Detailed by a slack neologist who’s waiting to die but has apparently hired a lazy assassin, puckish academics and the plotted theft of sex parts impel the multi-layered narrative hooey of this darkly comic, metafictive love story. Jamison Lee’s debut novel, To Deer at Swim, tells the story of Benny Huckman-seemingly a human magnet for animal death-as he learns to cohabitate with Wentworth, his former gender studies instructor, now an expelled scholar unlearning the difference between sincerity and sarcasm; November, his vegan girlfriend, who’s recently escaped her ex’s rabid Marxism and frenzied plans of sexual reassignment; and a mouse who is at the flighty center of a battle between the will to dominate and the ability to empathize. Benny is unaware, however, that his story might end as suddenly as a cat in his path if the narrator’s assassin finally comes through and settles, once and for all, this little debate regarding the death of the author.