Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?

by Ross Barkan

This essay appears in Issue 5 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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INCEL: A Novel 

by

ARX-Han

POSITIVE XP LLC, 336 pp., $14.95 

Mixtape Hyperborea 

by Adem Luz Rienspects

Independently Published, 237 pp., $13.69 

The louche or unabashedly noxious young man has mostly vanished from contemporary American fiction. He is neither author nor subject; there are few, if any, male equivalents of Ottessa Moshfegh or Lexi Freiman, nor of their scatological, misanthropic protagonists. (Only Teddy Wayne, of the leading male novelists under 50, seems interested in such disreputable males.) One can argue this is progress or something else entirely, but it is a trend that is hard to deny. Male lust and male rage is for the internet now. On the physical terrain, in the realm of literature, it is mostly excised.

There are numerous polls and studies that tell us men are no longer reading, men are falling behind in school, and men, in this transmogrifying economy, are struggling to adapt. A different sort of literary culture—one not dominated by the affluent and the college-educated—would be interested in these stories. What does male alienation look like? What about consciousness at its most fraught, its most poisoned? Or what about, simply, existence that is not so Manichean, not merely cleaved between white knights and deplorables? 

It might be left to outsiders to tell these tales. Luckily, two have emerged, both through the route of self-publishing. It is a testament to the changing times that more novelists are publishing on their own and not waiting on sclerotic gatekeepers. When fresh, invigorating works emerge this way, it’s also an indictment of the publishing houses that either rejected them or never would have considered them in the first place. Incel, by ARX-Han, and Mixtape Hyperborea, by Adem Luz Rienspects, were each published last year by pseudonymous authors. Each, in one form or another, confronts the intrigues and perils of manhood. Both are set in unnamed locales and told in the first-person, their narrators nameless or virtually nameless (INCEL’s is called Anon). Both have distinct temporal settings—2007 for Mixtape Hyperborea, 2012 for INCEL—and both are unexpectedly wistful. 

ARX-Han, in particular, is a formidable talent, as if Bret Easton Ellis decided to make a deep study of Reddit and the byzantine off-roads of evolutionary psychology. INCEL is, as its title suggests, the story of an incel. It is remarkably ambitious, plenty unsettling, and mordantly funny. Anon, the incel in question, narrates his lonely, furious quest to have sex before his 23rd birthday. He is a graduate student in a city that seems like some blend of New York and Chicago; he has one lone friend, a Korean American named Jason, and Jason’s race is relevant because Anon is a white supremacist. This is quite literal—he believes pale-skinned people of Western European descent like himself are superior to everyone else—and he offers, throughout the novel, crude taxonomies of every other race he comes across in his diverse city. He berates his sister for liking K-pop but stays loyal to Jason, in part because his friend is everything he is not: tall, macho, gifted in martial arts, and extraordinarily sexually active. Unlike Jason, he moons for the lone girl he ever kissed, an ex-girlfriend he dated for several fitful months.

Anon’s mind is warped by the internet. He is verbose and jargon-addled, inexorably steeped in his graduate studies. Here is how he describes another failed pickup attempt in a nightclub: “Something in my words triggers the programmatic death of the interaction, and a seemingly promising opportunity disintegrates into ashes. Roughly two minutes into our exchange she’s converged on the same placid, zoned-out expression as all the other girls.” The woman has, he adds, “a face that feeds into the front-facing sockets of my binocular skull, activating a tiny module of tissue located in my cerebral cortex.” 

Language like this, peppered throughout 300-plus pages, might seem exhausting but it rarely is. You learn, quickly, to inhabit Anon’s tortured consciousness; he is vile, but he is also deeply sad, even suicidal. His failures, at least, can be funny, as well as his attempts to ape banal human interaction. He tells dates he voted for Obama and likes Coldplay. Even his overt racism comes off as ludicrous—in Reddit forums, he is ridiculed as much as he is validated, and one of the more hilarious bits in the novel is when Anon, to his horror, comes across a Redditor who mocks his Aryan worship by concocting a scenario in which Anon is transported back to England at the start of World War I and is forced to realize, as he’s dying on a battlefield, that his modern conception of whiteness is irrelevant as Germans and British slaughter each other. “Immediately shipped to the front after bare minimum basic training,” the Redditor writes, “because even though he’s in homogenous society he’s totally expendable (elite capitalist class sent him there to die for monies lolololol).”

Most Americans who espouse racist views are not organized into militias or any genuine movements. They are, like Anon, trawling through the abyss of the internet, posting their way to hell; they are, despite furious claims to the contrary, effectively impotent. In Anon’s case, the impotence is literal, as his inability to escape virginhood is bound up in his debilitating anxiety, his struggle to get it up. (“I have to go return some videotapes,” he tells one failed conquest, echoing Patrick Bateman.) Most of the time, he’s hovering around shopping malls and approaching women he’s perpetually rating on a 10-scale, cataloging each snub in a notebook. He models his approach on a “frame-by-frame analysis” of 500 Days of Summer. If he’s home, he’s masturbating. His graduate studies aren’t going much better: His vision of a Skinner box applied to female human sexuality (to answer the question why do women fuck?) horrifies a classmate he hoped would be sympathetic. It is, in the classmate’s view, “the most autistic fucking thing” he’s ever heard.  

“Dude, I’m not autistic,” is Anon’s best rejoinder. 

ARX-Han keeps a focus on Anon’s few interpersonal relationships. He stays close to his sister until she tires of his casual misogyny and racism. His bond with Jason, though, doesn’t break. When not high or having sex, Jason is struggling with his own rage and sorrow, with his father murdered long ago, his mother terminally ill. Following her last wishes, he travels to South Korea to scatter her ashes in the sea. For Anon, death is omnipresent as he contemplates how he might take his own life and, in his more bombastic moments, whether he will reach his Nordic Valhalla. But his bluster never lasts long. He is fundamentally broken, his only hope of communion, at novel’s end, a sharing of pain with a woman next door he long assumed was adulterous. In reality, the woman’s partner, a jovial man who once helped Anon move in, has died of cancer. 

***

The world of Mixtape Hyperborea is not so dire, in part because its protagonist bears fewer psychological wounds and no internet-inflected racism. It’s senior year at Golden Sierra, a somewhat shabby prep school that lies in the mountains and is within bus-trip distance of Washington D.C. The unnamed narrator relishes his drives to school and his mixtape, which serves as a soundtrack for the novel. The playlist is eclectic, ranging from the tragic folk balladeer Jackson C. Frank to Dr. Dre and Nirvana. Everywhere is the sense of an ending—children who have grown up together are heading off to college, trade school, or other nebulous, non-romantic stations of adulthood.

The narrator and his friends, Josh and Micky, drift through shopping malls, try to go to parties, smoke copious amounts of weed, and mythologize their sexual exploits. Contemporary novels don’t seem to do adolescence well; there’s a certain shyness writers have about how teenagers, particularly boys, actually speak to each other. For anyone who came of age in the 2000s, Mixtape Hyperborea will ring especially true. The boys trade slurs as a form of endearment, and grow closer the more they mock-insult each other. The narrator and Josh, who is Hispanic, often engage in a hilarious and ruthless form of the Dozens, a kind of freestyle roast-off, and make obviously fantastic claims about their sexual prowess. Rienspects writes in a staccato rhythm, his single-sentence paragraphs deposited koan-like, his dialogue arriving in crisp bursts.

“How’s it goin’ man?” Micky asks.

“It’s great,” the narrator answers. “I felt a bit possessive of Josh a second ago when I saw you making him laugh, but I’m reminding myself that I really like both of you and want you to become close friends.”

“Psycho,” says Josh. “He’s always saying weird shit like that.” 

“It’s  true,” the narrator replies.

“Also don’t say possessive, you make it sound like we’re gay lovers.”

“I appreciate the honesty,” Micky says. 

Mixtape Hyperborea roves cinematically across Golden Sierra, sharing snatches of teacher dialogue and the straining of their love lives. Toddlers at the K-12 school make appearances too, warily surveyed by the overworked teachers on the playground. The narrator, meanwhile, is reverent of nature and God, and urinates in his backyard each morning while consuming water as a purification ritual. He also enjoys lifting and toying around, alone, with a sword. 

Deceptively poignant scenes are built around the messiness of high school friendship. For the senior trip, the class goes on a ferry ride to an island where they snorkel. Later, they take a bus to D.C. At a museum, the narrator takes stock of his class, one student who’s “borderline psycho,” another who “can’t bring herself to kill bugs,” and Micky who is a “twig with no muscle.” But this triggers only tenderness: “I realize I like everyone just the way they are.” 

At the hotel, where one student brought boxing gloves and headgear, the boys start their own temporary fight club. For the boys, the play-violence—no one is seriously injured—not only bonds them but allows them to verge on a kind of spiritual transcendence. “Each successive strike seems to release a lifetime of tension and repression of which I was prior unaware. Each strike against myself purifies and molds. No one really wins, we just call it after a while.”

Anon, in Incel, spars as well, but he is too tortured, too internet-drunk, to find the same sort of transcendence. Reading these novels together, one gets a sense Anon could have been Mixtape Hyperborea’s protagonist if he had had more friends and a girlfriend. He could have been sensitive to time’s passage, to the slow slippage of youth and the joys and fragilities of quotidian existence. It’s a credit to ARX-Han that he can, through Incel, plumb these depths; few writers summon such artistic courage. He writes of a world we want to look away from but can’t. 

If Incel, set in 2012, represents a period of the recent past not much different than today, a period nearly as atomized and dominated by tech platforms, Mixtape Hyperborea is a callback to the last decade before technology swallowed us whole. For aging millennials, those now trundling through their thirties and forties, it may be a reminder of all they’ve lost. The lives of the teens are raw and unmediated, all meaningful interaction reserved for the schoolyards, parked cars, and movie theaters. For those who didn’t come of age then, those too young to have experienced an adolescence where social media was ancillary, at best, to everyday life, Rienspects offers a particular gut-punch. 

On the last day of school, the narrator laughs with his friends, jokes with teachers, and delights in his new freedom—until he understands what he’s actually losing. “My last genuine school day, rife with boredom, idiosyncrasy, and mundane beauty has already passed,” he says. “It perished without warning.”