilts at 1980s “gym culture” as inception point. Billy explains: “It’s women in gyms all over the world sweatin’ and groanin’ and gittin’ it down deep every day—payin’ the price—takin’ their bodies apart and puttin’ em together a different way…they do it to keep their courage up and the fire burning.” The idea that a gym’s a different place for a woman than a man is the subject of no small number of papers and studies about gym influencers and/or the male gaze, and the idea of literally taking your body apart to put it together in a different way is the post-op trans individual’s path to the enlightenment of finding, inhabiting, and displaying their true self. As Bob Dylan quips in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film Rolling Thunder Revue (about the period when Dylan recorded “Hurricane,” a most direct upending of racial divisions that cross-examined American complicity, leading to Ruben “Hurricane” Carter’s release from prison), “Life isn’t about finding yourself…it’s about creating yourself.”

Body is also published within the timeframe just before Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) would comment on the commodification and feminization of the American male, and just after Warhol’s superstars and drag queens were reconstructing the gender paradigm in the AIDS-era New York City documented in the artworks and literature of David Wojnarowicz. The deep-South settings of Crews’s work, far from Armistead Maupin’s or Susan Sontag’s interrogations of the queering of the culture, were mostly precluded from such discourse at the time.

The bodybuilders in Crews’s novel—preening and posing, with fake-tanned skin and shaved-down smoothness—model the identity replication done nowadays online, the dermabrasion that is one’s e-dentity on social media or dating websites. At one point in Body, curious as to how these “fancy folks” do it, Shereel’s hirsute brother Motor is witnessed shaving himself by Russell, who recoils. The pallid and paunchy “white working class” of 1989 were supposed to be hapless beer-swilling sitcom husbands or delivery men dining at doughnut shops; they weren’t supposed to be so shorn in the decades before the proliferation of “manscaping” and libidos eternally prolongable by Viagra.

Russell Muscle’s an intriguing character partly because he’s an OG bodybuilder. He trains women but doesn’t think men should serve as judges for the female division and nostalgizes his field: “The whole sport had changed up on him. When he started, there had been no women and no she-men, or none that he knew of.” This newness he’s faced with reminds of nothing so much as the ardent Trump supporter, a MAGA revanchism that unfurls in some of Crews’s best prose in the book: “It made him feel weird,” is his description of Russell’s purview (and “weird” was a term much discussed in the leadup to the Trump-Harris presidential election, both parties wielding it to marginalize the other), “made him feel lost, the way he might feel if he went out one night and instead of walking into his own house, he made a wrong turn and walked into the house of a neighbor where everything was strange and where he did not belong.” The times haven’t stopped a-changing since the early folk-era Bob Dylan transitioned to the electric one, or since the publication of The Last Picture Show (1966) and its adaptation demonstrated the extinction of a brand of Southern and Western rural life. Crews even alludes to Florida itself as a much older incarnation of this nexus of fear of change through one of its most ancient symbols, the fountain of youth.

The entrance to the resort’s gym consists of two swinging doors with, festooned above them, an image of blue flamingoes preening their feathers and the words “FLORIDA’S FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH. COME FIND IT.” The unavoidable surfeit of 2025, the ads for testosterone, Hims, Bluechew, and other “male supplements” that accompany incessantly any event, program, podcast, or broadcast even remotely related to sports, comes readily to mind. All those avocations that begin with “Fellas, are you having a hard time?” are no more than fountain-of-youth promises writ large (and underwritten by Big Pharma).

The hotel owner and promoter of the bodybuilding competition, Friedkin (seemingly an allusion to hyper-masculine film director William Friedkin), is a telling supporting character, a sort of “stan,” a wannabe, a failed bodybuilder defined by a rotating passel of toupees, liposuction, and plastic surgery, his bronzer tan set apart from the competitors who use tanning beds to toast their skin. And skin is our largest organ, Billy reminds Earline in the book’s most direct titular reference as he poetically speaks about “body” as a source of worship and transcendence, something only human animals in their conscious and self-aware state are granted. He’s spent his life perfecting his body, and to this large woman he doesn’t hesitate to compare to a whale (he envies not just her freedom of appetite but her smooth skin) while massaging her in the bath (reverting her to an idyllic, childlike state comparable to enwombedness), he references his masseuse skills as follows: “It’s on account of my life spent in search of the body that I am today a skin mechanic.”

Both characters are virgins. Earline’s size has harmed her self-confidence while Billy’s abstemious asceticism has led him to aping the life of a prizefighter (traditionally, a boxer in training is supposed to lay off sex—“Women weaken legs!” as Rocky Balboa’s trainer Mickey meme-ably snarls). Billy’s path to greatness, he feels, will be his world-class back, and “he was not about to lose even an ounce of his worldbeating back through the head of his dick.” In the American pop culture/literary landscape, “back” carries a twofold meaning, firstly that of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s iconic anthem to derrieres “Baby Got Back” (1992), institutionalized as synonym for a curvaceous female backside that transfixes and hypnotizes (traditionally Black) men, and secondly, the nomenclature as applied by Allen Ginsberg in the conclusion of his epic poem “America” (1956), the speaker putting his queer shoulder to the wheel, the back as instantiation site for the manual laborer, the blue-collar worker shoving and lifting with their back, a protestant ethic applicable to whatever needs change, progress as forced into existence through labor, and never voluntarily given by the oppressor.

Earline’s more than happy to be “toned and tuned” (like an automobile or a fine musical instrument, “mankind”’s great inventions of transportation and transcendence) by Billy, and this inclusion of a straight-faced love story confirms the systems-novel intensity of Crews’s most capacious vision in this eclectic, esoteric, unrelenting and uncompromised novel. Earline’s reaction to Billy’s ministrations depict the female orgasm in as clear-eyed a prose as the lauded recent-day consent-centric feminist fictions of Sally Rooney when post-consummation, Earline annotates her physical union to Billy with “We married now.” His own rural patois figures it as, “We fit like two spoons, you sweet girl.”

In The Southern Literary Journal, Frank W. Shelton argues: “Crews’s fiction centers on the underlying tension between man’s yearning for perfection, yet the inevitable imperfection of the world and life in it…manifested in the body, conflicts with his yearning for spiritual perfection. Crews evokes the traditional duality of body and spirit, the body representing the biological trap man finds himself in, which intensifies his yearning for spiritual sustenance…Crews treats physical rituals as manifestations of man’s search for value. Looking at his novels…I contended that ‘the hope they offer has been gradually reduced, that the sustaining role ritual can play has diminished, and that the arena in which man can constructively act has become narrower and narrower until it virtually disappears’.” Body’s conclusion will support Shelton’s nihilistic reading.

As Body turns towards its climax, the explicit coach-athlete relationship is given uneasy airing when Shereel responds to her trainer Russell’s exhortations that “I’m the one who trained you…I’m the one who got you here,” with, “You swung the whip. I’m the one who hurt and sweated blood.” This parallels the dray horse verbiage that Wall hurls at Marvella and evokes the virulence of both slavery and animal abuse. The taskmaster pose of the older mentor sexually entangled with his charge calls the reader’s mind to both the #MeToo movement and to “tiger moms” and the overambitious coaches and parents living vicariously through their children’s academic, artistic, and athletic achievements, a worldwide phenomenon that crosses cultural, ethnic, and class boundaries.

Russell tells Shereel, “there are posters of you plastered on walls all over this country and half of Europe,” that she’s the result of their shared ambition, and that victory will make her a “somebody…the very best of her kind…special in a way very few people are ever privileged to know.” If this isn’t the Olympics and the Oscars, child beauty pageants and gameshow contestants, Instagrammers and TikTok aspirants, I don’t know what is. As he encourages and challenges her simultaneously, Russell literally pets Shereel, evoking in the surrogate child a smile—perhaps we’re all just looking for a mommy or a daddy to provide an ego stroke or a head pat.

The resort’s all-Cuban staff in Body is unfortunately deployed mostly as one-dimensional jesting, and we don’t get much development of these characters beyond a weakling named Julian who gets ordered around and threatened, a missed opportunity for some proto-White Lotus commentary in this tragicomedy, if I may tally a misstep. The blurbs call Crews “Swiftian,” but his approach is less clinical and poetic than Swift’s, his American ironist’s approach more a mashup of Mark Twain and Larry Flynt, the lasciviousness of Crews’s descriptions of bodies rather too potent to compare to anything less explicit than a Penthouse Forum letter, or maybe Jerzy Kosinski, Samuel Delany, and the Marquis de Sade.

Body arrives at the day of the competition with “women were being weighed in on one side of the vast Blue Flamingo Convention Center and the men on the other. In both places was a lot of flexing and psych going on, all of it done with seeming indifference to the other contestants present. But of course it was not.” We mostly still wake up and weigh ourselves, donning the apparatus of our professions. And self-discipline and self-competition are something that Crews in his lectures often traced back to ancient Greece, but working from home or online confronts us with real-time video of ourselves, and those selves are constantly being curated; uptight, impeccably groomed, focused on branding the self for personal/professional/economic gains instead of communal ones.

We “weigh in” with our atomized opinions in the comments sections or through social media posts while we weigh and shave our bodies, update our web presences, swallow our vitamins and coffee, separate our kids into traditionally-gendered spaces or age-based industrial batches in schools, quarrel over bathrooms or pronouns, and yeah, there sure is a lot of post-election “flexing and psych” transpiring both online and in the hushed corners of men’s rooms, women’s rooms, and workplace breakrooms near still-extant water coolers. Body furnishes all our masquerade, maquillage, and armor, a novel peopled by beleaguered souls (much like the bifurcated political parties in the mid-2020s) desperate to outdo each other, to have their worldview triumph at any cost.

The weigh-station is “as quiet as a church,” the resort devoid of “good-natured ribbing and general grab-ass” as the contestants see if they “made weight.” That these humans are inches of Lycra away from nude provides both the tragedy and the comedy of commodification. They parade to the scale of judgment, ordered from lightweights to heavyweights. We get another ripping Trump aside as, before weigh-in, Wallace sleeps in the same room with Marvella and her sisters, a “long desperate night holding his hard cock and listening to pussy snoring all around him while he dreamed on and off of Donald Trump. Not really Donald Trump exactly, but rather the way he acquired things. Acquisitions. Wallace had learned the word some time back, at about the same time he became fascinated with Trump.” The root word of “fascinate” means “to paralyze,” and Wallace is a Black character who has become fascinated, charmed, who considers himself a patriot, as did Trump’s increased minority voting bloc in 2024. Wallace imagines “franchised Black Magic gyms all over the country,” endorsements and strength supplements “sold in gymnasiums and health stores,” and even “a line of clothing, both for the street and for the gym, and shoes.” Not yet two years after the first Spike Lee/Michael Jordan Nike commercial, in the nascent days of “streetwear” before it rose to high fashion, Wall dreams of “Mercedes, Oriental rugs, European hotels, a personal cook, a personal pilot,” and Trump’s yacht with phones “for nearly every foot his yacht measured in length.”

The Turnipseeds arrive at the weigh-in, Nail picking at his fingernails with his knife and watching men climb onto a scale in little more than what he sees as women’s panties, his fiancé’s brother having shaved every hair on his body, while Billy asks Earline’s father Fonse for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Fonse welcomes teetotaler Billy to the Turnipseed family with a stoic Southern creed that still rings true to many folks in Texas, even in the cosmopolitan DFW (and applicable to marijuana as well): “I’ll let you in on a little something. It’s two kinds of people in this world: them of us that wants a drink and them that don’t want us to have one.” Fonse also makes an all but Faulknerian remark about how Billy will have to change his name because “cain’t be not bats mingling with the Turnipseed blood.” The chapter ends with Russell and Nail agreeing that what Shereel’s embarking upon in attempting to win best-of-show is “like going to war.”

War is international in scope and scale, and “backstage at the enormous convention center was a riot of color and movement and a babble of tongues, German, Italian, Spanish, and most of the other major languages of the world.” Recall William Burroughs’s aphorism “Our universe is a war universe. There may be other universes, but ours is based on war and games” serving as epigraph to the brilliantly allegorical video-game documentary The King of Kong (2007), because Crews’s descriptions would still apply to sporting competitions now, but that realm would include e-gaming and esports. In Body, within the arena of “perfected” bodies, Shereel’s sister Earline and her father Fonse stand out in sharp contrast, he as the only man in the room wearing a hat and fiending for a Camel cigarette and she due to her enormous size (and, in a prophecy of the body-positive movement, basking in Billy’s nonjudgmental affections). Earline occupies a cramped room full of “freaks,” by various parlances, and she is “every bit as wet with sweat as any of the competitors…but she seemed to be unaware of how she looked, or simply did not care.” She fans her man’s back and “from time to time he turned to glance lovingly at her.”

The Turnipseed males want to imbibe some whiskey Nail has stashed in his Chevy pickup while Billy dons a Ford cap (he owns part of a dealership back in his home state of Tennessee) to complete the contrast—he’s the “progressive” non-drinker who stands up to Nail and somehow earns the psychopath’s respect with an I-won’t-back-down air of traditional masculinity. Fonse the patriarch notes that “these ain’t natchal times” and then reiterates, “Now, by God, these is strange times,” the default position of those who worship the past, the foregone values of prior generations. Billy explains that, evocative of the Supreme Court, the competition has multiple judges, including a “head judge” (Chief Justice) who is, in this case, “bigger’n a side of beef and never wears nothing but white.”

The final chapter proffers the showdown. Shereel and Marvella arrive, eye each other and smile, balancing in each other’s gaze. Alphonse sees his daughter remove her bathrobe to reveal the chiseled/cut/swole physique beneath. He’s never watched his daughter compete in person, he hasn’t looked at her photos in bodybuilding magazines, and it’s a pre-internet age. Seeing his fiancé’s father unsettled, Nail’s tone is tough; “You seen Billy Bat,” he tells Fonse, implying: You know what these bodybuilders look like with the rippling muscles and all shiny and overpronounced. Fonse replies that this isn’t Billy, it’s his daughter. “You can’t git to look like that by accident,” he states. “She did it to herself. She made herself into somethin’ else.” And while it’s easy to read this as a literal patriarch offended by his grown-woman daughter making a strange/weird/feminist choice that rails against traditional definitions of “womanhood,” his response mellows and he asks after his wife, who’s found her way to their seats, and his sons remind him that Ernestine didn’t want to see the backstage prejudgment up close. “By God, she was right,” Fonse muses aloud, a know-nothing wishing he hadn’t been stripped of his illusions.

Shereel doesn’t engage with the vulgar smack talk of her opponent’s sisters as Russell has taught her “Control is the name of this game.” A low heart rate and a good poker face are indeed valuable weapons in competitive sports and games, but Shereel’s chief competition Marvella also remains “silent and magnificent” as the women line up. In each division, first place brings $25,000 (a little under $65,000 in today’s USD) and the overall best-in-show another $25K. Shereel hears and feels the wave of love and adulation from the crowd, and then notices that the head judge, famously large and dressed in head-to-toe white, is a Black man. Russell, in guru mode, reassures her, whispering, “Don’t play to the judges…Just do your job. Don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself. Really enjoy yourself.” Authenticity FTW is Russell’s mojo here. Shereel has ninety seconds to become a champion or lose. Her music is “Street Fighting Man” by The Rolling Stones. She exits the stage confident after performing her moves. “She was pure body, the bodiness of body, and in perfect control.” A sort of inverted Zen: not bodiless, but perfectly embodied.

Crews paces this well, tunnelling into Shereel’s interiority, her single-minded purpose, her attitude that second place is no place, inconceivable. The divisional stage is over but she’ll be called back for the final comparison, various women from different weight classes called out in pairs, just her and Marvella at one point, to strike poses until the judges decide who’s best, the overall Ms. Cosmos, “who was the body.” The judges deliberate and Shereel asks for solitude. She prepares for the night show and is announced winner of her division, the middleweights. Onstage with a third body, the lightweight winner, Shereel and heavyweight champ Marvella are clearly the stars of this final stage.

The lightweight champ is awarded third in show. Shereel is announced as second place, the runner-up. Marvella is crowned Ms. Cosmos. Shereel’s in shock but stays composed. Everyone but her departs the stage. She sees Russell crestfallen in the corner of the room, “awash in shame and loss” despite his pupil’s division win and putative overall silver medal. Nail escorts her to her room and the scene seems primed for consolational lovemaking but Shereel says she needs to remove her oil and bathe. She hands Nail her room key and asks him to give her forty-five minutes and then come in. Fonse appears in the hallway with a cigarette, hoping to console his daughter but sees Nail outside the room, who tells Fonse to go back and see to the women downstairs. Nail remains sentinel-like beside the door. When the forty-five minutes have elapsed, he unlocks the door and enters his fiancé’s hotel room to see the bathroom door ajar and Shereel in the bathtub, the water incredibly red, as dead as any of his platoon-mates or enemies killed in Vietnam.

“At least she had the courage to do it right,” is in Nail’s mind as he picks up her arm and sees razor slices (from grooming tool to weapon against the self) leading from her wrists to her elbows. “He put the arm back into the water, and stood looking down at her. The last option. The one open to everybody.” Nail remembers airlifting a sergeant from a firefight in Vietnam, one who’d lost every man in his command and who committed suicide inside the helicopter by firing his .45 caliber pistol into his mouth. He goes to the lobby, has Julian call an ambulance, and asks for the head judge’s room number. Julian tells him the head judge is in the hotel bar.

Enraged at what he sees as his fiancé being victimized by racial discrimination, Nail downs some whiskeys at the bar, waits until the judge leaves his table of sycophants to go to the men’s room, and follows. As the head judge washes his hands, Nail puts a gun on him, a .357 retrieved from his truck. The judge offers his wallet and Rolex. Nail takes out a fragmentation grenade, pulls the pin, and stuffs it in the man’s pants, concluding the novel.

This gesture, bellicose and nihilistic both, is Crews’s satirical attempt at redemptive justice, an inversion of all the ugly racial history, the most carceral and murderous abuses of power, the corrupt and racist decisions handed down by (almost always white male) cops and judges over the long and burdened history of both region and nation projected onto a Black judge blown into smithereens, or at least eunuch status, by a maniac avenger.

This level of sublimated anger turned sublime tragicomedy has few practitioners. David Lynch’s oeuvre contends with whiteness, violence, and American rot, often focusing on the disfigured. James Hannaham’s PEN/Faulkner-winning Delicious Foods (2014) is written in a jagged Southern vernacular, a ribald novel as ominous as the Kara Walker silhouettes which bedeck its cover art, an allegory full of gruesome disfigurement about how humans never cease trying to own and exploit each other, often under racial rubrics, a book that excoriates slavery and trafficking not just in the past but in the present.

Two other works offering a Crews-ian rage-humor cocktail are Mat Johnson’s graphic novel Incognegro (2008) and Percival Everett’s novel The Trees (2021). Both obsess over that very Southern grotesquerie, the legacy of lynching, in fine and funny fables that unpack the necessarily virulent imagery of cruelty, degradation, and disfiguration. In league with Lynch and this trio of contemporary African-American authors, Crews’s articulations on the myriad deformities of body and life wrought by the American cauldron of objectification and the Southern still of dehumanization look straight ahead and unblinking at the carcasses, the bodies, the strange fruit scattered through region and country alike.