The Men Can’t Be Saved: A Novel

“A brilliant skewering of modern-day masculinity. Wildly gripping, charmingly funny, bone-hard, & real. Purkert is the kind of writer whose work I’ll follow anywhere.” — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“A witty, warm, riotously timely debut of young men (mis)behaving... Philip Roth would have loved this novel.”— Joyce Carol Oates, award-winning author of Zero Sum: Stories

A knockout debut novel that tackles a haunting question: What do our jobs do to our souls?

Seth is a junior copywriter whose latest tagline just went viral. He’s the agency’s hottest new star, or at least he wants his coworker crush to think so. But while he’s busy drooling over his future corner office, the walls crumble around him.

When his job lets him go, he can’t let go of his job. Unfortunately, one former colleague can’t let him go either: Robert “Moon” McCloone, a skeezy on-the-rise exec better suited to a frat house than a boardroom. Seth tries to forget Moon & rediscover his spiritual self; he studies Kabbalah with an Orthodox rabbi by day while popping illegal prescription pills by night. But with each misstep, Seth strays farther from salvation—though he might get there, if he could only get out of his own way.

In his debut novel, Purkert incisively peels back the layers of the male ego, revealing what’s rotten & what might be redeemed. Brimming with wit, irreverence, & soul-searching, The Men Can’t Be Saved is a startlingly original examination of work, sex, addiction, religion, branding, & ourselves.

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Ben Purkert is the author of the poetry collection For the Love of Endings. His work appears in The New Yorker, the Nation, & the Kenyon Review. He is the founder of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on revision & the creative process. He holds degrees from Harvard & New York University, & he currently teaches at Rutgers. The Men Can’t Be Saved is his 1st novel.