Billed as “a dazzling reimagining of The Odyssey,” Beyond the Baths of Stars is Schneider K. Rancy’s debut novel, which follows a quartet of recent high school grads in South Florida. The Odyssey touchstones are definitely present and add an additional layer, especially for those familiar with the Greek epic or who at least saw Christopher Nolan’s adaptation this summer, but Rancy’s book stands on its own with a unique story that doesn’t feel like an uninspired remix.
I was initially drawn to Beyond the Baths of Stars because my cousin is Haitian-American and I was curious what I might learn from Rancy’s cultural perspective—and while the novel scratched that itch, I also got so much more than I was anticipating. It’s always such a pleasure to read a book that gives not just sparkling prose but a plethora of topics to mull over long after the reading experience is over. There’s so much to chew on, including class, cultural expectations, ambition, disillusionment, mental health, and the challenges of friendship. That makes Beyond the Baths of Stars viable for book clubs and robust college discussions.
It was a pleasure to pick Rancy’s brain on some of the book’s themes and craft considerations, and it’s no surprise that his responses were as deep as his authorial voice, which is something he hones in his free time when he’s not busy training to be a surgeon!
Courtney Kocak: You have three epigraphs that introduce the story. I love a good epigraph orientation and am always intrigued about how they come to be. Tell us how you chose those, what they mean to you, and how they relate to the story.
Schneider K. Rancy: I’m such a nerd for epigraphs, so I love this question. South Florida is a microcosm of the Caribbean, but it is also in some ways still the American South. Black identity in Florida and in the South in general for me is always in conversation with Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I think because of that influence, I’m a great fan of Southern Gothic literature and its fixation on fatalistic inevitability, and the Flannery O’Connor epigraph from Wise Blood just felt uncannily relevant in its preoccupation with religion and determinism. I came across Édouard Glissant’s theories of relationality and Caribbean identity through Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s experimental film triptych En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy, and the novel’s specific Glissant epigraph captures for me the desperation and hope of Caribbean diasporic life. The Pound epigraph from The Cantos is a reference to his epic Modernist reworking of the Odyssey and Pound’s realization that literature can’t capture or atone for the totality of the 20th century. I guess I came to each of the epigraphs because I was trying to prefigure the sort of cultural and literary milieu that I felt shaped the world of the novel.
CK: I feel like the first sentence, which ends “the world was an ocean was a prison,” tells the whole story for Eurick. He undergoes a transformation throughout the book, and yet maybe it was destined to end how it did. How do you think about the role of destiny in our lives? And on the flip side, how much agency do you think we have? Eurick seems torn between fatalism and revolution. I’m curious about your relationship to those ideas as the author.
SR: I have a complicated relationship with the idea of destiny. As someone who adheres to the principles of empiricism and the scientific revolution, I believe in happenstance, random probability, and that the universe moves toward entropy, rather than cosmic determinism. But I also understand how human-made socioeconomic structures and historic events precede us and thereby shape the possible outcomes and trajectories of our lives. History is a kind of fate—we see that manifest in education opportunities, healthcare outcomes, crime statistics, etc.—but we also have some agency to choose what we do with the options we are given. I don’t know if that counts as free will or not. But isn’t it fun to think about?
CK: Of course there’s something compelling about revolution, and yet it’s incredibly destructive. How do you think about that tension in your own life and the America of 2026?
SR: Frustration with the current American societal organization under late capitalism is common in our generation. To be alive is to be conscious of the ubiquitous dissatisfaction and rage. But what do we do with that? Do we continue believing in incrementalism and that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts” (apologies but I love Middlemarch unembarrassedly)? Or do we commit to complete revolution and societal upheaval? The latter is attractive and has been successful in accomplishing desired societal ideals in some instances (the Haitian Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, Colombian War of Independence, etc.) but has also created more oppressive structures in others (the Bolshevik Revolution, the Cuban Revolution again, arguably the American Revolution again, too). As a philosophical and political question, revolution is very romantic but it has real material and human costs. Of course, the current rat wheel of political farce isn’t sufficient either. I don’t have the answer, but something has to change.
CK: You’re Haitian-American and the tug of both cultures is alive within the text. Is that tug alive within yourself? It’s of course a complicated time to be an American. And I imagine a certain amount of yearning for a homeland that is hard to return to. Do you experience this cultural dissonance, and if so, how do you soothe it?
SR: I don’t struggle with a cultural dissonance, but that’s not to say that others don’t. Personally, I acknowledge holding a dual identity: in certain social contexts, especially among Caribbean and Latin American peoples, I feel more Haitian, but in other contexts I feel more so American. It can be complicated living in America as a first-generation immigrant while also being from a place that has been subject to American hegemonic economic policies and political interventions. I think that’s a reality fairly common to many immigrant Americans, since immigration patterns seem to mirror the arc of neocolonial missions. That potential for tension in diasporic communities is something I really wanted to explore in the story.
CK: I’ve been thinking a lot about adaptation since I read James last year. Beyond the Baths of Stars is billed as “a dazzling reimagining of The Odyssey.” I saw the Christopher Nolan/Matt Damon movie version this summer, itself an adaptation. Obviously some retellings map clearly one-to-one to the source material. Others take unique liberties. And yet others are such loose interpretations as to bear only the slightest fingerprint of the original. Your book seems to fall more on this end of the spectrum and I was intrigued by the glimmers. What was your first encounter with The Odyssey and how did you approach the adaptation? Can you share an example or two of your interpretation choices?
SR: I first read Homer’s Odyssey in college and liked it but wasn’t obsessed with it, but reading Derek Walcott’s Omeros blew my mind open to how Odyssey adaptations could be their own literary genre. After that I got super into other reworkings like Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Pound’s The Cantos, all while trying to avoid Joyce’s Ulysses out of an unreasonable anxiety of influence. I was pretty tied to having direct corollaries to the Richard Lattimore translation of the Odyssey (I actually had the text open as I wrote!), but I was more interested in creating relatable contemporizations—like turning Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s crew into mindless animals into Eurick and friends wandering entranced through a booze/drug-fueled haze at a party, or depicting Tiresias not as an undead prophet but as a crackpot street fortune teller. Getting creative with the liberties I took was a lot of the fun of it.
CK: The Ana character was fascinating, and perhaps even more striking was the way she resonated with Eurick. He seemed to over-index on the meaning she was trying to convey to him. Where did your inspiration for her come from? Were you thinking of humans to whom we sometimes attribute godlike wisdom because of our own flailing or uncertainty (whether or not that’s their intent)?
SR: The Odyssey is replete with images and ideas of Odysseus’s masculinity and his uncriticized philandering with women, interactions that are all rather morally questionable. I think because of that, I was interested in playing with and subverting the trope of the manic pixie dream girl—some flattened archetype—and Ana’s character seemed like a perfect parallel to the goddess Athena. They are both idealized feminine forms within their respective stories, but I was attracted to how Ana might complicate the deus ex machina function that Athena serves in the Odyssey. What do we do when the person we hang all our hopes on might not be our savior? It’s a more interesting and human question to me than the divine interventions of the Greek pantheon.
CK: I found the art competition section interesting. Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see anything that would preclude either of the participants from competing, and some of the reactions were a little bit entitled in thinking that because someone had more privilege, they should have sat it out. It’s a complicated topic and I can personally relate to both POVs, but support isn’t so clear-cut (and not always financial), and the reality is that to make it in the art world you do have to compete with immense privilege. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this more directly.
SR: I didn’t personally read an implication in the novel that economically advantaged individuals shouldn’t compete in artistic competitions, but I do think some of the characters exhibit a resentment toward the competitors who they may feel didn’t have to work through the same obstacles that they have had to. I think it’s just a recognition that having economic stability affords a freedom to engage in artistic production that economic instability doesn’t. This is a reality not just within the world of the text, but an observable phenomenon in the lived world.
CK: The friendship is so strong until the end. It’s so hard to witness someone you love self-destruct and not be able to stop it. I’m curious if you’ve had this experience in your own life and what you learned from it.
SR: Not closely, but I’ve known many such individuals in passing and was interested in the distress and psychological fracturing of a character experiencing existential crises. It’s been done so beautifully in works like Zadie Smith’s NW and Richard Wright’s Native Son, so I aspired to try to emulate even a portion of that! I think those moments are really important inflection points in a narrative arc and say a lot about the type of person a character is or is willing to become.
CK: Surgeon/poet is an interesting combination. How does your work in medicine influence your writing, beyond affording a much better lifestyle than poetry alone ever could? Is there any way that your writing impacts your practice of medicine?
SR: The average work week for a surgical trainee can be 60–80 hours at minimum wage, with some months requiring 24-hour shifts every 2 to 3 days caring for the traumatically injured and surgical emergencies, so “lifestyle” can be relative! Surgery is an intense field, and writing, for me, is a cathartic release. Work life is fairly busy at present, so I only get to write every few weeks, but in the intervals I can allow plot points to marinate so I can hit the ground running once the opportunity arises. Conversely, I think writing creates a fluidity and comfort with language that facilitates the employment of empathy when I’m counseling patients in extremis, which is a crucial skill set that’s invaluable in emergency/trauma surgery and in medicine in general.
CK: I’m not sure if you can tell a story with a young adult protagonist without parental tension. And the immigrant aspect adds another layer to it. Those expectations can be an incredible burden, but they can also be a powerful motivator. Based on nothing but the book and your bio, it seems the latter was definitely true for you. Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country. Obviously that experience often comes with struggles, but would you say this first-generation mentality has served you well in other regards?
SR: I can’t presume to speak for all immigrant communities, but I’ve observed in several cultures how common it can be for parental figures to impress all their hopes and dreams of an industrious future onto their first-generation children. The reality is that the first-generation experience is diverse, and those expectations can be motivating for some children and overwhelming for others. The truth, I think, is that what happens is independent of parental expectations: whatever the outcome is, it’ll be decided by the individual’s environment, abilities, and motivations. That complexity is certainly true for me, and is also a nuanced calculus I wanted to work through in the story. Why do individuals with similar circumstances have diverging paths? Why do people with such different starts in life have converging realities? It’s a central tenet I think the world of the novel is obsessed with.
CK: The American dream is under siege and sputtering both in this book and on the streets. What do you hope to convey about class and systemic oppression? Do you see upward mobility as endangered or extinct?
SR: Forms of economic disenfranchisement have always been a part of the American project and socioeconomic inequalities are inherent to the class hierarchies of our present late capitalist society. Multiple academic disciplines acknowledge these phenomena. There’s also a growing body of political theory that posits the capitalist system in its current iteration will soon collapse, which one might argue will precipitate sociocultural chaos. You could also argue the mechanisms of upward mobility in this country have always been barred from select marginalized groups. That being said, I’m less interested in the minutiae of social theory and more in examining the lives and experiences of people affected by these systems. I wanted to portray people who feel apprehensive about an economic system they’re beginning to suspect is in natural decay, a system whose proverbial ladder to betterment they’ve realized has in fact always been out of their reach. The reality is that these are human stories, stories of anxiety and stagnation and desperation, and I wanted to share stories like that with the world.
CK: Anything else you’d like to add?
SR: Beyond the Baths of Stars is a book that aims to tackle so-called “big themes”—class, fate, politics, societal disenfranchisement, etc.—but it’s also a book about pop culture, art, poetry, Caribbean history and identity, and both weird and really cool cultural idiosyncrasies of South Florida. I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope readers have a lot of fun reading it, too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Schneider K. Rancy is a Haitian-American writer from South Florida. He is the author of the poetry collections Dreams of Diaspora and Self-Portrait in Hospital as Camus. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in Callaloo, Columbia Journal, Apogee, Moko Magazine, Sargasso, and elsewhere. In his spare time, he is a surgeon. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives in New York City.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Courtney Kocak is a writer, podcaster, and comedian who splits time between Austin and Los Angeles. Her bylines include The New York Times, The Cut, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, Slate, and more. Her debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, with Trio House Press, is out now.