Coming and Age
On Alex Muka’s ‘Hell or Hangover’
Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover marks the boisterous, exuberant return of the male gaze to those literary precincts from which it has been excluded for some time now.
Lou Kennedy, a 25-year-old half-Cuban, half-Irish, all-Jersey Hobokenite, is a trad cad and debauchee of epic proportions undergoing a crisis of faith. Despite the prodigious amount of booze and innumerable lines of coke he consumes in the week we spend with him, which he, with an engaging combination of guilt and glee, informs us, has been his M.O. since college, a sense of emptiness is fast encroaching. The highs are coming harder and the hangovers growing worse. Getting wasted has started to feel like wasted time. Presenting himself to himself and his friends as “Professor Lou,” doctor of debauchery, he has developed an entire system of ethics based on keeping the party going and avoiding commitment. Never let a woman you are dating post your pic on her Instagram. Never be the first to text. Avoid brunch at all costs. Always be sniffing. Yet his rigid code of rogues’ honor, intended to ensure his free-roaming pleasure, has become a source of constriction.
We first meet Lou as he and his pals, already slightly inebriated from their pre-game libations, board the PATH train into Manhattan for an evening of more drinking, drugging, rooftop bar and bottle-service clubbing in what promises to be the “Great Bridge and Tunnel” novel. But the party-hardy paradigm is upended when Lou crosses paths with Marissa, a fetching beauty from Barcelona full of flirtatious sarcasm and enough game to coyly counter his best moves. Enthralled and fascinated by the challenge, he promptly ditches his friends to follow her into the night — a night that encompasses, in addition to the vodka, tequila, and Johnnie Walker Blue shots he has already imbibed, four “Irish Car Bombs”1 (Lou’s suggestion), multiple rounds of gin and tonics (Marissa’s intervention), several trips to the bathroom on Lou’s part to snort enough coke to countermand his blood-alcohol ratio, and an impromptu lesson in guaguancó as Marissa drags Lou onto the dance floor. The latter, a form of Cuban rumba, a polyrhythmic pantomime of sexual courtship in which dancers alternately grasp for and evade each other’s gyrating bodies, stirs Lou’s passion, shaking the rigid rules Professor Lou has erected: “Dance apart, creep into one another, barely touch, move away. Each turn we take gets closer, quicker, the distance and time between touches becoming smaller and smaller.”
Alas, poor Lou — or “pobrecita” as Marissa calls him! His last bathroom binge fails to stem the alcoholic onslaught. “[T]he black sways up and down like the ocean at night.” He blacks out. The next morning, he awakens in bed with a woman, but it is not Marissa. It is his ex-girlfriend Kristen, who had been sexting him all night. And, of course, he does not have Marissa’s phone number or other particulars, in part because he was pretending to have thrown away his cell phone in courtly compliance with her disdain for these playthings del diablo.
Game on! We are now in Hyper Hornby Space, the male POV meta-romcom incorporating and exponentiating its own formulae as part of the narrative. Boy meets1 girl, boy loses1 girl, re-meets2 girl, re-loses2 girl, has existential crisis, doubts existence of girl, doubts boy’s own existence, doubts existence itself, re-meets3 girl, ad trope-finitum . . . . Over the course of the following week, recounted in short, time-coded segments, we witness Lou’s desperate search for Marissa, the magical creature he believes will save him from himself, in mortal kombat with his own bad habits and party animal ontology. He gets smashed with his friends. Totters into a police station to file a missing person report. Scours the internet. Tweets. Visits a Santería priestess. Solicits a mistakenly presumed Cuban mobster’s connections for the quest. Enlists his company’s nerdiest computer geek to help debug his blacked-out missteps. Endures compounding hangovers. Loses his nepo job. Commandeers and crashes an e-scooter into the Flatiron Building. Gets busted for DUI emerging Jerseyside from the Holland Tunnel.
It all has the speed and appeal of standup, complete with callbacks, shtick, a bit of slapstick, and the invocation of male and female stereotypes mixing to hilarious effect. Pete Davidson’s go-with-the-flow hedonism, Larry David’s curbside connivance, Gaffigan’s gluttony, a touch of Dice Clay and SNL’s Marcello Hernandez’s “Cuban Mom” monologue. Everything exaggerated to mythological proportions as comedy demands, ever since the pre-Socratic Greeks hoisted monumental dildos through the streets of Athens in the Festival of Dionysus.2 But with the comic exaggerations come what can only be called clichés. We all know the routines. Men want to watch sports, drink beer, eat nachos, and get laid. Women want to have relationships, go shopping, and eat brunch. “I love women, but I’m finding we’re not compatible,” says Bill Burr. “Two women, that’s what they want . . . . Really, ‘cause be honest now, if you can’t satisfy that one woman, why do you wanna piss off another one?” says Wanda Sykes. “Women are from Venus, men are from Mars” as the pre-woke legacy culture proclaimed.
That these shibboleths that haunt the collective unconscious can show their face in literary discourse again is exhilarating. Not because they are true, but because their powerful grip on the popular imagination adds force to our narratives of what men and women must negotiate in their quest for intimacy and connection. But after a quarter-century of gender fluidity and deconstructed sex roles, is another round of the battle of the sexes, molded by rigid behavioral caricatures, really what we are seeking? That or an off-ramp from the struggle so fervently fantasized by Lou and a legion of outer-borough romantics of finding “The One” who will relieve us of our compulsion to reenact our conditioning, bewitching us into our true and better selves?
The congenital flaw in the male gaze, at least as expressed in the autofictional first person (of which, full disclosure, this reviewer is also a practitioner), is solipsism. The primary relationship is between the author and his own experience, copping an attitude of self-mockery, bemusement, questioning, aggrandizement — shock and awe at his own excesses or exultation in their peaks. The other characters exist only on the edges of this bubble of self — as objects of desire, obstacles, stereotypes to take note of or a cheering squad for the protagonist’s personal quest. Muka’s authorial voice is strong and definitive as he explores the intricacies of Lou’s subjectivity in all its contradictions, quirks, and obsessions, but the other characters he gives us remain a commedia dell’arte of romcom tropes — the friend-zoned nice guy, the wild-and-crazy guy, the smart-ass cool girl, the Snapchatting ex. Even Marissa, more fully fleshed out than the others through her exchanges with Lou and the random autobiographical details she drops, exists mainly as his idealization: a dazzling surface, the siren luring him to sobriety and adulthood. We never quite learn her motivation or why she is attracted to him.
If the female gaze, as we have come to know it, consists largely in seeing the world as a web of relationships with the self defined through its connection to others — in their capacity for fulfillment or abasement — the male gaze revels in its freedom from otherness, vanquishing foes, triumphing over adversity and getting it, however “it” may be defined. How then to overcome this dichotomy? To create narratives that can plumb the depths of male subjectivity while placing it in a world of other subjects whose motivations and interiority complete the story? To move beyond authorial voice to authorial vision?
Perhaps the answer lies in guaguancó, the controlling metaphor of Muka’s novel, the dance that Lou has learned but not quite mastered by its end. In guaguancó, the male rumbero and female rumbera engage in a pelvic discourse, each ensconced in their own embodied subjectivity, acting out their gendered mission. The rumbero thrusts his hips attempting to reach the rumbera’s sweet spot, while the rumbera parries and eludes him “like Neo dodging a bullet”3 or a matador sidestepping the bull’s horn. Both have agency, the rumbero chasing his pleasure and the rumbera seeking to build a passion that will outlast its immediate gratification. “You see?” says Marissa. “That’s Guaguancó. Getting closer and closer . . . . Building it up. Delaying pleasure.” Two separate perspectives, each necessary for the other to exist.
We await Professor Lou’s next opus wherein, having become a guaguancó guru, he can speak from both sides of the dance.
David Polonoff is a satirist and novelist living in New York City. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, East Village Eye, and on his Substack, Tropelessness. His novel WannaBeat, detailing a misspent youth in San Francisco’s literary North Beach neighborhood, is available from Trouser Press Books and Amazon.
A bilious concoction consisting of Jameson, Baileys, and Guinness.
“In the fourth chapter of [Aristotle's] Poetics . . . . comedy is stated to have grown out of the phallika, the phallic processions and ceremonies . . . . A number of additional sources help towards a mental reconstruction of the image and form of the phallika . . . . The earliest depicts . . . a group of performers . . . upholding an oversized effigy of a phallus; the effigy rises sloping upwards, propped on a horizontal crossbar which the men carry on their shoulders.” —Ioannis M. Konstantakos, “Aristotle on the Origins of Comedy,” LOGEION - A Journal of Ancient Theatre, Volume 13, 2023
Curiously, Nietzsche never followed up his Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music with The Birth of Comedy Out of the Spirit of the Phallus. Then again, comedy had not yet reached its Wagnerian moment — the advent of the Marx Brothers.
A reference to Keanu Reeves’ character in The Matrix of 1999.
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“ boisterous, exuberant return of the male gaze to those literary precincts from which it has been excluded for some time”
Man my eyes glazed over instantly. TMR back to its beginning.
Can’t even follow the logic of the bit about how these “shibboleths” are important to “add[] force” to narratives. They exist because they’re easy and familiar and make common reference points. And the ways this novel sounds like a throwback make the presence of all the stereotypes make a kind of sense. But the review fails at selling this as important, or significant, in any larger context than “enjoyable, if you are of a certain age, and inscrutable as entertainment if not”