Which Way, Western Author?

by Christian Lorentzen

This essay appears in Issue 1 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.

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Bronze Age Mindset

by Bronze Age Pervert

Independently Published, 198 pp, $16.48

Selfie, Suicide: or Cairey Turnbull's Blue Skiddoo

by Logo Daedalus

Independently Published, 164pp, $14.99

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The most generous and useful way to read Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert, as someone suggested to me, is as fiction. The narrator is anyway a fictional persona, and though it would be a strain to call the book a novel—there is, after all, no narrative, no cast of characters—the book is an act of make-believe. The narrator calls his book an “exhortation” and avers that it is not a work of self-help. Classification in the latter category would be all too pedestrian and unworthy of the drama the author conceives of himself as staging. That drama is an awakening in his followers of an archaic style of masculinity, which he eventually identifies with Achilles and Patroclus. Heroes and bros capable of great victories garnering them eternal fame. What’s not to like?