The Material

A single momentous day transforms the lives of students and professors at a school for stand-up comedy in a novel that “[brims] with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Insightful, compassionate, biting and honest.”—The Washington Post

“Brilliance is on display here.”—Percival Everett, author of James and The Trees

ONE OF SLATE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Longlisted for the New American Voices Award

Can comedy be taught? Someone, at some point, seemed to think so. The Chicago Stand-Up MFA program has enrolled young comedians for nearly a decade.

Its teachers and students all know how bits work—in theory, at least. They know that there’s a line between sharp and cruel, that sad becomes funny at the right angle, that the worst is the best, the truth is the worst, and any moment of your life that isn’t a punch line will either get you to a punch line or force you to be one.

They’re all afraid to be one.

Artie may be too handsome for standup, Olivia too reluctant to examine her own life, and Phil too afraid to cause harm. Kruger may be too vanilla to command his students’ respect, Ashbee too detached. And then we have Dorothy—the only woman on the program’s faculty—who though preparing to launch a comeback tour can’t tell if she’s too abiding, too ambitious, or too ambivalent.

Whether a visiting professor—the high-profile, controversy-steeped comedian Manny Reinhardt—will do more to help or harm their cause remains to be seen. But he’s on his way. He’ll be arriving sooner than anyone thinks.

Riffing keenly across a diverse array of precision-cut perspectives, The Material examines life through the eyes of a reluctantly assembled ensemble, a band of outsiders bound together by the need to laugh and the longing to make others laugh even harder.

“Insightful, compassionate, biting and honest.”—The Washington Post

“Fluid, inventive and often, yes, funny . . . There’s definitely a quirky wryness here that will please fans of Curtis Sittenfeld and A.M. Homes.”—The Spectator

“Funny, intelligent and has much to say about how we live now . . . Part of what keeps us reading is to see how far [Bordas will] go.”—Financial Times

“Bordas seamlessly weaves together the neuroses, insecurities, and egos of her characters, yielding a novel that both skewers the comic impulse to turn everything into ‘material,’ and manages to live up to the humor of its subject.”—Bustle

“Entertaining and perceptive.”—The Chicago Tribune

“I was so engaged and surprised by this novel I almost didn’t get around to getting envious. . . . Luckily, being annoyed at the talents of those younger than you is also a theme of The Material.”—Slate, “The 10 Best Books of 2024”

“[The Material is] like a table in the back of the club surrounded by comics trying to make each other laugh.”—Vulture, “The Best Comedy Books of 2024”

“With an emotional pendulum that can swing between pathos and bathos, [The Material] a high-wire act and masterclass in tone, observation and the beneath-the-surface substance.”—Style Weekly

“Sinuous, intelligent.”—Literary Review

“Brimming with insecure characters, clever repartee, dark jokes and funny riffs. . . Bordas makes a case that [emotion and comedy can] coexist.”—The Wall Street Journal

“[The Material] is a stream of neurotic consciousness flowing from person to person, an extended ‘take my smartphone—please’ routine, and an impressive piece of Q3 reading.”—The New York Times

“The Material is laugh-out-loud funny and offers an incisive look at the deep sadness of trying to find a laugh when you need it the most.”—The Chicago Review of Books

“Skillful, engrossing.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Marvelously engaging and entertaining . . .”—The Independent

“Bordas is alert to the pitfalls [of writing about humor]—indeed, like the best comedians, she incorporates them into her set.”—Sunday Times

“Bordas’s novel is a deep and illuminating pleasure, full of insights about stand-up comedy, group dynamics, and the inner lives of artists.”—Tom Perrotta, author of Tracy Flick Can’t Win

“The Material is [damned funny]. . . . profound, deeply engrossing, dark and generous, a great novel about humans making art right now.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You

“Almost suspended in time, the novel elucidates the irreconcilability of learning and living, of performance and being.”—Rachel Cusk, author of Second Place

“Come for the laughs, stay for the observations so deadpan and accurate that you may be blinded by your own reflection.”—Ling Ma, author of Bliss Montage and Severance

“[The Material] is funny—fast and fizzy and dangerous . . .”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Camille Bordas is the author of three prizewinning novels. The most recent, How to Behave in a Crowd, was the first she wrote in English. The earlier two, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. She has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.

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