Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm finished with Sayers' Whose Body. Lord Whimsey was great, and it had enough intensity at times to grab my interest. I feel like the confrontation was a missed opportunity, given the convergence of themes which was implicit in the scene. A good read nevertheless.
Picking up Churchill's Savrola, because it has occurred to me that I've read more Hitler and Stalin than Churchill.
On Monday evening I finished The Matriarch. Not the sort of thing I'd usually read, and the narrative was a bit digressive and all over the place, but I found it engaging enough to read it to the end. Interesting, 7/10. Curiously, my edition states it was first published in the fifties, but it's primarily set in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Given that it's a family drama following several generations of European Jews, I interpreted it in a wistful light, with the author looking back from a post-WWII perspective on a more optimistic era in which Jewish integration among European Gentiles seemed a live possibility. But consulting the author's Wikipedia page, it seems it was actually published in the mid-twenties, and that made me sad: it was written by a woman who had no idea how bad things were going to get for Jews.
The same day, my copy of INCEL by Arx-Han arrived in the post. It was unusually warm and sunny on Monday, so after work I spent a few hours sitting in the park reading. By Wednesday evening I'd finished the book, and I have thoughts.
I first encountered Arx-Han when I stumbled across his Substack, specifically an article called "The problem with modern fiction is that most writers lack artistic courage". In the article, he argued that the current generation of Anglophone novelists are cowardly, systematically refusing to articulate uncomfortable truths that might land them in hot water on social media. Specifically, he took Tony Tulathimutte to task for pulling his punches throughout his second book, Rejection. I was under the impression he was setting himself up in opposition to Tulathimutte: "unlike Tony, I'm telling it like it is, saying the things the establishment doesn't want to hear, so much so that I had to go the self-publishing route because no traditional publisher can handle the truth!" This unavoidably coloured my expectations of INCEL going into it. Reading the post again, I'm surprised to find that I'd remembered it incorrectly, and he openly cops to being even more of a coward than Tulathimutte.
And he's right. If INCEL was meant to be a more daring and honest take on similar subject matter as that tackled by Tulathimutte, it must be judged a failure.
"The Feminist" was a brave story, presenting an incel character as sympathetic, three-dimensional and capable of articulating his worldview in detail. The most daring thing about it was how viciously and relentlessly it skewered the stock piece of advice inevitably offered to sexually frustrated men by feminist women: "if you can't get laid, it means you don't Respecc Wimmen enough". Sure, Tulathimutte lost his nerve at the end by having his protagonist jump off the slippery slope, but up until that point you'd be hard pressed to find a better example this century of a fiction writer arguing that some sexually frustrated men really do have legitimate grievances and aren't just entitled manchildren. Braver still was Tony writing the story in such a way that it could easily be taken as (semi-)autobiographical, with its unnamed, bookish protagonist who's implied to be a Thai-American (so of course when it came time to republish the story as part of Rejection, Tony lost his nerve and retconned the character into being a white guy named Craig). But in its original incarnation, "The Feminist" was genuinely daring.
(See also Will, one of the four protagonists of Tulathimutte's debut Private Citizens who is Thai-American and a perverted pornsick loser, and probably the least sympathetic of the four. Again, that takes a certain amount of guts.)
Now compare the unnamed protagonist of INCEL. Unlike Arx-Han, he's a white American, and in his internal monologues constantly rants about his superior genetic heritage relative to people of other ethnic backgrounds. Very little attempt is made to make him seem like a real person, and he's more of a one-dimensional caricature. Essentially no effort is made to make the reader sympathise with him: per the laboured, obligatory allusions to Fight Club and American Psycho, we know from the outset we are reading a novel from the perspective of a fundamentally unlikeable character. (Aside from Tulathimutte's oeuvre, the work it most reminded me of was, for some reason, the Maniac remake starring Elijah Wood.) The novel's ostensible premise ("if I can't get laid by my 23rd birthday, I'm going to commit suicide byThe protagonist gets called out on his bullshit by his sister, the sole voice of reason in his life. By treating her as a person and not just a number on a scale from 1-10 who can be manipulated with a flowchart of responses, he finally succeeds in fucking a hot white girl, even if he blows his load too soon. He realises sex isn't all it's cracked up to be and losing his virginity won't magically solve all of his problems. He learns that women aren't all whores, and even attractive women face serious obstacles in their lives. Early on, the protagonist's attempts to approach women consist of him recycling dialogue from (in his opinion) trite romcoms like (500) Days of Summer, but his own character development arc is so pat and conventional that it wouldn't take a lot of tweaking for it to feel entirely at home in a film of that ilk. As Christopher Orr might put it, this novel doesn't even have the conviction of its own malice.
copPoC: locate the biggest black guy I can find, and call him The Gamer Word until he beats me to death") is underdeveloped to the point of feeling like anti-woke clickbait: if Arx-Han had included a countdown at the beginning of each chapter, the device might have had more impact. I can only assume he included this device to lend a sense of narrative momentum to what would otherwise have consisted of a series of largely self-contained vignettes. At no point in the novel did I seriously believe it was going to end with the protagonist's death, and sure enough, the ending is so meek and milquetoast that I felt cheated.I don't know what Arx-Han would consider a brave and daring artistic statement, but I have a hard time imagining it would amount to "incels are a bunch of privileged, entitled white manbabies who can't get laid because of their reactionary politics and because they think of women as sex objects rather than people. The solution to their problems is to stop being racist and Be More Empathetic". No one in the West would get in trouble for claiming as much. The reason Arx-Han self-published INCEL isn't because it was too daring and subversive for a traditional publisher to touch: this is the work of an aspiring provocateur. Even leaving aside its punch-pulling, this compulsively readable and not particularly long book (less than 300 pages in the edition I read) is crying out for an editor. One chapter of cringe comedy wherein the protagonist cold approaches a girl in public and makes a fool of himself is plenty; by my count, there are at least four. One might have thought such a devotee of Chuck Palahniuk would have internalised the value of economy.
I dunno. I expected more. Even when Arx-Han admitted to being less brave than Tulathimutte, I thought maybe he was being self-deprecating, or holding himself to an unreasonably high standard ("I was brave, but not brave enough"). But he was right on the money: he's less brave than Tulathimutte, less willing to step on progressive pieties, and not as funny, and less concise, and his characters aren't as believable. The poor man's Tulathimutte, alas.
Started on the third book in the Neapolitan quartet.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link