The Great American Novel is a holy obsession – the Everest every writer dreams of summiting. For most, that dream begins and ends with William Faulkner, whose winding sentences and sunburned Southern landscapes birthed prose that seemed to breathe. His words marched; crookedly, yes, but always with purpose.
Louis C.K., a would-be Faulkner disciple, trudges into the same swamp in Ingram, minus the map, the bearings and any sense of control. What was presumably intended to echo the Mississippian’s hypnotic disarray becomes instead a masterclass in incoherence. The story, told in long and sweaty first-person narration, follows a boy wandering through a Texan landscape of mud, hunger and half-formed memories. The intention is noble; the execution is catastrophic.
Take this early passage: “I walked on that road as the sky paled out from white and then into blue and as the cars and trucks went from one passing every now and again to all of the trucks and cars in the world roaring past in both directions, the wind coming off of them shaking and rattling me.” That sentence, in isolation, isn’t irredeemable. But that kind of stuff doesn’t stop. It never stops. It staggers on like a drunk who’s forgotten his name, his address and, halfway through, his pants. The rhythm is off – neither musical nor precise – just unspooling thoughts with nowhere to land. Faulkner wrote like a jazz musician. C.K. writes like a man falling down a staircase, pedantically describing every step on the way down.
Later, the prose grows even sloppier: “My head began to get light and dizzy, and I set myself on the rail of the metal fence, thinking that I’d found another world and hoping I would suddenly die so I wouldn’t have to face anything more unknown and frightening.” The problem isn’t the sentiment – there’s pathos buried in there somewhere – it’s the presentation. Every feeling is smothered by the depressing drone of one clause clinging to the next. Sentences swell like rivers after a storm, spilling into each other until the reader can no longer tell where one ends and the next begins.
Faulkner’s greatness lay in his ability to make disorientation feel deliberate. His syntax bent under the weight of meaning. C.K.’s bends under the weight of confusion. The child narrator of Ingram is meant to embody innocence, fear and wonder, but comes across like an adult trying too hard to sound simple. There are too many examples to list, but consider this gem: “The road, getting taller and wider and wider above me, shook and trembled from the cars and trucks whooshing on it, making it sound like distant thunder that never got closer or further as all around me went to night.” Perhaps C.K. was reaching for something lyrical, yet it just seems lazy.
By the time the book reaches its fourth chapter, inspiration has begun to dry up. The boy, still trudging through heat and hunger, pauses to think – and ends up talking to a mountain. Yes, a mountain, which delivers riddles like rejected country lyrics. “If your nose can find food,” it says, “you can find water.” It’s aiming for profundity, but lands closer to a geology-themed stand-up routine.
Of course, the elephant in the room – or perhaps the hotel room – is C.K. himself. The man who spent a career turning discomfort into comedy now turns his discomfort into fiction. The irony is that C.K.’s old scandal appears to have seeped straight into the prose. Ingram has more scenes of self-pleasure than self-reflection. The boy’s journey often pauses so he can gaze at his penis like it’s a compass, a metaphor, or maybe just the only thing the author still cares about. At times, the novel feels less a coming-of-age story and more a deposition – C.K. relitigating his own infamy through the world’s most unnecessary anatomy lessons.
C.K. has confessed to doing no research for the book. That much is obvious. What’s remarkable is how proud he seems of it. Unearned confidence drips from every page, arrogance mistaking itself for artistry. His Texas is no Texas at all – it’s a place built from movie clichés and barroom hearsay. The Texans who populate it speak like caricatures from a bygone era, or maybe from no era that ever existed. The dialogue, which should break up the sludge of narration, lands with the energy of a half-deflated tire. Every exchange has a yee-haw, aw-shucks rhythm – as if Steinbeck had been rewritten by a man who’s only ever met Southerners in a Cracker Barrel. What should be earthy or haunting instead comes off like bad improv. The voices blend into one syrupy monotone, all twang and no tension. It’s dialogue without drama, rhythm or reason, the kind that makes you miss punctuation purely for the company.
C.K. is a genuinely gifted comedian, but he’s a dreadful writer. This novel isn’t the worst thing he’s ever done, but it’s undoubtedly the emptiest. The scandal that nearly ended his career was, at least, human. Ingram isn’t even alive.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 22, 2025 World edition.
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