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Fiction

Help! It’s the First Trump Presidency and This Poet’s Life Is Spiraling.

Daniel Poppick’s novel, “The Copywriter,” peeks into a writer’s journal as he navigates his everyday life and a tumultuous period in American history.

Credit...Lucas Burtin

Jonathan Russell Clark

Jonathan Russell Clark is the author of “Skateboard” and “An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom: Roberto Bolaño’s ’2666.’” His next book, “Timecodes: The Conversation,” is forthcoming.

Feb. 3, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ET

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THE COPYWRITER, by Daniel Poppick

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The plot of Daniel Poppick’s debut novel, “The Copywriter,” is refreshingly understated. Our narrator is a 30-something poet who is only referred to as “D__ .” It’s 2017. D__ is living in Brooklyn and, to make ends meet, working as a copywriter for a company selling obnoxious novelties like a “lavender-scented yoga mat” and an “eggplant emoji drone.” Shortly after we meet him, however, he gets laid off by the company’s new, 24-year-old C.E.O. Unemployed but with a bit of savings, D__ decides to take time to focus on writing, a choice that puts pressure on his relationship with his girlfriend, Lucy.

What follows are the mundane adventures of one man living in New York between the election of Donald Trump and the outbreak of the Covid pandemic: D__ grapples with his close friend Ruth’s move to California and news of her pregnancy; D__ begins to read Proust’s seven-volume “In Search of Lost Time”; Lucy breaks up with him, after seven years; and he eventually finds another job, this time writing copy for “a storied Midtown Jewish arts and community center.”

None of this is a spoiler. Rather than build toward a dramatic conclusion, the events of the story occur much as they would in real life — that is, with little conventional narrative momentum. They just happen.

This approach is mirrored in the novel’s structure: “The Copywriter” is formatted as a journal being kept by D__. That playful form is one of the novel’s delights. The book actually reads like a journal being kept by a living person. After he starts Proust, for example, quotes from successive volumes begin to appear in D__’s notes, subtly updating the reader on D__’s reading progress as the calendar moves from month to month.

Daniel Poppick is a poet, just like his protagonist. But instead of being a poet’s novel, “The Copywriter” is, simply, a novel about a poet.

What’s the difference? you might ask. Well, a poet’s novel is a novel that has a poet’s sensibility layered on top of the proceedings, the writer’s language barely disguising its yearning to break prose convention, no matter if the story calls for it or not. Poppick, however, pivots — he assigns the poet’s predilections to his protagonist, who is in the process of writing an overly poetic journal. This allows Poppick to both satirize and utilize the powers of verse without it ever feeling like he’s simply disguised a poem in the costume of a novel. The book’s tone is elevated, but, hey, that’s just how our character, who happens to be a poet, writes.

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It’s a clever choice, and Poppick gets as much as he can out of it — it’s fun to watch this author play with his narrator’s linguistic sensibilities. D__, for instance, favors aphoristic koans about his literary endeavors, like “A novel is unpaid labor, while poetry is labor’s ash.” He also writes some preposterously purple prose, as in, “A phalanx of nasturtium blossoms strums the rat’s belly as it scampers through the city horticulturalist’s handiwork.” This is all part of Poppick’s literary dance. The prose is D__’s, not Poppick’s, and it’s bad on purpose.

Genre-wise, “The Copywriter” exists somewhere between a hangout film and a novel of ideas. Yes, we’re watching D__’s everyday life, but that everyday life is taking place during some of the most tumultuous years in recent American history. Accordingly, D__’s journal flits between referencing extraordinary events, like the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally, and relating parables about everything from solar eclipses to vitamin C.

This duality, it turns out, is the point. D__, like most of us, doesn’t actively participate in the political climate of his time. He’s aware of current events, registers them empathetically and sensibly, but he doesn’t act on his emotions. One reason could be that he’s encumbered by the pileup of the everyday. When he sees the news story about Heather Heyer’s killing in Charlottesville, he feels something “not quite rage, but just parallel to rage. Then, from a different part of my screen, I receive an email notification requesting a product description for an LED light box emblazoned with the phrase NAMASTE IN BED.” By placing the fraught macro alongside the absurd micro, Poppick stages an argument about how our political and personal consciousnesses inform each other, and about the emotional whiplash of modern life.

D__ is ultimately a passive agent of history, but he isn’t wholly inactive. A pivotal plot point at the conclusion of the novel revolves around whether or not he will take an ethical stand at his job at the Jewish cultural center when he is asked to write copy for a lecture given by a man D__ refers to as “a prominent former U.S. statesman of European Jewish extraction” and a “bespectacled mass murderer.” It’s simultaneously a quotidian task — it’s just another copywriting assignment — and also a monumental moral decision. In action, it may seem like a small choice, but in a vast and ugly universe, sometimes small choices are all we have.

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THE COPYWRITER | By Daniel Poppick | Scribner | 210 pp. | $26

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