PAY AS YOU GO takes place in a fictional place called POLIS. This location name got me thinking. Especially since the writer, Esker David Johnson, sends his protagonist, Slide, on a modern day odyssey that provokes comparisons to the Greek Odysseus himself. 

So I got to thinking, what does polis mean in Greek. It means police. But then I thought, what does it mean in Latin. Johnson seems to want to get to the root of things and where better to start than with our root language. In Latin polis means city.

At it’s simplest, this is story about Slide looking for a place to live in Polis.

The mission would be this: I was to go into Polis and find a place to live…Somewhere to anchor myself against the winds of life an end to all drifting, to wait out harsh tides and take stock of my cargo of hopes. Pg, 87.

At a grander glance, Slide is in fact on an odyssey through the complicated, regulated and much divided Polis. 

These two meanings of the word polis provoked a new thought - can you really have a city without police? Is that not just defined as a tribe or a settlement of people - if you do not have regulations and strictures of authority? 

Slide himself constantly comes up against authorities, regulations, and laws that prohibit his climb in life. Therefore, polis feels like the perfect name on multiple levels for the allegorical odyssey Slide endures. 

Loaded with a spectacular dream of a clean and elegant home, Slide navigates betrayals, lies, theft, gangsters, scam artists, natural disaster, and finally, devastating success on this pursuit.

Class divides, intellectual divides, and false hope rise to the surface of the themes in this piece. There are times that Johnson’s delight in language bordered on indulgent, but in truth, it was delightful as well as accurately serving as it’s own metaphor for the extremity with which humans must throw themselves at their hopes and dreams in order to get anywhere. 

Johnson’s imagination winds through every corner of his invented city. Characters leap off the page as if they truly exist—even if they only appear for a sentence. The world of Polis is alive and personal. 

What I was most surprised by was that after all of Slide’s darker trials, he does in fact find unexpected success. It is only in this success that he can see that the dreams we are all fed rest on a house of cards. 

Life’s true fulfillments are in human connection, in relationship, in love. Stuff—homes, couches, fancy things, people knowing your name—they are all fine, but hold their own emptiness that only someone who has reached that success can really understand. 

Johnson announces himself in a rather big way with this novel both because of his command of exact and unique language, but also because he takes on a belief system that resides so deeply inside of all of us. 

Slide might not be the smartest or the most talented, but his often delusion pursuits lead him to a clarity of truth that reminds me a bit of CATCHER IN THE RYE. 

My only wish is that Johnson allowed Slide to pontificate on answers instead of only the faults in the system. But who knows, maybe that is coming in the next Esker David Johnson novel. And if nothing else, Slide is a supremely moral guy. Maybe the take away is that our values are our values no matter how the external presents. 

This is a big but worthy read. It got me thinking and I have a feeling it will get you thinking, too.