Incidental Contact is outsider musician/Pushcart Prize winning author Jim White’s long awaited debut novel. Part memoir, part urban fable, the quixotic narrative unspools around a cluster of truly baffling events that befall White during a severe mental health spiral, episodes which lead to him being “discovered” by Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Chronicling a harrowing ten year stretch mostly spent disintegrating behind the wheel of a New York City taxi cab, White navigates a daisy chain of gritty intersections between the real and surreal, encountering a dizzying array of agents of synchronicity: drug lords, con men, deviant proctologists, errant pigs, doomed lovers, psychics and psychos, and ultimately a string of true cultural luminaries, each bearing enigmatic messages for White from the Great Beyond. Above all Incidental Contact is a love letter to the fans of White’s Wrong-Eyed Jesus oeuvre—the marginalized seekers among us: the freaks, the outsiders, the lost souls—anyone who, as White points out in his iconic song Static on the Radio, “thinks less of what is written than what’s wrote between the lines. ”
