It is hard to describe the wonderfully disorienting sensation of entering a Marcy Dermansky novel.

Having read all six of her novels, I’m well-positioned to try to illuminate the experience.

“Hot Air,” her latest offering, is an excellent example of the Dermansky method, where you start with an ordinary person in an ordinary situation before injecting some destabilizing element that is almost, but not quite, absurd. After which the character engages in a series of actions that are, objectively, a pretty bad idea, but in the context of the world Dermansky has conjured, both logical and surprising.

Yeah, I don’t know how someone pulls this off either, but if you’ve done it six times, clearly it isn’t a fluke. (I’ve previously written about her “Bad Marie,” “Very Nice” and “The Red Ca

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