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Reading Jesse Ball’s new novel feels like being hypnotised, or like having your heart broken – but really it feels like both at once It’s a dreamlike road-trip of a book, more Kafka than Kerouac, in which a terminally ill widower and his young son, who has Down syndrome, travel across a nameless continent in an indeterminate past They journey from a town called A to a town called Z, taking a bizarre census, marking each resident they encounter with a tattoo But beside or beneath this story – which has the feel of a fable or parable, transpiring outside the specificities of time and place – something else is being constructed: an act of remembrance or restitution   Census opens with – and reading it is framed by – a nonfictional foreword to the meandering fiction that follows In it, Ball explains why he wanted to write the book (‘I felt, and feel, that people with Down syndrome are not really understood’) and how he decided to do it (‘I realised I would make a book that was hollow’) In the opening line, we learn that the book is about – or rather, says Ball, ‘around’, the distinction is important – a real person, on whom the boy in the novel is based: ‘My brother Abram Ball died in 1998’ We learn that Abram had Down syndrome, and that when he died, aged 24, he had been quadriplegic for years As a boy, Jesse assumed that he would live with and care for Abram when they were adults, in a relationship ‘very similar to that of a father and son’, until death intervened The power of Ball’s foreword is connected to the simplicity with which it is written, which, in turn, highlights an irony: that a loved person has died tragically young can be stated in a handful of words, but to express the transformations wrought by that loss would exhaust the capabilities of language One reading of Census is that it offers, or attempts to offer, an artistic consolation for that inconsolable loss It’s the closest Ball can get