“Roscoe” by Andrew J. Gregor

Roscoe

Andrew J. Gregor
B. C. Kraft (2026)
ISBN: 978-3912304701
Reviewed by Paul Knobloch for Reader Views (06/2026)

Certain books speak to me more strongly than others, and the reason for this differs from book to book. With Andrew J. Gregor’s new novel, Roscoe, what moved me was the writer’s attempt to give voice to a terribly marginalized—if not the most marginalized—portion of our population. On the streets and in his early sixties, Roscoe tells his hardscrabble story from a first-person perspective that does not attempt to sugarcoat anything. With no one to count on and nowhere to go, the seriousness of his situation is palpable right away:  “I don’t have an I.D. That’s what makes a person in America. You got to have an I.D. … My stomach does its squeaking thing to say it’s hungry. I have $11.34 in my wallet. Anyways, back to, you know–what they call civilization.”

The narrator’s problems are immediately identified as institutional. This is important, and it is not a cop-out. As the tale progresses, we see that Roscoe is not some simple, uneducated misfit without the skills to succeed in the real world—something that makes his situation even more frightening.

There but for the grace of God go all of us.

No, Roscoe is able to identify these institutional problems because of his intelligence. He’s not a “bad” human being. He understands very well some of the reasons why he and others have ended up where they did. And while he recognizes the silliness of much of the identity politics that swirls around us incessantly, he doesn’t blame any of this on women, African Americans, or any other convenient scapegoats. His understanding of history and social realities is illustrated on more than one occasion:

In the 1890s ninety percent of Africa, think about it, ninety percent of the continent of Africa had been taken over by Europeans. We white people owned ninety percent of the whole continent. We set up puppet governments, we took all their resources, mined their earth, replaced their crops with our crops, diverted their rivers…

But life is tough for anyone who falls upon repeated hard times, and Roscoe is no exception. Some of the most heartbreaking moments come when he feels, profoundly, the undeniable fact that many no longer perceive him as a human being. When people are kind to him, it’s often insincere, and when a beautiful woman passes him by, his feelings of shame and impotence are crushing. Nevertheless, Roscoe holds onto his humanity, even producing a bit of extemporaneous Proustian reverie in a toilet. Even with his dignity shattered, his wit, cognitive skills, and emotional depth have not left him:

The smell of the soap permeates my brain. It’s like doing good drugs. Takes me straight back to a dozen memories. Fond ones. Vanilla cookies when I was six. My first ones. The first time I had crème brulée. Maybe at twelve or thirteen. The first girl I kissed. She smelled of vanilla for some reason. And so on. Memories. A life. It’s all a flat surface. I mean I still exist somewhere as that little boy eternally kissing vanilla girl. A never-ending kiss. A never-ending crème brulée.

At one point, we see who Roscoe truly is when he risks everything to save Hans from a car accident. Roscoe is encouraged to perhaps reconsider his position about staying on the streets. He even agrees to be interviewed by a TV show near the end of the book, before one final ironic twist.

What I really appreciate is how Gregor assembles the novel so as to present homelessness not as a social problem so much as a visibility issue. Roscoe repeatedly discovers that life on the street has rendered him functionally invisible. People avoid him, fear him, dismiss him, or reduce him to a stereotype. The accident changes that dynamic. For a brief moment, he is seen—not as a homeless man, but as a human being capable of courage, intelligence, and compassion.

Roscoe also wrestles with the tension between choice and circumstance. Roscoe insists that his life is largely the result of decisions he has made, yet the narrative constantly raises questions about contingency and luck. A chance encounter, a traffic accident, a viral video, a conversation over drinks—small events suddenly create opportunities that seemed impossible only hours earlier.

In any case, what emerges is a portrait of a man suspended between resignation and hope. What we need to do as readers is recognize that rich and meaningful lives like these are being lived on the margins of society, and it’s nice that Gregor has done just that.