The Accidental Future of Dean Harris

Derek McFadden’s The Accidental Future of Dean Harris is a novel about artistic ambition that understands how humiliating ambition can feel from the inside. Dean is an unpublished writer, an underpaid literary gatekeeper, a man with cerebral palsy, and the sort of person who keeps building his life around the conviction that the real version of himself is still just ahead. McFadden gives him a nonlinear six-part structure to move through therapy sessions, family history, romantic memory, professional frustration, grief, and the stubborn hope that a future self might still arrive. That structure sounds fussy on paper, but it suits a book obsessed with revision, not only of manuscripts, but of the stories people tell about their own lives.

What works best here is Dean’s voice. He is funny, self-lacerating, observant, and just grandiose enough to stay interesting. The novel gets real mileage out of his relationships, especially with Claire, his partner in both emotional survival and the doomed-sounding bakery-bookstore dream Treats and Tomes, and with the older literary champion Charles Corning, who keeps pushing Dean to stop being afraid of the truth in his own work. McFadden is also sharp on the small abrasions of literary culture: unpaid labor, agent rejections, ego disguised as mentorship, and the way talent can curdle into self-protection. The book can be a little earnest, and its sprawl occasionally shows. Readers will find this is a smart and emotionally candid novel about art, disability, love, and the dangerous comfort of waiting for your life to begin.