IN THE FIRST PAGES of All Fours, Miranda July’s second novel, the unnamed narrator confesses to collecting intimate ephemera from her friends’ relationships. But the “artifacts”—“screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers,” recordings of conversations—never add up to something substantial. Her impulse to acquire these relics is “like trying to grab smoke by its handle,” she says before wondering, “What handle?” July’s spacey, tender art chases the same evanescence across multiple media (film, fiction, dance, and performance). Her work aims to take hold of, and hang tight to, the ineffable attractions and connections that constitute a life. All Fours may be her most successful grasping yet. By its end, the phrase “hideously affecting” came unbidden to my mind.

I’m ethically bound to disclose that I have much in common with its narrator, an emotionally immature, eccentrically libidinous, perimenopausal married woman with a past in sex work who is perpetually panicking about aging into undesirability and, consequently, celibacy. Though she has many close female friends, the narrator yearns for the immersive intimacy most associated with romantic passion. She toys with the idea of connecting with her aloof husband, Harris, but she can’t commit to the pursuit—or even decide if she likes him. Together, they are “formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned [their] drink.” She enjoys the weekly sex she forces herself to initiate once it’s set in motion, but afterward, she withdraws into her “native state,” which involves “dreading the next time.” The obstacle is him—or who they are together—because, alone, she is sexually voracious, full of extravagant fantasies, and prone to bouts of compulsive masturbation that last for days. When Harris gives her a look that says, “We could be as one right now, if you really wanted that,” her eyes respond with nothing. “Certainly, sex would reconnect us,” she thinks after she neglects her dutiful routine, “that was the problem.” 

It doesn’t take long (about forty pages) for our narrator to find a fixation for her restless and relentless craving: Davey, a younger married man she meets at the start of a promptly aborted cross-country road trip from California to New York. Like July, the narrator is also “a minor celebrity” appreciated by a cohort of indie-film enthusiasts, readers of the New Yorker, and fellow artistically inclined free spirits. As her own boss, there are few absolute demands on her time. Usefully, her art generates enough disposable income for her to indulge in expensive whims, like redoing the interior of the motel room where she settles at the start of her journey. And she’s just famous enough to worry about how her elevated status might influence a new relationship. The narrator suspects Davey is too ordinary to recognize her—he works at a Hertz on the outskirts of Los Angeles—but after days of building a charged friendship, she learns that he knows exactly who she is, and she is ashamed. “My fame neutered me,” she thinks, dismayed. Rather than wanting to be with her because she’s “a great beauty” or “so magnetic and witty,” Davey is no more than a fan, impressed by her modest cachet. 

With stunning accuracy, July captures the inner vacillations of a woman trying, and failing, to convince herself of her sexual obsolescence. This type of falsely authoritative self-negation is one of the ego’s maneuvers when it anticipates looking foolish or being rejected, and its correlation with reality is tenuous. No matter how many times the narrator tells herself she is “too old,” her desire for Davey and the intensity of union he represents is irrepressible and has the power of a prophecy. After a week of tentative, platonic encounters, Davey reveals that he does want her. (“I jerk off after every time I see you,” he says.) Contrary to popular wisdom, she is still fuckable, still lovable, at forty-five years old, even if Davey’s marital ethics won’t permit him to fully indulge.

The narrator issues a similar series of experimentally definitive decrees throughout the process of falling in love with him. One moment, he’s not a serious romantic prospect because he’s “dumb,” checks Instagram too much, and is not talented; the next, he is the most transcendent dancer she’s ever seen and the only person capable of understanding the very core of who she is. When she watches him perform a dance choreographed for her, she thinks she is “entirely known”: “This is the happiest moment of my life.” The ambiguities of romantic obsession tend to bring on such grandiose and melodramatic thinking; the slow-filling outline of the newly beloved lends itself to idealized projection. But other people’s permanent opacity also means we can’t ever be sure that a lover’s degree of attraction is the same as our own. When Davey says the limitations placed on their relationship by his marriage are “as bad” for him as they are for her, the narrator is dubious: “I would have loved to have seen a graph of the relative badness.” 

The intensity of her yo-yoing feelings—and her unconsummated craving for Davey’s “huge cock”—is depicted with such meticulous accuracy that an almost unbearable momentum builds for the first third of the book, an energy destined to shatter into diffuse agony when she goes back to her family. Returned to her real world, she is “too much a soul,” unequipped to deal with domestic chores and the requirements of raising her adored child, Sam. The narrator’s subsequent flailing brings on a major reckoning in her marriage, after which she and Harris decide to see other people. 

THE CROSSHATCHED SIGNIFICANCE that emerges between strangers is a July hallmark as well as one of her great charms, and sex is her preferred arena of incident. She is fascinated by what sex, and physicality more generally, can achieve, namely surprise, revelation, and connection. Her depiction of sexual curiosity and mutability is regularly a source of relief for me, an implicit repudiation of the dour, limited way sex is treated socially and culturally. In her first film, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, I was exhilarated by the two teenage best friends who experiment with their sexual power by provoking an adult neighbor into writing explicit reveries about them on posters displayed in his window and who bully a peer into evaluating their respective blow job techniques. Past the halfway point of All Fours, the narrator and her husband embark on a poignant, hilarious role-play that helped me understand what might have united these people in the first place, and I began to root for them to stay together. But the second half of the book flags as the narrator starts canvassing friends about menopause, taking hormones, and figuring out the shape of her newly open marriage. Once Davey recedes into the past, she takes up with an artist named Kris, a character who remains vague and who “happily”—or so the narrator says—doesn’t come close to replicating Davey’s vibrant urgency. 

July is extremely funny, which makes her narrator good company, but without the catalyst of intense desire, she can meander into less dynamic self-involvement.And her dedication to sexual unpredictability can work against the coherence of her distinctive characters, who sometimes feel shoehorned into the wrong plot. This was the case in her 2020 film, Kajillionaire, in which the gorgeous, vivacious Melanie pursues the awkward, prickly Old Dolio despite myriad discouragements of considerable magnitude. It also happened in July’s debut novel, The First Bad Man, when two women’s vicious physical fights eventually yield to sex. In All Fours, this engineered import comes when the narrator has sex with a woman connected to Davey’s past. The setup has a certain logic—if you can’t sleep with someone directly, one degree of separation is the next best thing—but in place of chemistry, there’s only antagonism and irritation. “There was no attraction between us,” the narrator says. “Her agenda seemed more self-help than sexual.” Why, then, do they do it? Because the author wanted them to. 

Thanks to her frank, appealing voice and earnest appreciation for interpersonal weirdness, July’s failures are often more engaging than less ambitious writers’ successes, and when she pulls off her smoke-grabbing, it’s unforgettable. (What a poorer world we’d be in without the “pooping back and forth” motif from Me and You and Everyone We Know.) I didn’t mind the missteps in All Fours because I’d rather the risk be taken than declined. No one in July’s work is ever wasted. Everyone has the potential to be important, and that potential is usually fulfilled. Ten chapters after her first appearance, an antique seller met in passing is revealed to be a figure of crucial relevance. The narrator sees an artist’s name on a card in her sculptor friend’s studio and ends up sleeping with that artist’s ex-girlfriend. Everything could become something; everyone could become someone. (“What, you having a strangely intimate interaction with a stranger?” the narrator imagines her husband saying to her at one point.) 

The wackiness of the narrator of All Fours is mild when compared to July’s character Christine in Me and You and Everyone We Know, a grown woman who puts socks on her ears in a department store while trying to court a shoe salesman, and the protagonist of The First Bad Man, a woman who telepathically communicates with strangers’ babies and, for a year, hosts her employers’ abusive daughter as a houseguest. But like those earlier projects—both of which I enjoyed—All Fours still suffers, at points, from artificiality. 

The book’s end, even more so than the aforementioned sex scene, struck me as contrived. But that didn’t keep me from crying, and I won’t soon forget it (as, in truth, I forget so many novels that are more strictly realistic). The specificity of emotion—and the flourish with which it’s rendered—seeps beyond the boundaries of the book and stains the reader. “I could always be how I was in the (motel) room,” the narrator realizes; the “full soul” she felt in possession of while lost in love with Davey is not a moment with a beginning and end, nor something he bestows or withholds. The narrator comes to understand this through dance, not in spite of the form’s separation from so-called real life but because of it. Art’s elevation and estrangement facilitate the transmission of truth. If life is the smoke, art is the handle. What handle? The best, and the only, one we have.

Charlotte Shane is a cofounder of TigerBee Press. Her new book, An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work, will be published in August by Simon & Schuster.

IF THE MEASURE of a debut is how capably it shits on the pieties of its literary forebears, then Honor Levy’s funny, provocative My First Book is an unqualified success. The fact that I, an Elder Millennial, found it largely inscrutable proves the point. 

Though nominally fiction—at least according to the metadata—the sixteen pieces collected here could as easily be called prose poems, personal essays, or rants, though their author would likely find all of these classifications “cringe.” The book opens with “Love Story,” which details the online courtship between a guy in his “fall of Rome era” and a young woman “giving damsel in distress.” Sample sentence: “He was kamikaze mode, pumping iron, all Sun and Steel sending hearts <3 <3 <3 to his Saint Wilgefortis, darling, starving, hily hikikomori virgin femcel holed up in her Serial Experiments Laincore bedroom.” Still with me? 

Not everything in My First Book has such a high barrier of entry. “Good Boys,” a vignette about young people smoking on a Paris rooftop, recalls the early work of Levy’s fellow Bennington College alum Bret Easton Ellis. Like Ellis, Levy achieved notoriety at a young age for both her writing and her public persona; the New Yorker published “Good Boys” when she was twenty-one, and the New York Times, The Cut, and Vanity Fair have anointed her a “darling” and “It Girl” of  the downtown scene, a loose coterie of artists and writers who coalesced around the Lower East Side’s quasi-mythical Dimes Square during the pandemic to snort ketamine, stage amateur theater, say “retard”with impunity, and con PayPal founder Peter Thiel into funding small-circulation literary journals—or so it’s been said. Until recently, Levy cohosted Wet Brain, a self-described “post-canceled” podcast that gave airtime to heterodox thinkers such as the neo-feudalist start-up founder Curtis Yarvin and the novelist-turned-raw-milk-evangelist Tao Lin. Levy’s cohost, Walter Pearce, has described her as a “Quirked Howard Stern.” 

Thankfully, despite her entrenchment in it, Levy has little interest in writing about the downtown scene, a subject that has received more than its share of spilled ink already. In fact, “Good Boys” is one of the few pieces in My First Book with a primarily offline setting. Elsewhere, we follow Levy’s alter egos Sad Girl and Internet Girl through the looking glass of their LCD screens: 

When I was eleven it was spelled with a Big I. That was how I was taught it. How autocorrect corrected it. Like god to God. It was a place to visit. A proper noun. The Internet. The thinspo forums and videos of Saddam’s execution and the pics from that bat mitzvah I wasn’t invited to. I could go there and I went there that day after school on my clunky white laptop. I went there and I never came back. . . . It was like coming a long way through a dark tunnel and turning around to look at the speck of light from which I came, but there was no light. . . . The tunnel was and always will be my world.

As this passage makes clear, Levy’s work isn’t about the internet so much as it’s sprung from a   consciousness so shaped by the internet that no imaginative act exists beyond its influence. Each story in My First Book opens with ASCII art on its title page, and some include “links” to sites such as honor.baby/lovestory, a small repository of curated content including a sped-up version of MGMT’s “Little Dark Ages” and a time-lapse GIF of a rotting fox. Almost all are written in present tense, and time is nonlinear, often jumping between decades from one sentence to the next: “I’m twenty-one. I’m eleven. I’m on the internet. I’m twenty-one.”  

For her “normie” readers, Levy has graciously included “Z was for Zoomer,” a fifty-six-page glossary beginning with “Autism,” which apparently afflicts “all the hot-art-world-adjacent millennial girls.” Later, under “Edgelord,” she cites the glossary’s “Autism” entry as an example of “a total edgelord move.” As in Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, in which quickly outdated neologisms like “ethnomagnetism” were defined in the margins, Levy’s glossary points to the mutability of language and to the fundamental impossibility of catching a zeitgeist, especially one that moves at 5G speed, and freezing it in the amber of the printed page. Note the past tense in the piece’s title, and in her introduction to it: “These are some words that briefly built a world I briefly lived in.” 

Levy, of course, is not the first writer to try to capture the texture of a tap and scroll existence; Patricia Lockwood, Joshua Cohen, and Mark Doten have explored similar territory in recent work. But Levy is more than a decade younger than these writers, a generation gap that’s felt in her command of Gen Z vernacular and also in her restlessness. Often, Levy starts off in the ballpark of the traditional short story—i.e., the kind with characters and scenes—and then digresses and never returns, leaving the initial frame of narrative open like a forgotten browser tab. “Hall of Mirrors” begins with an after-school teacher letting a child sit on her lap—she’s entranced by the boy’s “anime blue eyes”—but quickly veers into a passage that reads like a Wikipedia entry on the history of mirrors, which leads to a didactic riff on the dangers of PFOAS—The End. Other pieces don’t even bother with the pretense of a frame. “Brief Interview with a Beautiful Boy,” the title of which nods to David Foster Wallace, isn’t a story so much as a pile of declarative statements: “He’s drunk as fuck and maxing out his credit cards. He’s trying not to scare the hoes, but it’s hard. He’s a spoiled brat. He absolutely despises liberals. He can’t even do a single pushup.” 

On Wet Brain, Levy frequently contended that there’s no longer a difference between irony and sincerity, “based” and “cringe.” Asserting this may be another edgelord move, but to her point, it isn’t only an edgelord move. Just as these “crazy unprecedented beginning and end times” have blurred the borders between on- and offline, and between avatar and self, Levy seems to be suggesting that language has become so debased and inescapably referential that there’s no longer such a thing as single-entendre speech. Her story “Cancel Me” begins: “It’s 2019. Max is canceled. Oliver is canceled. Kian is canceled. Rob is canceled. Bryce is canceled. Carter is canceled.” Each repetition dilutes meaning until no meaning remains. 

By her own definition, this worldview would make Levy a “Doomer,” someone who’s swallowed a “catastrophic black capsule of apathy, denial, nihilism, fatalism, and defeatism.” There are moments of glib humor in My First Book that support this conclusion, such as a joke about teen girls wanting to be “Dachau liberation day–skinny.” But herstrongest stories find Levy attempting to peel back the layers of irony in search of something buried beneath them. 

In his 2017 n+1 “In Memoriam” for Denis Johnson, the writer Justin Taylor squares the bleakness of Johnson’s fiction with the author’s Christian faith by suggesting that, for Johnson, “evil is a symptom of suffering, which is to say estrangement from the sacred.” I’d imagine that Levy, an “ethnically Jewish” convert to Catholicism, would concur. The difference is the tenderness with which Johnson treats the sinners and losers who populate his work. As Taylor writes, “He does not damn his souls to stay lost. He believes in the possibility, perhaps the promise, of their redemption.” I kept looking for a similar tenderness—and a similar promise—in My First Book. Occasionally I found it, such as in “Cancel Me,” when the narrator looks across the room at a party and “can see everyone holding their Red Solo cups and hurting.” A small moment of empathy, it sticks out in a collection whose author’s default stance is a gently sardonic sneer.  

But maybe empathy’s the wrong thing to look for in this kind of book; certainly Johnson is  the wrong point of reference. A better one might be the experimental novelist Mark Leyner, a ’90s cult figure now largely remembered as the primary target of “E UNIBUS PLURAM,” David Foster Wallace’s 1990 polemic on television’s deleterious influence on American fiction.

While Wallace concedes that Leyner is “dazzlingly creative” and “extremely funny,” he scolds Leyner’s “amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader” and concludes that his work is ultimately “doomed to shallowness by a desire to ridicule a TV culture whose mockery of itself and all value absorbs all ridicule.” As readers of Infinite Jest are aware, Wallace had a tortured relationship with the concept of “entertainment,” and I’ve always taken his assault on Leyner as a projection of anxiety over his own reader-wowing pyrotechnics. Regardless, it’s a fundamental misreading of Leyner’s project—which was not to ridicule TV culture but to radically repurpose sitcom clichés and ad-speak into something ecstatic and alive. I’m wary of similarly misreading Levy. Despite her insistence that “everything’s a copy so let me paste from Wikipedia,” the stylized eccentricity of her best work reads like an act of resistance against the algorithm’s assault on the imagination. If she sometimes resigns herself to the futility of that resistance, who can blame her? These are bleak times. A bromide from the early days of social media was that you had to separate the static from the noise. A generation later, My First Book exposes the fallacy of such a distinction. It’s all static. It’s all noise. 

Adam Wilson is the author of three books, most recently the novel Sensation Machines (Soho, 2020).

IN HARI KUNZRU’S NOVEL My Revolutions (2007), which starts in Britain in 1998, the narrator, a fifty-year-old named Michael Frame, receives a visit from an old friend, Miles, the only person who knows that he is a former violent radical living under an assumed identity. To the delight of Michael’s younger wife and late-adolescent stepdaughter, Miles reels off stories of the good old days, a vanilla version of what occurred. After he slips up on a detail, mentioning a university education written out of the cover story, Michael quickly intervenes and finds himself drawn into the yarn-spinning, “a confection of swinging London and San Francisco flower-power, as phoney as one of those television nostalgia shows where they soundtrack archive footage with old Top 40 hits.” These candy-colored reminiscences are ideally matched to the preconceptions of their audience. Michael’s wife invokes “the sixties milieu” as something ossified, remote, like the Battle of Waterloo or the Spanish Armada, while his stepdaughter’s primary reference for that period was “probably Austin Powers.”

 My Revolutions uses Michael’s own detailed reminiscences of that time, which form the bulk of the novel, to reveal the reality beneath the tales served up to Michael’s family as well as the sort of write-ups that turned one of Michael’s comrades into a “cardboard cut-out” of a hippie, shrouding his true character behind a “haze of Byronic bullshit.” Kunzru’s new novel, Blue Ruin, also has a middle-aged male narrator who is prompted to recall a twentysomething London existence defined by hopes dashed and love lost. Yet here it’s the retrospective episodes that bring to mind the uneasy role-play in Michael’s living room—an Austin Powers retelling of the hipster ’90s, all late nights and loft spaces. And though it’s hard to be sure, as in any first-person narrative, that the account is to be taken at face value, as sacrosanct or wholly dependable, we are given no firm reason for doubt, no clear point of contrast or more nuanced alternative, no skeptical commentary elsewhere within the fictional world pointing to evidence of holes or cracks, cardboard or bullshit.

As its title suggests, Blue Ruin is a follow-up to Kunzru’s previous books White Tears (2017) and Red Pill (2020), completing a loose trilogy devoted––in part––to contemporary America, a conceit derived from Kieślowski’s Three Colors sequence (1993–94), where the flag in question was the Tricolore. (A graduate student in an earlier Kunzru novel dazzles her future husband with talk of Henry James, Marrakech, the Kosovo War, and “the films of Kryzstof Kieślowski.”) The novel’s present-day setting is pandemic-time New York State, where an Englishman, Jay Gates, is living hand to mouth as a courier. Delivering groceries to a cottage on a vast wooded compound, he encounters his former girlfriend, Alice, living in seclusion with her husband, Jay’s old best friend, Rob, now a celebrated artist, and another couple, the gallerist Marshall and his girlfriend. Jay collapses and, while recovering in a barn, starts thinking back to a time when he and Rob, just out of art school and on the verge of success, fell in with the aspiring curator Alice—dazzling, fearless, wealthy, French—and started putting together shows and installations as a collective named after the disused factory that served as their base, Fancy Goods. (There was a similar central hangout in My Revolutions, Free Pictures.)

From the start, the novel appears at ease with the creakiest devices of period evocation. “Back then,” we are told, “East London was cheap. A combination of Victorian industry and the Luftwaffe had created a streetscape full of weird gaps and hidden places, alleys and railway arches, yards and courts and terraces.” The memories often descend into, or half disguise, a list: “a room at the back of a kebab shop where you could drink room-temperature beer out of cans at four in the morning . . . pubs with lunchtime strippers . . . a bar in someone’s front room . . . a bar where you could buy drugs through a metal hatch by the cigarette machine . . . a Jamaican bar with a glitterball turning over a little dancefloor.” A reference to involvement with “all the intersecting causes of the nineties left” prompts more itemizing: “the Zapatistas, corporate branding, globalization, the predatory behavior of the International Monetary Fund.” Everything is left in its congealed state, with stereotypes neither questioned nor restored to a validating original context. Alice gives Jay an art theory book, and he tells us that he underlined “phrases about the reification of social relations, and spaces of intersubjective connection.” It resembles the description at the start of The Corrections, when Chip Lambert sells off his library and recalls the books’ long-ago promise of “a radical critique of late-capitalist society,” except in this case the ideas are crucial, not a fleeting source of parody. Yet we aren’t told what these concepts amounted to, where they came from, how they influenced Jay’s own practice. At one point, Jay recalls that he and Rob “were in love with painting’s mess and machismo, and we were young enough not to know what a cliché it all was.” He never expresses the same concern about his own reminiscences, nor his presentation of Rob.

Kunzru tries to offset the nostalgia-doc atmosphere by withholding titles. Sometimes the device is explained, as when Jay says he cannot remember the name of the British TV comedy about a “discontented suburban businessman” in which a title sequence depicted the central figure running along a beach removing his suit and tie before plunging naked into the sea (The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin). We can’t be sure whether he knows that the “TV show about teenagers with superpowers” he passes out in front of following an argument with Alice is called Buffy the Vampire Slayer.There’s even a bit about a song that made the Top 40 (in fact, top 2), though the reluctance to name it produces a somewhat tortuous syntactical effect: “Rob once joked unkindly that the song was about her, the indie pop hit about the art-school girl who wants to do whatever common people do” (Pulp’s “Common People”). 

It’s hard to get a handle on the novel’s attitude to reference. Instead of dropping a litter of names, whether real or invented or composite, Kunzru, or Jay, refers to a “famously conservative art critic,” “one of the famous Young British Artists,” “London’s most famous collector.” “A famous Chinese artist was to send some kind of pyrotechnic dragon down the Thames.” At an awards ceremony where he is nominated, Jay sits through an elaborate dinner and makes “halting conversation with a famous film director.” During an inventory of the kitchen in the cottage, Jay notices “a messy figurative painting that even in my dissociated state I recognized as the work of a famous nineteen-eighties Neo-expressionist, an artist whose work I’d only ever seen in museums.” The college where Jay and Rob meet is identified only as an institution “famous” for “disdaining traditional ideas about medium and craft.” But there’s also a heavy reliance on the explanatory power of familiar cultural reference points. In consecutive sentences Alice is likened to a Franz Kline and the darkness described as “Dickensian.” We also read: “like a character in a New Wave film,” “Brideshead persona,” “a Blakean heaven,” “like a scene from some Swinging London comedy,” “a sort of Valkyrie,” “a science fiction quality,” “like a cocktail in Star Trek.” It seems that Kunzru, or Jay, is implying that description is now unavoidably secondhand, that celebrity culture and our postmodern habits of mind have defeated realist representation. But then on other occasions, we get the comp and the full-fat rendering too. The words “like a set for a French house video” are followed by: “underfloor checkerboard lighting, space age retro furniture and a massive chandelier hung dramatically from the ceiling.” Opportunities for shorthand are rejected. When Jay and Alice arrive at “a tiny country station” in rural France, there are “flowers in hanging baskets and a dog sleeping on the platform.” Then Jay sits down at a metal table and orders two bottles of Orangina. 

The one thing overtly dismissed as “bullshit” within the novel, the claim that the “delivery guy” happens to be an “old friend from London”—a scenario that Marshall compares to the “script of a porno”—turns out to be true. Or strongly appears to. There are hints that a COVID-addled Jay has imagined the entire thing. He calls Alice “the mistress of some fairy-tale kingdom” and recounts a long dream, which itself contains a dream. It’s notable that he shares a nickname (or adoptive name) and a pair of initials with one of the best-known fantasists in literature. Like James Gatz, aka Jay Gatsby, Jason “Jay” Gates believes he can rekindle a long-lost romance with a rich girl now living in upstate New York with an unfaithful and unworthy husband. (Both characters spend time working on the yacht of a rich American—Jay as “deckhand,” Gatsby as “steward, mate, skipper, secretary.”) But Gatsby, though daft and even delusional, wasn’t quite hallucinating. Marshall’s aggressive questioning of the coincidence hardly strengthens the sense of dream logic. 

AS THE STORY OF A LOVE TRIANGLE and tripartite character study––along with pandemic-era drama and historical portrait, the novel’s other generic identities—Blue Ruin presents a strikingly similar scenario to Luca Guadagnino’s recent film Challengers, but with the art scene replacing the tennis circuit, and a pointed pandemic setting instead of a necessarily pre-pandemic one. In novel and film alike, a man reduced to sleeping in his car has an unexpected encounter in New York State with an old girlfriend married to, and managing, the former best friend and colleague with whom he met her, a dominant figure in his field whose best days, to the wife’s gall, appear to be behind him. Both stories begin in the present, with the coincidental reunion, before unfolding an intermittent flashback structure that eventually brings us back to the present. 

Like Challengers, Blue Ruin suffers from a basic lack of clarity—over the initial couple’s breakup and the woman’s preference for the best friend, and over the question of why the one who lost out is reduced to his current lowly status. Kunzru makes more of an effort than Justin Kuritzkes and Luca Guadagnino, the writer and director of Challengers, to outline the relational dynamics. Alice tells Jay that it was “really hard being around your self-hatred. You were so unsatisfied with everything, and so proud and humiliated and angry about being humiliated.” In Jay’s own telling, the main source of humiliation during the time he knew Alice was her growing closeness with Rob. Alice’s use of that word to describe her own experiences also comes in relation to sexual betrayal; Rob’s name, we learn, has appeared on a spreadsheet devoted to “problematic art men, something like that.” 

How are we to assess Jay’s personality?He explains that he was the only child of an English mother and a Jamaican father he never knew. As a kid, he emulated his white peers, dressing as a goth, listening to synthesizer bands, talking “like a taxi driver.” Spending time with Black groups during his foundation year at art school, he knew he emitted “out-group signals.” But race doesn’t appear to form a crucial part of his self-image. The first allusion of any kind comes on page forty-eight, with a reference to “hostile white barbers”—the word “Black” is used just once—and Jay’s feeling of alienation is generally cast in existential or psychological terms. When he describes himself as a “rank outsider,” his references are to unspecified “faults” obvious to other people. We learn that after his mother and stepfather had twins, he went to live with his Nan, and the implication is that he was destined for exclusion, doomed to play third wheel. Yet when recalling what attracted him to Alice, he doesn’t reinforce the idea that he was seeking out rejection. He says only that he would “chase after very beautiful girls . . . because they were the ones other people seemed to want.” Then, after charming them, he struggled to sustain his interest. But that isn’t what transpires in his relationship with Alice, the instance he is describing.

Jay’s account of his decline is no more coherent. He claims that when he learned that Alice and Rob had moved to New York, it convinced him “to do something drastic . . . to copy her by leaving behind the person she had left, to break myself and begin again.” But he had already retreated from the art world on ethical grounds. He hated “collectors” and was appalled by the commercial calculation of Rob and Alice, the hypocrisy of peddling a sale show as “seeking a relational exterior to capitalist modes of exchange.” Jay didn’t want “to make statement objects for the rich.” His degree show, a performance involving a painting occluded from view that he then destroys, is “a refusal, a way to separate myself from all the other artists who were jostling at the money trough for a chance to dip their snouts.” So: Are his actions noble and self-assertive, a defense of integrity, or merely a reflex, a product of a lifelong inability, which he calls “a sort of failing on my part,” to become a part of anything? 

It’s possible that Kunzru is deliberately undermining a consistent interpretation of Jay as man, moral agent, partner, artist, and narrator. Imagery of drifting and driftwood recurs in various connections. Kunzru’s first novel, The Impressionist (2002), was about a Zelig-like shape-shifter in Asia, Europe, and Africa in the 1920s. In My Revolutions, Michael Frame, whose real name is Chris Carver, notes: “Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change.” At the end of Red Pill, a man who has suffered a breakdown returns to his Brooklyn apartment and finds that everything is both the same and different. Promoting My Revolutions, Kunzru said that he had a “nasty feeling” that he would find himself repeatedly asking the same question about whether the self is grounded or contingent, innate or context-specific—whether, in fact, we break ourselves and begin again with almost every action. Kunzru’s friend and younger contemporary Zadie Smith recently argued that the idea of shifting personas is “very deep in ’90s cultural logic. . . . The point was variety. It’s a weird aesthetic tic.” But Kunzru’s presentation of variety is too varied. As with the pattern of details relating to dreaming or imagining, it is difficult to track the argument—to be sure there is an argument—about change serving as the only constant. 

BLUE RUIN IS A PERSISTENTLY FRUSTRATING EXPERIENCE, at once predictable and inscrutable, certainly the least intricate and engaging of Kunzru’s seven novels. The title itself points to an essential lack of focus, urgency, and definition. White Tears and Red Pill risked seeming on-the-nose, naffly topical, but they reflected Kunzru’s ambition, his desire to offer the last—or longest—word on a prevalent conceptual and epistemic theme. Blue Ruin isjust a phrase, not far from a cliché, seemingly pulled out of the air because he needed a two-word tag including that color.

 It seems strange that Kunzru has chosen to set his ’90s novel among a version of the Young British Artists, familiar terrain to an English readership and hardly revelatory to an international one, when his own experience of that time was so distinctive, and ripe for explication. In 1993, two years after completing his degree, he went to do postgraduate studies in philosophy and literature at the University of Warwick, a college on a Brutalist campus in the West Midlands, and fell in with a gang of aggressively future-minded theorists, led by Nick Land and Sadie Plant and later known as the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). He had always been drawn to oppositional impulses. Growing up in Essex, the son of a Kashmiri Hindu father and an English mother, he discovered Bowie and science fiction and the “almost unreadably abstruse meanderings” of the British music press. As an English student at a left-leaning Oxford college, he was being taught what a student with more traditional tutors called “Red English” (implying Marxist): protested apartheid, the poll tax, and fees for higher education; got into rave culture; and sought out a graduate student with whom he could study postcolonial literature. Land and Plant were an ideal fit. A list of their favored topics—culled from the many accounts of the CCRU’s activities—includes biohacking, dance music, e-cash, feminism, matrices, open-source software, and virtuality. An emphasis on the multiple was welcome to the child of mixed ethnicity. But to Kunzru, all the resulting ideas were linked by an emphasis on freedom from constraint—reveling in the autonomous zone of the dance floor as a sort of corporeal counterpart to surfing the net.

When Kunzru left Warwick, his sole marketable skill was that he could explain “why you would connect a phone line to a computer.” Plant introduced him to the editors of the British arm of a successful newAmerican tech magazine. A bio note that appeared shortly afterward says he “does something quite important, though nobody is sure what. Mostly, he plays loud techno music in the offices of Wired UK.” YouTube has some amusingly mad footage, from 1996, of Kunzru standing in the London nightclub Heaven and attempting to conduct an interview by video link with the novelist and inventor Arthur C. Clarke, who was at home in Sri Lanka. He remained at Wired UK until its closure in early 1997, at which point he started writing travel pieces for newspapers and music reviews for the lifestyle monthly Wallpaper, did some DJing, presented a TV show, and started working on The Impressionist, a comic picaresque about an Anglo-Indian that received a wild advance and was published in 2002.

In many of his preoccupations, Kunzru is highly characteristic, even the exemplar, of a certain kind of nerdily cerebral, outward-looking Englishman born between 1968 and 1970 who now dominates British cultural output at home and abroad. The best-known instances are Thom Yorke and Christopher Nolan. Other prose writers include Tom McCarthy, David Mitchell, and—fleetingly—Alex Garland, and The Guardian journalist and political historian Andy Beckett. They have all shown a marked interest in travel, science fiction, the contemporary—future-minded—themes that preoccupied the CCRU, and the pop culture of their childhoods. Kunzru wrote a story with a title from Simple Minds, “New Gold Dream,” while Beckett named his book about the early ’80s Promised You a Miracle. Mitchell, who wrote a novel about a prog-rock band, Utopia Avenue, has said that Kunzru “got me into Brian Eno.” In recent months, the prominence of this micro-generation has been hard to miss. Yorke released a second album with his new band, The Smile. Nolan won his first Oscar, for Oppenheimer. Garland––who stopped publishing fiction twenty years ago and is now, like Nolan, essentially an American studio director––has made his biggest film, Civil War. Mitchell is on a tour to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cloud Atlas. Beckett has just brought out The Searchers, about the left wing of the modern Labour Party, following books about Britain’s relationship with Chile and histories of the ’70s and early ’80s. And Kunzru has completed an ambitious conceptual trilogy.

There are certainly broad distinctions between these novelists. Mitchell has said of Kunzru that he’s “a deeply intelligent, highly read, politically engaged man, and I know I’m not like that.” Kunzru and McCarthy are more engaged with, and involved in, contemporary art; Garland and Mitchell are more populist and work on movies, initially collaborating with teams behind key works of the ’90s(Trainspotting and The Matrix, respectively) and adapting theirbest-known novels (The Beach and Cloud Atlas). One thing they share is an indifference or disdain toward the writer most commonly heroized by writers younger and older, Martin Amis. He is mentioned nowhere in McCarthy’s essays or Garland’s interviews. Mitchell sent him up in Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks. Beckett, in a recent interview, described him as seeming “quite an ’80s kind of figure.” Kunzru has noted that his work is “full of class anxiety.” The allegiance among English novelists was to a writer already celebrated when they came of age, J. G. Ballard. When the philosopher Simon Critchley noted that Kunzru, Mitchell, and McCarthy are “great writers and really clever people” but haven’t really shaken the form of the novel, the claim points to their fidelity to the concept-first approach adopted by Ballard, who, with the exception of the seventeen-part collage The Atrocity Exhibition, was content to work on a moderate scale, using a thriller-ish plot as a courier of social and scientific theorizing, and a male narrator or close third person. 

There was also the example of another unlikely—even less likely—resident of the English Home Counties, Stanley Kubrick. 2001 is a clear influence on Gods Without Men (Clarke’s source novel provides the epigraph), Nolan’s and Garland’s films, and Yorke’s music. The film’s command of scientific fact is praised in McCarthy’s most recent novel, The Making of Incarnation. A crucial factor was that Ballard and Kubrick offered stories of war in Southeast Asia during the mid-to-late ’80s, a boom time for the modern mythology of that region. Kunzru has written about Thailand and touched on the Second World War and the Vietnam conflict. Garland’s debut The Beach begins with an uncredited quotation from Full Metal Jacket—he also recalls a school-days trip to see Platoon—and owes a narrative debt to Empire of the Sun.

The closest that Blue Ruin comes to reflecting the richness of Kunzru’s formative influences is a few passages about Jay floating around Asia, that fleeting reference to intersubjective connection, and a description of an art project in which Jay erases his digital footprint. During a recent appearance on New Moves, a podcast dedicated to politics and technology, Kunzru noted the greater relevance of “other things that I have done.” The belief that the self is “a multiplicity”––fortified by cyberculture and Nick Land’s work—served as the theme of The Impressionist. Its immediate successor, Transmission (2004), about a computer virus, drew directly on his Wired days. His engagement with electronic music underpinned the sly, original, and ingeniously developed White Tears, which mutates from a satire of cultural appropriation to a ghost story about racial violence. (It has substantial overlap with Percival Everett’s recent—less mordant––The Trees.) The preoccupation with subcultures, superstition, and utopian possibilities found expression in Kunzru’s richest novel to date, the stunning Gods Without Men, which explores the tendency to seek pattern in both chaos and emptiness. In nine narratives taking place between 1778 and 2009, all converging on the Mojave desert, the novel depicts UFO sightings, finance capitalism, substance abuse, the tabloid press, religious faith. The central story concerns a relationship between a Hindu man and a Jewish woman whose differences are underscored first when they have a son and then, after he is kidnapped, by a potentially extraterrestrial force. (This couple, Jaz and Lisa, are clear antecedents of Jay and Alice in Blue Ruin.) 

When Gods Without Men appeared, it risked seeming old hat. The structure associated with the systems novel, perhaps above all with Gravity’s Rainbow—though Kunzru’s touchstone may have been another canonical instance, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home—was by that point fully domesticated, having provided the basis for perhaps the two most visible literary novels of the early twenty-first century, both to some degree family sagas, White Teeth and The Corrections. There were also inevitable comparisons to Cloud Atlas, no doubt abetted by David Mitchell’s praise for Kunzru’s book, though the closer precedent was Mitchell’s first novel, Ghostwritten, which also compiles a story in nine strands. (They share an interest in Le Guin and also Kieślowski, whose films offer a dreamier art-house counterpart of the systems perspective.) Yet looking back, Gods Without Men alsoanticipatedthe portrayal of mystically endowed spaces in McCarthy’s Satin Island, Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (which Alex Garland adapted), Everett’s Telephone, and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo.

IF GODS WITHOUT MEN IS THE WORK that best illustrates Kunzru’s strength as thinker and storyteller, the novel that offers the clearest contrast to the procedures of Blue Ruin is its immediate predecessor, Red Pill. Of his time at Warwick, Kunzru has said, “I was supposed to be reading German Romanticism and thinking about the noumenon”—the thing in itself. Then, after he discovered the work of Land and Plant, all that “went out the window.” This is more or less what occurs to Kunzru’s nameless narrator, a half-Indian, half-English liberal humanist who arrives in Berlin for a residency at the Deuter Center for Social and Cultural Research, founded––like Warwick, in fact––by local industrial interests. He intends to research German poetry and the lyric self. He reads about Kleist’s struggle to find the truth beneath the surface of things, “the famous Ding an sich, the thing in itself.” It wasn’t quite true that for the twenty-four-year-old Kunzru the noumenon went out the window. What happened was that his studies at Warwick introduced him to a different way of approaching or appropriating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought—with different conclusions about the true nature of what lies beyond sensory stimuli, not a transcendental aesthetic but a hellscape. In the retelling offered by Red Pill, the narrator becomes obsessed with a violent network-TV cop show, Blue Lives, sort of The Shield meets True Detective, in which he identifies allusions to the Counter-Enlightenment conspiracist and protofascist Comte de Maistre––one of Isaiah Berlin’s “six enemies of human liberty––and a “subtext” of dog-eat-dog millenarianism, a reading corroborated when he falls in with the showrunner. (He has the same surname, Bridgeman, as Miles in My Revolutions.) 

Red Pill explores what Kunzru considers the central lesson of the cyber age––that divergent images of society and the self might have a shared lineage and symbolic coordinates. At the time, he felt convinced that the ideas he was deriving from Deleuzian cyberculture and rave culture—about deterritorialization and “lines of flight,” horizontal networking and cross-border universalism—were destined to “lead leftwards.” This was the basis, at least in part, of the thinking developed by another Warwick postgraduate, a founding member of the CCRU and self-described “student of electronic culture,” Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism (2009) and the blogs and essays posthumously collected as k-punk (2018). It turned out that the liberationist potential recognized or foreseen by Kunzru and Fisher and Sadie Plant was not the only possibility, leftward the only direction. For a start, there was an industry, growing every second, devoted to selling hardware and software. While Kunzru was working at Wired UK, he was also part of the collective running Mute magazine, which was far more skeptical about the internet’s power to escape co-optation and exploitation. But even before that, Kunzru had evidence that this would be the case. He has recalled trying to talk to Nick Land about the potential of these converging phenomena and found that he was “clearly not . . . invested in the same way.” Land’s later work was concerned with the futility of social progress, the obsoleteness of democracy, and the superiority of the white race. (His writing was collected as Fanged Noumena.) Red Pill allegorizes Kunzru’s own naivete, moving his disillusionment from the mid-’90s to the mid-2010s, compressing years into the term of a writer’s residency.

In Blue Ruin, the enmeshed contraries of Kunzru’s previous work have been replaced by stark polarities. Even if Jay’s account of the art scene was accurate, and a declinist narrative inescapable, the scenario is not sufficiently complex to engage Kunzru’s rare analytic gifts, his ability to temper his taste for polemic with a feeling for paradox. Jay’s memories—and the scene he is recalling—do not yield the unexpected affiliations at which Kunzru has excelled. He clearly sees, or experienced, the art scene as a simpler tale than tech culture or the appropriation of Romantic thought. “In the early ’90s,” Kunzru wrote in 2012, Damien Hirst “seemed like a breath of fresh air, a rave-era blast against the terrible, starchy politeness that characterised the British art scene.” But he ended up as “house artist to the 1%,” and running a sort of sweatshop. The urge to create––a pure, free act––was sullied by rapacity and excess. Jay describes a party in Hackney Wick “before gentrification crept out that far,” where “a feral ecosystem was thriving just beyond the grasp of the developers who were beginning to line the canals with glass boxes and plastic-clad towers.” The “lock-in”––an after-hours session––where he and Rob meet Alice occurs “before” the scene-y Shoreditch pub was “converted into flats.” Jay recalls taking the 55 into central London and looking out for “spiky” and “humble” sculptures placed on the roofs of bus shelters along the route. The experience was complete without knowing “the name of the maker.” Only “later” was anonymity viewed as “a kind of death.”

The old days aren’t perfect. The Hackney factory was divided into “firetrap studios,” and the pub lock-in would have been “hard on the neighbors.” (And presumably it was someone’s job to clean or maintain the bus shelters.) But in revealing what followed, there is no sense of a genealogy, catalyst, or even basic causal process. “I loved painting,” Jay recalls, “but I began to feel that there was also something rotten about it, something shallow and corrupt.” That isn’t quite right. The “it” isn’t painting itself but the scene and, more precisely, the market. Something rotten is done to painting. Jay never hints at an inherent flaw, that, say, the machismo of painting could germinate a territorial instinct in the collector, that love of art cannot help but curdle into desire for ownership, that the exercise of imposing their vision on reality and other people might be compatible with the aggressive or acquisitive. Kunzru’s previous novels depicted all manner of controlling activities,by lobbyists, hackers, planters, market mystics, prime-time propagandists. If there was a kick-yourself moment, a moment where what-might-have-been was lost or botched, it came at least as long ago as the Enlightenment. The late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century didn’t invent the human capacity for corruption and depravity, self-adulation, self-destruction—only revealed it in a thousand brand-new ways.

Leo Robson is a freelance writer. His first novel, The Boys, will be published in the UK next spring.

BEFORE READING GABRIEL SMITH’S DEBUT NOVEL BRAT, I did the normal thing and googled him. I thought I remembered seeing his name on my Twitter feed: in February, Smith had posted a screenshot of a hoax email from Charli XCX, in which she divulged that she was “a HUGE fan” of his writing and asked permission to use the title of his book for her new album (which is indeed called Brat). Charli XCX was prompted to engage, if only to disavow the email. The Guardian found this newsworthy; Smith told the reporter that the post was meant to be “hilariously egotistical” and said he enjoys “making fun of how insanely, deludedly self-important novelists often act.” With regard to this and various other pranks he’s pulled: “I get off on provoking people and if you grew up posting online then obviously you’ve heard it all before.” 

It can be hard to discern an insanely, deludedly self-important novelist from someone lampooning one, but yes, I’ve heard it before; it’s a little funny and totally harmless. I wasn’t provoked, either, by a note he posted about how critics are “small children, desperate to be placated, entranced, or even loved by art, in place of their parents,” with an exhortation that critics “Come to Daddy”; “BRAT may soothe you.” It’s defensive—if you don’t like the book, you’re the brat—but it’s not really offensive. Publishing a book is scawy. As the writer Greta Rainbow recently observed of debut author Honor Levy, whose book, like Smith’s, was originally acquired by indie press New York Tyrant: “The most earnest thing you can do is get a book deal. The most irony-pilled, reactionary cope is to shitpost.”

I’ve broken the fourth wall and indulged in this backstory in order to confess that I approached Smith’s book feeling less than optimistic. While shitposting might work to get attention for your book, it doesn’t really work as a book, and due to my experience as a person who reads both books and the internet, I braced myself for the likelihood of this convergence. Separate the art from the artist, I muttered as I squinted at the title page. For the first sixty to eighty-ish pages, I got more or less what I anticipated: flat prose, mildly provocative characters, a sort of boring benzo realism descended from alt lit 1.0. I’m not particularly thirsty for earnest or florid “literary fiction,” I just get a little dehydrated when I sense that an author is hedging against being evaluated according to conventions like character complexity or plot development; for instance, when the most the narrator divulges about his feelings is that he has “bad feelings,” and the description is restricted to, e.g., “I went out onto the balcony for a while. The sun was setting gray.” 

But after the first quarter to a third, Brat twists around and gets weirdly good, even great. The text is increasingly ruptured by “found” texts—virtuosic experiments that complicate the plot—and the story eventually amounts to a surreal, tender portrayal of family dynamics in the wake of grief. In retrospect, the flat first part comes to feel justified as a formal choice. I’m tempted to say that Smith tricked himself into writing a good book, but if I’m going to assume authorial intent, as an adult critic should do, he tricked me into reading a good book. Touché, Brat. 

We meet the narrator, a young British man named Gabriel, in a doctor’s office, possibly concussed, and afflicted by what looks like a touch of eczema. His father has just died, his girlfriend has left him and their London flat, and he’s numb and lashing out—most recently he’s picked a fight with his teenage nephew. Later, after the funeral, he attacks a family friend for complimenting the deceased. “Listen, you stupid purple bitch,” he says to her, “shut the fuck up about my dad.” The next day, his brother assesses Gabriel’s face: “She made you look like a little bitch.” His brother’s wife agrees: “You are a little bitch.” Later, they both tell him, separately: “You’re retarded.” Of their mother, who has dementia and lives in a care home, Gabriel suggests to his brother: “Maybe we should just kill mum.” In these first sections, which rely a lot on dialogue, it’s hard to discern whether the characters are assholes or whether they’re lampooning assholes. 

Gabriel moves into his parents’ now-empty house under the pretense of clearing it out for sale. His brother and his wife need the money, but Gabriel’s listlessness and sentimental attachment to the home prevent him from completing the promised task. He also happens to be a writer struggling to make good on a £55,000 advance. Instead of tidying or writing, he drinks, smokes, self-medicates, and searches the house for—what? For the antidote to grief, for the essence of who his parents were, for his own origin story. Meanwhile, the house is rotting and coming apart. The walls are “peeling away from themselves,” the roof shingles are falling off, and mold is spreading everywhere.

Also, Gabriel’s skin is coming off his body in sheets. What the doctor on page one identified as a patch of eczema turns out to be a malady of a different order. When Gabriel grasps at the flaking skin on his chest it comes away painlessly in a “thick and translucent white flap.” He describes the process with bemused detachment. At the outset, this reads like a heavy-handed metaphor, but as Gabriel’s molting becomes more extreme, the whole novel sloughs realism like skin, edging body horror. When he pulls the skin from his hand, it comes away “like a glove of myself”; when he tries to masturbate, his whole penis dermis loosens and sheds. Perhaps uncertain what’s beneath all the layers, he burrows his thumb deep into his thigh, finding only more of himself. The wound festers. (See: mourning versus melancholia.) 

Traipsing around his childhood home with a sense of mild foreboding, he discovers enigmatic artifacts: a manuscript on his mother’s desk, a screenplay on his father’s desk, a VHS tape in the attic. The manuscripts—in addition to two stories published by his ex-girlfriend and pages of a book his grandmother is writing—are excerpted and embedded in the book, allowing Brat to spill far beyond the confines of the voice of the autofictional writer-dude with which it begins, subverting our (my) expectations. 

The discovered texts destabilize Gabriel’s assumptions about his life—and reality. His mother’s manuscript appears to be an autofictional account of an alternate version of her life, but each time he returns to read more of it, the story changes. In his dad’s page-turner of an unfinished television script, a group of university students discover a VHS tape of a 1970s sitcom called The Best Years of Our Lives, which also changes every time they watch it. The teens speculate that this has to do with “relativity,” that the sitcom may be “some kind of link to other universes.” The VHS tape from the attic—which, yes, changes each time Gabriel watches it—has footage of his young mother with a man who is not his father, and of her holding two children he doesn’t recognize. 

Back in what used to be stable reality, Gabriel meets a teenage brother-sister pair outside a gas station who seem to have emerged from one of the branching stories in his mother’s book—or maybe they’re the other kids in the footage, or in the script? Did his mother have another family? Are his parents his parents? Is anything he remembers real? Does it matter? His charming grandmother, a successful novelist, delivers evasive, cryptic lines about parallel universes and the fallibility of memory, yet she insists she doesn’t have “the answers.” “I know it’s all so upsetting,” she tells Gabriel. “But I do have Pink Panthers, or Custard Creams.” 

With his father gone and his mother’s memories becoming blank pages, Gabriel has lost his life’s two central witnesses. Yet he constantly remarks that he feels like he’s being watched, as if he both fears and desires to be haunted—or for his dad’s death to have been a cruel prank. Eventually a costumed watcher, identity never revealed, does emerge from the garden shed: “The man was dressed in a horrible mud-covered brown costume. The costume had its own fur. The fur was full of dried mud and attached plant matter, leaves, twigs, matted. And on his head he had a mask of a deer face. A woman deer, without antlers. Covering his whole head.” The literalism of the book’s uncanny events is what makes them so successful. Although it’s true that he’s drunk or high for the majority of the book, Gabriel doesn’t come across as unreliable. He’s not lying or hallucinating: these things are just happening. Maybe Gabriel’s grief is powerful enough to warp the whole world. 

This isn’t to say that everyone sees what he sees—as his brother puts it, Gabriel is “grieving very weirdly.” When the brother arrives at the house to demand Gabriel get his shit together, Gabriel convinces him to read their mother’s morphing manuscript . . . but now it’s just hundreds of title pages. The VHS tape glitches. Brother does not find these tricks amusing: “You need to see a fucking head doctor.” As they banter, it becomes obvious that the bitchy talk from the early section is part of their family lexicon, in which “Hey, fuck your mother,” or “Your dad’s a finook” are terms of endearment. Cruelty gives way to intimacy, or shows how these are twinned, and the siblings bond in their shared grief. Of the family overall: generically disaffected characters now seem lovable in their disaffections. Just as the characters reveal their provocations to be endearments, so does the book. It becomes earnest, even sentimental, in the best way: it expresses something conventional yet true. 

The many overlaps between the plot and the plots-in-plot have sinister edges, but while Gabriel’s galaxy brain expands and expands, he never becomes a red-yarn-style conspiracist. He’s too depressed to act like a detective; on some level he knows that there probably isn’t any buried family secret to uncover (much less the existence of a parallel universe). Finding mysteries—or inventing them—has been a way of keeping his father’s story alive. But death remains the irreducible, unsolvable mystery. There’s nothing to find out; that’s what’s so horrible about it. Part of the struggle in its aftermath is to stop hunting for answers and relinquish the need to remember everything. “People want their memory to be the real one,” his grandmother says, but “history is the opposite of memory.” The lack of payoff means that some of Smith’s efforts at manufacturing suspense molder in vibey territory, but Gabriel’s personal evolution is entirely rewarding. 

The book’s title comes from a T-shirt that Gabriel’s ex left behind, perhaps on purpose. At the end, the ex calls and tells him to grow up, and he kind of does. He gives most of his advance to his brother’s family and begins writing his book—incidentally, the very book the reader has just finished. In a satisfying move, it ends by repeating its first line; the story-within-a-story structure is complete. Of course this prompted me to circle right back to the start of the book. Had I arrived prejudicial or had the text really been repellant? Well, I did find the opening prose as juvenile as I had the first time, yet this time I read it with admiration and anticipation. Smith has pulled off a peculiar bildungsomething, in which the book grows up with the character.

Elvia Wilk is the author of the novel Oval (2019) and the essay collection Death by Landscape (2022; both Soft Skull Press).