Some of Habash’s most interesting writing probes the depths of Florida’s grueling routines, following both his coaches’ orders and his own personal superstitions.

For him, “food is an afterthought, class is an afterthought, people relationships are an afterthought, hydration is an afterthought, sleep is an afterthought.” When Mary Beth, a girl he meets in his Drawing class, asks him what he plans to do after graduation, he replies, “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

Coasting through his classes with a C average, Florida has little time for typical college experiences, shunning nonathletic friendships or romantic possibilities. A senior at a small college in Oregsburg, North Dakota, he is the top-seeded wrestler in his weight class, with his sights set on the Division IV NCAA Championship in Kenosha in the spring. John McEnroe? “I keep making history like it’s my job to manufacture it,” Florida brags, and his record for the season backs him up. Stephen Florida is also, at its strongest and truest core, an intricate, book-length study of Florida himself-hypnotic, self-aggrandizing, frequently disturbing, sometimes startlingly lucid-and through Florida’s dumbly savvy voice Habash asks bold, difficult questions about the challenges and compromises that complicate true resolve.įlorida’s singular narration is the heart and engine of Habash’s novel, with all the digressive strangeness and boastful grandeur of Captain Ahab shot through with . . . Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash’s tough, smart debut novel, is an ode to the solitude and rigor of college wrestling, its guts and its glory: mats smelling of disinfectant and jittery vomit in locker room sinks running bleachers and two-a-days and savage rivalries based on arbitrary brackets hand-meat mashed by teeth, singlets twisted and threatening to tear, fingers in eye sockets, knee joints, and assholes heartbreak and loss.

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash