Six months ago, Louis C.K.—the once acclaimed comedian disgraced by revelations of sexual misconduct in 2017 —announced in an email , “Turns out I’m also a novelist.” Ingram , C.K.’s newly published first novel, is, as he warned his mailing list, “not a comedy book. It’s a literary novel. It is literally a literary novel.”

It’s also a bit of a mess. Narrated by the title character—described by C.K. as a “simple but eloquent country boy”— Ingram relates the wanderings of a 9-year-old with zero experience of the world through a hardscrabble East Texas landscape. At the beginning of the book, Ingram explains that he spent his early childhood on an isolated farm, sitting in the dirt, watching his family’s pigs, dogs, chickens, and other animals. At some point, his father takes him

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