In John Cheever’s​ Bullet Park (1969), Eliot Nailles, a mild-mannered advertising executive, is asked by an Italian doctor: ‘Why do Americans want to be immortal?’ Amie Barrodale’s first novel, Trip, offers a playful reformulation of this question. In some ways, it’s a send-up of a culture obsessed with ‘healthmaxxing’, where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments. Barrodale rejects self-improvement, opting instead for an undisciplined, unlikeable narrator who also happens to be dead. You can try to live for ever – marshalling your willpower and multivitamins – but, like Sandra, the documentary filmmaker at the centre of Trip, you might slip on a hairbrush in a hotel bathroom in Nepal while attending a conference full of bickering academics. And, like Sandra, you might be eulogised by someone who barely knew you: ‘She may not have been graceful eating with a knife and fork; her clothing may have been all stretch fabrics, but she is dead. Died alone in a toilet. No sense of personal style and an unusual amount of flyaway hairs, but …’

In the opening chapters, Sandra is still alive. She is separated from her husband, Vic, a sculptor who has spent twenty years working on a piece called The Gaurea – a sixty-foot yellow blown-glass vessel with many oblong holes. They have one teenage son, Trip, who was diagnosed with autism as a child. When he refuses to leave his bedroom in the morning, Sandra tells him: ‘Everyone goes to school. I went to school. Your father went to school.’ Trip, with the breeziness of a teenager who has learned to weaponise his diagnosis, responds: ‘You guys aren’t autistic.’

As Sandra prepares to leave for the conference, she and Vic have to negotiate a crisis. In a fit of rage, Trip smashes The Gaurea into a thousand pieces, which prompts a meeting with his school guidance counsellor, Cathy, who persuades them to place Trip in a troubled-teen facility called the Centre. Troubled isn’t the right word for Trip, but miscommunication is a speciality of Barrodale’s. The epigraph to her short story collection, You Are Having a Good Time (2016), is from the Buddhist filmmaker Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche: ‘There is no such thing as communication. There are only two things. There is successful miscommunication and unsuccessful miscommunication. And when you have unsuccessful miscommunication, you are having a good time.’ Miscommunication is exactly what happens in Spin, one of Trip’s favourite restaurants, as his fate is decided. ‘We went back and forth for twenty minutes,’ Sandra reports, ‘with me saying I couldn’t stay, Vic saying he was a danger to himself and Cathy saying the Centre had horses.’

The title of the novel evokes the emotional ‘journey’ Sandra has been on with Trip and the various people who have tried to tell her who her son is, how he should behave and how his behaviour reflects on her. At the Centre, Sandra is informed by a ‘PhD nurse practitioner with two decades’ clinical experience’ that Trip also has OCD. When Sandra questions this, the nurse says: ‘I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to say that I see autism spectrum disorder is in the family on Mom’s side.’ Sandra seethes with inarticulable rage. Who are these people who think they can pigeonhole her and her family? People with lanyards. People who’ve done courses. During a meeting with Trip’s deputy principal, Sandra thinks: ‘Angela was not the sort of person who would have had any power over us in a former life.’

After her death, Sandra recounts the slow process of Trip’s diagnosis and the endless appointments during which she was assessed as much as her child. There are doctors and therapists, letters and numbers, patterns and symbols and Play-Doh. There is screen time, there are entreaties to reduce screen time, outsized sensitivities and the dawning realisation that Trip is different. Teachers stare at him as if to ascertain how autistic he actually is. ‘Vic was so desperate and out of his depth that he turned to optimism,’ Sandra recalls, ‘to the things the internet advises us to say in these moments. He actually said: “How can we all work together to solve this?”’

Sandra is opposed to optimism of any kind. She remembers a teacher suggesting a ‘therapeutic tool’ to help Trip – zipping him into a body bag and getting his classmates to hug him – and identifies this as ‘the moment when I was separated from my son’. ‘When do we die?’ Trip asks her at one point. ‘That’s the only way out of this.’ Barrodale is a Buddhist but says the concept of the Bardo is something she struggles with. As she told an interviewer last year, ‘at the beginning of every Bardo teaching, they always say “Bardo means in between,” and I would always be like, “Yeah, yeah get to the death part. Get to what I want to hear.”’

As his mother moves between life and death, Trip has an adventure of his own. He escapes from the Centre and hitches a lift from a middle-aged man called Anthony, who is travelling to Florida. Anthony has an MBA from the second-best business school in the South, describes himself as ‘radioactive in Manhattan’ and speaks in aggressive non sequiturs: ‘I’d like if I were a woman and could give birth naturally. I would like to have a baby in a blow-up kiddie pool. Women waste it, of course, with their epidurals, fentanyl and Stadol.’ He’s also a recovering addict and practises ‘contemplative meditation’ but, judging by his past relationships, this doesn’t seem to be working. When Trip wakes up after a nap he hears Anthony leaving a voice note: ‘It wasn’t your fault I misunderstood the letter, though it was a bit unclear. I got carried away, and I embarrassed you in your professional environment. Again. Please, if you’ll just talk to me, I think we can work it out. If you’ll just answer one of my calls.’

As a storm closes in, Anthony ignores an evacuation warning and keeps driving towards Florida. He tells Trip they’ve been invited to a party along the way. Soon they arrive at a large, gated house where it’s clear they aren’t entirely welcome. Inside, they run into Dick Chambers, a man who provokes horrible feelings of failure and inadequacy in Anthony. On greeting his old rival, Anthony is preternaturally calm: ‘Dick Chambers … Always a witty remark. You’re looking healthy.’ Dick responds by recounting, at great length, one of Anthony’s unsuccessful business ventures – a modest billboard designed to create less visual pollution than the average ones. On being reminded of this, Anthony abandons all pretence of reason. The scene ends with him and Trip stealing ‘the aptly named’ Dick’s boat. Lancaster, the owner of the house, protests: ‘Please get out of the boat, Anthony. You are not yourself and the damages could be quite expensive.’ ‘I give nary a shit,’ Anthony replies. As the storm intensifies, the pair are dragged out to sea. Anthony finds a box of luxury chocolates on the boat: ‘Only the best for Dick.’ Even as the situation turns dire and drowning begins to seem inevitable, petty resentments remain.

Trip is about consciousness, karma and retribution, but it’s also silly and your enjoyment of it may depend on your tolerance for this (mine is medium to high). What Sandra regrets most, looking back on her life, is how serious she was. She didn’t always meet Trip on his level: as he grew older, she stopped talking to him in the voices of his favourite characters from Cars. ‘I thought about how shy it had made me for a person to be different. How nervous, even angry.’ Why does adulthood demand such rigid, unimaginative responses? Why does a novel about dying demand seriousness? Barrodale loves a moment of manic slapstick. ‘I always feel like there’s a lot on the surface that people ignore in writing,’ she said last year in a conversation with Ottessa Moshfegh. ‘They go to the interior because they feel like that’s the meat. But I kind of feel like the surface is the meat.’ Life is about finding a way to bond with your son, but it’s also about listening to an unassuming conference attendee recount a story about meeting Robert Pattinson (‘I’d faint if he tried to buy me a drink,’ another academic chimes in).

Trip​ has a lightness that Barrodale’s short stories sometimes lack. You Are Having a Good Time shows signs of its age. There’s a blurb from the now disgraced James Franco, which is actually very Amie Barrodale. I can imagine a story of hers in which a writer forces a famous actor, living in obscurity after a litany of accusations, to rescind his praise for her work. There are shades of #MeToo in ‘Animals’, about a film director who takes advantage of his actresses, leaving one of them feeling confused, ashamed and adrift when she is nominated for an award for her performance in his film. The narrator of ‘William Wei’ is an incel. A misogynistic pornography addict living alone in an empty apartment (Barrodale’s characters, like good Buddhists, give things away), William starts getting phone calls from a woman called Koko he once met at a party. They arrange a date, and William goes through all the usual preparations you make before meeting someone you’ve been flirting with over the phone:

On the train, I kept telling myself to just be myself. I had a prescription for a low-milligram anti-anxiety medication, as well as a mild beta blocker, and I kept going into the bathroom to take more – I wanted to get the mixture right. After I took a pill, I’d check myself in the mirror, and I’d always be surprised at what I found. I kept expecting to find a monster.

William is insecure about his looks, but still assumes he has the right to feel disappointed by Koko’s appearance. He quickly realises that everything he does makes Koko angry. Eventually he’s transformed by his own paralysis. The story concludes with him sitting alone, waiting for Koko to return: ‘The sorts of things I thought during that time, while I sat there, I can never really say. It was heavy. I think that’s what people say – it was a bad trip; it was heavy. I think I can safely say it changed my life.’

Two stories in the collection follow characters searching for an elusive object they believe will bring them pleasure, only to find it brings nothing but misery. In ‘The Sew Man’ the narrator’s desire for a particular suit leads to a series of strange encounters with his tailor. In ‘The Commission’ a mysterious customer called Mr Thibideaux commissions a bowl by a famous artist but never shows up to collect it. (‘It was a small thing,’ the narrator says, ‘but it grew in my mind, so that when I looked at, when I even thought about, Mr Thibideaux’s bowl, I felt sick to my stomach. It became the kind of incident a person could explain to a psychologist.’) Barrodale’s characters are often in the grip of mania. Occasionally this is heightened by a screwball sensibility, as in ‘Frank Advice for Fat Women’: a psychiatrist becomes romantically involved with a mother and daughter at the same time, leading to a frantic scene, straight from a sitcom, where he ends up on calls with both women simultaneously.

In ‘Night Report’, Ema is given a book by a married lover she’s attempting to keep at arm’s length. Instead she finds herself sending him a long screed in 21 parts, explaining her feelings about the book as well as her feelings about him. He responds: ‘Good times.’ Immediately afterwards she sublets her apartment and goes on a month-long meditation retreat in Vermont. There she encounters Sloane Newam, the author of the book (a memoir), who turns out to be a ‘kind of contortionist know-it-all’. The married man is baffled. ‘What are you doing? You hate New Age and you hate nature and you hate amateurs.’ Ema gets nothing out of the retreat and admits that if a gun were available she’d happily shoot the other visitors. At the end of the story, Mr Thibideaux agrees: the time he ‘spent in monasteries was characterised by impassioned bickering over the smallest things – the sound of chewing, the way a certain man moved his fingers’.

The same bitterness is evident in the collection’s best story, ‘Mynahs’, set in a creative writing workshop. Donald Burden and Benjamin Greer meet in John Berryman’s poetry class. At one point their drunken mentor claims that he knows why Greer writes:

‘I’ll tell you one … thing,’ Berryman said, ‘The writer is slime.’

‘You’re drunk,’ Greer said.

Berryman turned.

‘I’ll tell you why you write.’

Greer was frightened.

Berryman said: ‘You went to a party one time. You were sort of maybe half invited. You spoke to a girl, and you felt like she ignored you. You spoke to another girl, and it seemed like she ignored you too. That’s it. Everything spun from a habit you formed one night, at a party when you felt you were ignored.’

Greer later steals Burden’s manuscript and plans to plagiarise it. (The writer is slime.) However, unbeknown to him, Burden has rewritten it from scratch and manages to publish it before Greer can get his version into print. Burden is eventually driven insane by the success of his book and, years later, when he finally confronts Greer about the stolen manuscript, nobody takes him seriously. Greer has got away with it.

In Trip there’s no escaping the consequences of your actions. After a tense encounter with her son’s principal, from which she emerges victorious, Sandra thinks:

I was happy because I had humiliated the principal. But I knew it wouldn’t go well. When I was a kid, I thought I could get away with that kind of thing. But as an adult, I knew it would be given back to me, magnified in some way, and I would taste defeat.

What feels good in the moment turns out to be harmful. Sandra later recognises a similar failure of judgment with regard to Trip. What she had experienced as humiliation and disruption was, in fact, what she needed most. The problem is that such clarity comes only in death:

I was happy to have been shaken out of it a little bit by my son, to have been made to feel disrupted, shameful, ungainly, awkward and unsure. To have been made to stir for a moment in the everlasting sleep that had been my life. Sandra Vernon’s life. Or whatever. Whatever. Whatever it was.