'How to Leave the House' follows a quest for a missing package

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Natwest, 23, is about to finally leave for university. But a package he's waiting for has gone missing and – fearing humiliation if its contents are found out – he spends 24 hours looking for it all over town. That's the premise of Nathan Newman's comic novel, How to Leave the House. In today's episode, Newman speaks with NPR's David Folkenflik about some of the odd neighborhood characters Natwest bumps into along the way, and how their own concerns and their perceptions of Natwest completely challenge the notion of who he thinks he is as the protagonist of his own story.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Are you a Lenin or a McCartney? Are you a Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Or what about a Kierkegaard or Hegel? These questions are great fodder for, you know, the bar and are fun to think about, but they are, by definition, limiting. There is no category we can place ourselves in because we are, as humans, complicated creatures,
0:25.6	and we also aren't guaranteed to know ourselves.
0:29.6	These questions of self-awareness are all over the place in the new novel,
0:32.9	How to Leave the House by Nathan Newman.
0:35.2	It's a novel that takes place over the course of a day in a small
0:38.2	town, and our main character, Nat West, bounces around meeting different folks and finding out
0:44.0	things about them. And while it very much is a book about self-discovery, in this interview with
0:49.5	NPR's David Fulkenflick, Nathan talks about how the book is about the importance of other people,
0:55.9	that we are just side characters in someone else's story, and that's a beautiful thing.
1:02.3	That's ahead.
1:03.9	In case there is any doubt, the title of the first chapter of the new comic novel,
1:09.0	How to Leave the House, spells it out. Nat West is the hero of the first chapter of the new comic novel, How to Leave the House, Spells It Out.
1:11.8	Nat West is the hero of the novel. He's young. He's about to head off to university a few years
1:17.7	after his peers. The wrinkle, he's missing a package. It was supposed to be delivered the day
1:23.1	before he leaves the English town he's known his entire life. The contents, well, they're potentially
1:28.4	embarrassing, even mortifying, and so Nat West is determined to find it. How to Leave the House is
1:34.7	Nathan Newman's debut novel, and they join me now to talk about it. Nathan Newman, welcome.
1:39.6	Hey, how you doing? I'm good, I'm good, particularly after reading this book. Let's talk a little bit more about your protagonist, Nat West, the hero.
1:48.4	Who is he?
1:49.1	Why has it been so difficult for him to launch into adulthood?
1:53.4	So he's a very anxious, nerdy, extremely art-obsessed, 23-year-old.
1:58.6	Because of his arrogance, he kind of went into his final exams at high school, thinking he could pass them, and he didn't.
	...

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