Ross Simonini - a fascinating take on the cult of personality: about celebrities need to destroy and recreate themselves to stay relevant, public personalities coming to belong to everyone, and about our need to see everyone as a kind of celebrity

Ross Simonini, The Book of Formation, Melville House, 2017.

This debut novel—told in interviews—spans 20 years in the rise and fall of the charismatic leader of a seductive self-help movement.

In the 1990s, a talk show host leads the "personality movement," an integrative approach to radical self-transformation. Mayah, the movement's architect and celebrity advocate, adopts a curious, wild child named Masha Isle. A guinea-pig for the movement, and the key to its future, Isle is the subject of the eight interviews that comprise this book.

As the interviewer's objectivity disintegrates—even as the movement's legitimacy becomes increasingly suspect—he becomes obsessed with Masha. And all of that is thrown into question when tragedy strikes.

The stunning debut of a new literary talent, and a fascinating take on the cult of personality: about celebrities need to destroy and recreate themselves to stay relevant, public personalities coming to belong to everyone, and about our need to see everyone as a kind of celebrity.

It starts when a journalist accepts what he believes will be a softball assignment: a profile of Mayah Isle, a powerful talk show host and the queen of a popular self-transformation philosophy called the “personality movement.”
But the reporter quickly intuits that Mayah’s adopted son Masha—who is hidden from the public—is the real story. And over the next two decades, Masha becomes a leading voice for personality transformation, and the reporter enjoys better access to him than anyone.
That access becomes an increasingly fraught position as the movement crosses into questionable legal and ethical territory, even as Masha and Mayah become steadily more famous and influential

Artistically innovative, darkly funny, and morally complex, The Book of Formation peers into the subconscious desires of our culture, and the celebrities and spiritual leaders we believe will save us

“Sickness, celebrity, a dismayingly plausible quasi-religious movement—The Book of Formation takes a long, strange look at a culture in crisis and comes back with something magical and engrossing. This is a more than promising debut.”—Tom Bissell

"Here in The Book of Formation, self-invention, reinvention and their elaborate culture go under the knife.”—Jesse Ball

"The Book of Formation is about the deformation and reformation of not just the three main personalities in this book, but the idea of personality, in general. This modern-day Kaspar Hauser story is told in as a series of interviews (the interview being the form we have created for the worship of personality) in a sincere and surprising attempt to come to terms with the pain of having a body, and the unnecessary burden of being oneself; and with the discomforts of being famous, loved, despised, and just an anonymous member of the audience. If you want a book unlike any you have ever read, but like so many of the delicious things in our culture (The Oprah Winfrey show, Interview magazine) you have no reason not to begin the original, fascinating and humane Book of Formation.” —Sheila Heti

“Hypnotic, genre-bending… Question(s) the nature of faith, entertainment, celebrities, and ultimately, the way we tell our own stories.” —INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

"It’s astonishingly well done. I was gripped... This is due to Simonini’s impressive handling of his form... clearly he is an expert in the spoken word and oral storytelling." —THE INDEPENDENT

“Ross Simonini’s The Book of Formation deftly interrogates how we become who we are… original and thought-provoking debut.” —ARKANSAS INTERNATIONAL

Simonini’s ambitious debut novel tells the story of the rise of a popular self-transformation movement through the eyes of a successful journalist who becomes increasingly involved with its central figures. Mayah Isle is a celebrity talk show host who uses her platform to spread the movement’s message—that personality is malleable, and that humans can enact radical change within ourselves by learning how to manipulate it. When the unnamed narrator is assigned to write a profile about Mayah, he is initially surprised when she instead directs him toward her enigmatic adopted son, Masha, who had previously been kept out of the public eye. Over the course of the novel, however, Masha takes over Mayah’s role on the talk show and succeeds her as the de facto leader of the personality movement. Through interview transcripts, the novel paints an intimate and complicated portrait of Masha as the initially skeptical journalist’s relationship to the movement—and to his ailing body—undergoes its own fascinating transformation. Strikingly intelligent, the novel concludes on a haunting note that questions how much people can actually know about what makes them who they are. - Publishers Weekly

A singular novel told largely through interviews between an introspective journalist and the leaders of a New Age therapy said to transfigure its subjects’ personalities.
In his debut novel, Simonini constructs a parallel culture just a few degrees shy of the present. The center of this culture is the “personality movement,” in which celebrity therapists who resemble Oprah with a side of psychodrama work to manipulate their patients’ "p," which, the unnamed journalist says, "as best as I could understand, was some kind of energy substance at the root of our identities.” Through their televised sessions, the therapists work to “turn” patients away from negative behavior patterns with a series of bizarre mental and physical exercises, ideally resulting in the patient gaining a new interpersonal identity. When the reporter agrees to interview the de facto leader of the movement, a woman known only as Mayah, he begins a 20-year correspondence that becomes the major focus of his career, providing an insider’s look at a widespread cultural movement that brings into question the nature of celebrity and its intersections with personal wellness. The narrative is primarily composed of interviews between the journalist and Mayah’s adopted son, Masha, who soon becomes the face of the empire. Though the interviews occasionally spiral into an invented jargon that is more confusing than illuminating, they are consistently hypnotizing as they build a portrait of an individual and his life’s work of manipulating patients' bodies and minds to reconstruct their personalities. As the treatments Masha prescribes grow more physically demanding and accusations arise regarding sexual abuse, the public begins to question the ethics behind his practice, and the narrator struggles to remain objective as the roles of interviewer and subject blur.

A debut reminiscent of modern art—often unsettling, not always easy or beautiful, but rewarding to the reader willing to grapple with its questions. - Kirkus

Ross Simonini’s debut novel The Book of Formation is one of the strangest novels I’ve read this year. It begins in 1994 when a journalist accepts an assignment to interview one Mayah Isle, a talk-show host in the style of Oprah who peddles an increasingly popular self-transformation philosophy known as the “personality movement” which revolves around “p”, “which, as best as I could understand,” the journalist explains, “was some kind of energy substance at the root of our identities”.
For some reason, the notoriously private Mayah grants the journalist access to her adopted son Masha, about whom at this stage very little is known. The interview that follows is the first of eight that the journalist conducts with Masha over the course of the next two decades, during which he takes over from his mother as the face of the movement.
The Book of Formation is structured like a long-time-coming confession (for the first few years, Mayah forbids their publication), the eight interviews transcribed and written up, each with a explanatory introduction briefly setting the scene, filling in what’s happened to Mayah, Masha and the movement in the years that have passed between encounters.First and foremost, it’s astonishingly well done. I was gripped, which is remarkable given how jargon-heavy much of the conversations is and the piecemeal nature of the narrative – big events always happening off-stage, the sex scandals that rock the movement, Mayah’s unexpected decision to “turn” (the terminology used to change personalities, reminiscent of a snake shedding its skin), and issues in Masha’s private life that make him a prime target for the tabloids.

This is due to Simonini’s impressive handling of his form. The majority of the text is laid out as interview transcripts, and he magnificently recreates the feel of real conversations and genuine interactions. Perhaps that’s not so surprising as the author has been the interviews editor for The Believer magazine for many years as well as the executive producer of the radio show The Organist – clearly he is an expert in the spoken word and oral storytelling.
When it comes to the details under discussion therein, though, I often found myself floundering. But again, this is indicative of just how convincing a scenario Simonini’s created, one in which issues of celebrity culture combine with the attractions of guru, self-help and wellness cultures. At first our attention is on Marsha – echoes of Kaspar Hauser and Frankenstein’s monster in the confusing tale of his early years – but it’s actually the journalist himself whom I became more and more intrigued by, the slow drip feed of details about his life drawing me in.
In just one of the similarities between this and The Answers, Catherine Lacey’s super smart dystopian take on dating, he’s suffering from some mysterious disease that preoccupies his attention and dictates much of his existence. - Lucy Scholes
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-book-of-formation-ross-simonini-review-a8095106.html