Great essay; much to think about. At this moment all I can think is: it’s difficult to be original, moral, unique, honest and piercingly vital all at once—but still well worth the attempt. Thank you!
The bit where you revert to shamelessly flogging your own author - the ingenious Lehrer, who responded to accusations of fascism by bravely becoming an actual fascist - had me in stitches. Also - American Psycho a “vastly superior” movie? LOL bro. You should try writing sentences with less words. A lot less. Maybe none.
What are you on about mate? “the ingenious Lehrer, who responded to accusations of fascism by bravely becoming an actual fascist - had me in stitches.” Wasn’t I underlining hollowness of transgression? Is that ‘shameless plugging’ or are you confused by so many words because you have a problem with comprehension?
If you’re going to do a hatchet job on a pal you have to do much better than this Udith. It has to be bullet proof. Otherwise you wind up skewered on your own weird bitterness.
Well, this is very far from a 'hatchet job. At least attempt to unpack the nuances of an intellectual argument before acting like a petulant child because there are 'too many words' to get your head around. If I write that one type of transgression is probably more authentic than another, but then go on to qualify this with the unequivocal statement that transgression is itself a useless and infantile pursuit as an artistic telos...what am I trying to say? Have a little think about it and get back to me. However, I seem to have hit a nerve, perhaps because you're also committed to the aimless performance of transgression for the amusement of a specific audience? In any case, you're embarrassing yourself on a public forum. But I suspect you're used to this sort of thing, so let's keep going, by all means.
I don’t know much Udith, but I do know bitterness, resentment and professional jealousy dressed up as ‘radical honesty’ when I see it - that’s basically my PHD.
You’re better than this Udith. I believe in you bro. Don’t make the same mistakes I made. Just cool it on the word count. Stop trying to sound impressive all the time.
I can say with complete confidence that I'm not motivated by any of those things, that I know my only motivations are (and always will be) purely artistic and intellectual. It doesn't affect me in the slightest if you think otherwise. Take it easy.
I wasn’t sure whether I should like Udith’s article or not until I learned that you had a PhD. Now I am team Lias Saoudi and I hate Udith forever. If Udith (cursed be his name) reveals that he is more credentialled than you, I will reconsider my undying enmity.
Of course this may or may not be the real Lias Saoudi, and he may or may not be mates with Rob Doyle, but if it *is* the real LS, I do think he has more authority to arbitrate on transgression in its authentic or inauthentic forms than anyone else here. You should look him up!
We know each other. I think he's cool and a sound guy - as with Doyle. This shouldn't have any bearing upon criticism if its provenance is genuinely not malicious, and is made seriously. In my opinion, this is the main reason why everything in culture is so flat and uninteresting, why there is such low energy everywhere - the mistaken belief that frictionless professional politeness equates some abstract creative solidarity. And, really speaking, the only one who has any 'authority' to arbitrate upon the authenticity of transgression is God himself lol
Ah OK, you know each other. Certainly makes sense to fine tune the new friction-full style amongst consenting acquaintances before unleashing it in the park.
You say that Doyle is clearly ambivalent towards the labelling ‘Irish Novelist’. Interesting. And I wonder why… Maybe he doesn’t want to be associated by default with some famous Irish novelists who are famously difficult (like Becket or Joyce)? This then perhaps links to your note that one must have sufficient means to actually transcend the self, which they certainly had. And I love that you come onto Martin Amis in the middle. My mind immediately went to Amis when I read that Doyle’s novel includes a character with his own name. In Amis’s case, though, it’s usually a cameo (ha!), as in ‘Money’ and ‘London Fields.’
"Maybe" "a bit" "less" use of " " & ' ' "next time" "?"
Also, the film adaptation of American Psycho was intentionally comic. It specifically intended to satirize nihilism, not embrace it. Come on, the briefest of Google searches could have helped you there. Although I agree that the adaptation is superior to the original.
The novel is very much a social medium in the way that the novelist seeks to communicate a “story” (or experience) of some sort to the reader which is distinct from a painter or composer. The novel is therefore rarely “radical” in any meaningful sense beyond its immediate shock value when its composition is so concerned with itself in relation to others (despite what those “enfant terribles” say as they go, cap in hand, to the publisher). What would be “radical” in this context are the novels incapable of being written by those incapable of writing them. For this reason, it is overly harsh to brand Doyle a Normie for the way in which he transgresses within the confines of the novel as a matter of skill or stylistic taste, when the novel is itself quite Normie, in that it must be able to be read and/or understood by The Reader. And who is this reader? A Normie. So I agree insofar as all transgression within a novel is a Normie transgression, but I disagree that it is because the novelist is inept. Even the mighty Nabokov struggled. It goes on…
You begin with a quote from Nietzsche. You end with a proclamation: "In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside." And in between, you spend 6,000 words calling Rob Doyle a "normie" for not being transgressive enough, while accusing Bret Easton Ellis of superficiality, while praising Adam Lehrer (your own author) for being a real transgressor because he went from "Bernie Bro to MAGA fanatic in the blink of an eye."
Let me translate your essay for those who don't have the patience: "I am the only true outsider here. Everyone else is performing."
That is not criticism. That is solipsism with a vocabulary.
Let me break down why, point by point.
On "Normie Transgression" and your own position
You say transgression is only valid if it costs you something — if it makes you "an intensely loathed pariah, rather than a mildly tolerated prankster." Fine. Then tell me: what has your transgression cost you?
You are the Editor in Chief of your own press. You publish your own writers. You write for a Substack with 25,000 subscribers. You are not a pariah. You are a brand. And there's nothing wrong with that — except that you keep pretending you're outside the system while clearly enjoying its benefits.
You call Doyle's invocation of "avant-garde" a mantra. But your own invocation of "transgression" appears 47 times in this essay. At some point, the word stops meaning anything and becomes a talisman. You're not analyzing. You're chanting.
On American Psycho and The Shining
You claim the film adaptation of American Psycho is "vastly superior" to the novel, and compare it to Kubrick's The Shining. This is not an argument. It's a provocation dressed as insight.
Here's what Kubrick understood that you don't: The Shining is a film about a man going crazy in a haunted hotel. American Psycho (the novel) is a thousand-page endurance test. It is supposed to be boring, repetitive, nauseating. That's the point. The film, as good as it is, makes Bateman charismatic. The novel traps you in his head until you want to scream. That's not a failure. That's the achievement.
Calling the film "superior" because it's more entertaining is like calling a rollercoaster superior to surgery. They do different things. The fact that you can't see that suggests you're not interested in what novels can do. You're interested in signaling your taste.
On Lunar Park and the failure of autofiction
You say the 90s postmodernists failed at "meta-fictional transgression of the self." But Lunar Park isn't trying to transcend the self. It's trying to excavate it. The novel is not a clever game. It's a man being haunted by the ghost of his abusive father, by his own creation (Patrick Bateman), by the impossibility of escaping either.
You dismiss this as "paltry narcissistic impulses." But narcissism is not the same as trauma. And trauma doesn't perform for your approval. It just is.
You also say no one has succeeded at "truly transgressing the authorial self." Maybe that's because it's not an interesting goal. The self isn't a cage to escape. It's the only thing you have. Writing isn't about getting rid of the self. It's about telling the truth about it — even when that truth is boring, repetitive, or uncomfortable.
Ellis told the truth. You just didn't like what he said.
On Rob Doyle (since you clearly wanted to talk about him)
You say Doyle's style is "modest, familiar, earnest — like if Nick Hornby had written about piss fetishists in Berghain." That's a good line. I'll give you that. But then you spend pages calling him a "normie" for not being transgressive enough, while also admitting that Threshold was "admirable" and "relatable" until you changed your mind.
Here's the thing: relatability is not a crime. Neither is earnestness. Not every book has to burn down the house. Some just need to light a match. You're angry at Doyle for not being the writer you want him to be, instead of engaging with the writer he is.
That's not criticism. That's entitlement.
And your central piece of evidence against him — the passage about the pedophile teacher — is taken from a fictional adolescent alter-ego. You know this. You acknowledge it. But you still treat it as if Doyle himself endorses it. That's not "radical honesty." That's bad reading.
On Adam Lehrer and your own conflict of interest
You devote several paragraphs to praising Adam Lehrer — a writer you personally published through your own press — as a model of "genuine" transgression. You call his work "thrilling," "unashamed," "unapologetic." You say he commits fully to the principle of transgression, even if his views are "silly" or "protean."
This is not criticism. This is marketing. You're using a review of someone else's book to sell your own author. And you have the audacity to call Doyle a "normie"?
If you want to be taken seriously as a critic, disclose your conflicts of interest. Or at least pretend to have some self-awareness.
On your behavior in the comments
When someone disagreed with you — Lias Saoudi, Jamie Collinson — you didn't engage with their arguments. You called them "stupid middle-class English cunt," "Nick Hornby," and mocked their reading comprehension. You "had a little dance at their Substack."
This is not "radical honesty." This is insecurity with a vocabulary. You can dish it out, but you can't take it. The moment someone pushes back, you abandon the pretense of intellectual distance and go straight for the ad hominem.
That's not transgression. That's tantrum.
On what you actually got right
I'll give you this: your point about "crypto-transgression" — work that looks subversive but ultimately reinforces the system — is worth discussing. And your diagnosis of the "bourgeois bohemian" landscape (Berlin, drugs, techno, kink) as a theme park for middle-class seekers is sharp.
But you apply it so broadly, so arrogantly, that you end up dismissing everything that isn't your own taste. You're not a critic. You're a curator of your own ego.
Final note 😜
You wrote: "In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside."
Then step outside your own certainties for a moment. Try reading Ellis not as a "normie" or a "genius" but as a person who wrote what he saw. Try reading Doyle the same way. Try reading any writer without first deciding whether they're "transgressive enough" for your approval.
You might not like what you find. But at least you'll be reading — not just judging.
And next time someone criticizes you, maybe don't call them a cunt. It ruins the effect.
Sincerely,
A reader who finished Lunar Park — and still thinks about the ending.
P.S. You quote Nabokov writing on a typewriter balanced on a bidet, fleeing the Nazis, unsure of his English, but driven by an uncompromising style. That's a beautiful image. But you missed the point: Nabokov didn't write to be "transgressive." He wrote because he had to. The same way Ellis wrote. The same way Doyle writes. The same way any real writer writes — not to impress critics like you, but because the alternative is silence.
You should try listening to that silence sometime. You might learn something.
It's embarrassing how AI-inflected this diatribe reads. The “it's not this, it's that” appears about a dozen times, not to mention cringe-inducing milquetoast mic-drops like “solipsism with a vocabulary” that strongly suggest an LLM's idea of a witty dunk.
If you didn't actually write this with AI, your style is certainly a convincing facsimile.
Maybe you should have written the essay instead, Lizzy? You seem so intent on misreading and responding at such a staggering scale that it might be best if you just rewrote the whole thing, if it makes you feel better. But did you happen to read this part: “But transgression — whether “crypto” or Normie — is ultimately an infantile pursuit when pursued as an artistic telos. It is the mark of an impoverished and unrefined aesthetic sense that is, paradoxically, more compliant to the existing order because it is so easily satisfied and contented. The unruly child, after all, is easily and swiftly quieted when his irrational desires are indulged.”
Great essay; much to think about. At this moment all I can think is: it’s difficult to be original, moral, unique, honest and piercingly vital all at once—but still well worth the attempt. Thank you!
The bit where you revert to shamelessly flogging your own author - the ingenious Lehrer, who responded to accusations of fascism by bravely becoming an actual fascist - had me in stitches. Also - American Psycho a “vastly superior” movie? LOL bro. You should try writing sentences with less words. A lot less. Maybe none.
What are you on about mate? “the ingenious Lehrer, who responded to accusations of fascism by bravely becoming an actual fascist - had me in stitches.” Wasn’t I underlining hollowness of transgression? Is that ‘shameless plugging’ or are you confused by so many words because you have a problem with comprehension?
‘This type of transgression - the type I also happen to publish - is the REAL transgression kids’
If you’re going to do a hatchet job on a pal you have to do much better than this Udith. It has to be bullet proof. Otherwise you wind up skewered on your own weird bitterness.
Well, this is very far from a 'hatchet job. At least attempt to unpack the nuances of an intellectual argument before acting like a petulant child because there are 'too many words' to get your head around. If I write that one type of transgression is probably more authentic than another, but then go on to qualify this with the unequivocal statement that transgression is itself a useless and infantile pursuit as an artistic telos...what am I trying to say? Have a little think about it and get back to me. However, I seem to have hit a nerve, perhaps because you're also committed to the aimless performance of transgression for the amusement of a specific audience? In any case, you're embarrassing yourself on a public forum. But I suspect you're used to this sort of thing, so let's keep going, by all means.
I don’t know much Udith, but I do know bitterness, resentment and professional jealousy dressed up as ‘radical honesty’ when I see it - that’s basically my PHD.
You’re better than this Udith. I believe in you bro. Don’t make the same mistakes I made. Just cool it on the word count. Stop trying to sound impressive all the time.
I can say with complete confidence that I'm not motivated by any of those things, that I know my only motivations are (and always will be) purely artistic and intellectual. It doesn't affect me in the slightest if you think otherwise. Take it easy.
I wasn’t sure whether I should like Udith’s article or not until I learned that you had a PhD. Now I am team Lias Saoudi and I hate Udith forever. If Udith (cursed be his name) reveals that he is more credentialled than you, I will reconsider my undying enmity.
I have several PHD’s
Can't tell if this is satire or not, brilliant work either way, I fall on my face before your genius.
E
Wait a second — is this some “You better not talk shit about my friend’s book” thing?
Well said. Writing about ‘style’ with such a lack of it is also hilarious. Maybe have a re-read of Lunar Park, and unclench.
Of course this may or may not be the real Lias Saoudi, and he may or may not be mates with Rob Doyle, but if it *is* the real LS, I do think he has more authority to arbitrate on transgression in its authentic or inauthentic forms than anyone else here. You should look him up!
We know each other. I think he's cool and a sound guy - as with Doyle. This shouldn't have any bearing upon criticism if its provenance is genuinely not malicious, and is made seriously. In my opinion, this is the main reason why everything in culture is so flat and uninteresting, why there is such low energy everywhere - the mistaken belief that frictionless professional politeness equates some abstract creative solidarity. And, really speaking, the only one who has any 'authority' to arbitrate upon the authenticity of transgression is God himself lol
Ah OK, you know each other. Certainly makes sense to fine tune the new friction-full style amongst consenting acquaintances before unleashing it in the park.
Why are you like this
You say that Doyle is clearly ambivalent towards the labelling ‘Irish Novelist’. Interesting. And I wonder why… Maybe he doesn’t want to be associated by default with some famous Irish novelists who are famously difficult (like Becket or Joyce)? This then perhaps links to your note that one must have sufficient means to actually transcend the self, which they certainly had. And I love that you come onto Martin Amis in the middle. My mind immediately went to Amis when I read that Doyle’s novel includes a character with his own name. In Amis’s case, though, it’s usually a cameo (ha!), as in ‘Money’ and ‘London Fields.’
I have to admit, I may be a normie and a middlebrow. I like Bret, Mart, Karl Ove and Rob Doyle and the only bits of this I enjoyed were the quotes.
"Maybe" "a bit" "less" use of " " & ' ' "next time" "?"
Also, the film adaptation of American Psycho was intentionally comic. It specifically intended to satirize nihilism, not embrace it. Come on, the briefest of Google searches could have helped you there. Although I agree that the adaptation is superior to the original.
The novel is very much a social medium in the way that the novelist seeks to communicate a “story” (or experience) of some sort to the reader which is distinct from a painter or composer. The novel is therefore rarely “radical” in any meaningful sense beyond its immediate shock value when its composition is so concerned with itself in relation to others (despite what those “enfant terribles” say as they go, cap in hand, to the publisher). What would be “radical” in this context are the novels incapable of being written by those incapable of writing them. For this reason, it is overly harsh to brand Doyle a Normie for the way in which he transgresses within the confines of the novel as a matter of skill or stylistic taste, when the novel is itself quite Normie, in that it must be able to be read and/or understood by The Reader. And who is this reader? A Normie. So I agree insofar as all transgression within a novel is a Normie transgression, but I disagree that it is because the novelist is inept. Even the mighty Nabokov struggled. It goes on…
Dear Udith,
You begin with a quote from Nietzsche. You end with a proclamation: "In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside." And in between, you spend 6,000 words calling Rob Doyle a "normie" for not being transgressive enough, while accusing Bret Easton Ellis of superficiality, while praising Adam Lehrer (your own author) for being a real transgressor because he went from "Bernie Bro to MAGA fanatic in the blink of an eye."
Let me translate your essay for those who don't have the patience: "I am the only true outsider here. Everyone else is performing."
That is not criticism. That is solipsism with a vocabulary.
Let me break down why, point by point.
On "Normie Transgression" and your own position
You say transgression is only valid if it costs you something — if it makes you "an intensely loathed pariah, rather than a mildly tolerated prankster." Fine. Then tell me: what has your transgression cost you?
You are the Editor in Chief of your own press. You publish your own writers. You write for a Substack with 25,000 subscribers. You are not a pariah. You are a brand. And there's nothing wrong with that — except that you keep pretending you're outside the system while clearly enjoying its benefits.
You call Doyle's invocation of "avant-garde" a mantra. But your own invocation of "transgression" appears 47 times in this essay. At some point, the word stops meaning anything and becomes a talisman. You're not analyzing. You're chanting.
On American Psycho and The Shining
You claim the film adaptation of American Psycho is "vastly superior" to the novel, and compare it to Kubrick's The Shining. This is not an argument. It's a provocation dressed as insight.
Here's what Kubrick understood that you don't: The Shining is a film about a man going crazy in a haunted hotel. American Psycho (the novel) is a thousand-page endurance test. It is supposed to be boring, repetitive, nauseating. That's the point. The film, as good as it is, makes Bateman charismatic. The novel traps you in his head until you want to scream. That's not a failure. That's the achievement.
Calling the film "superior" because it's more entertaining is like calling a rollercoaster superior to surgery. They do different things. The fact that you can't see that suggests you're not interested in what novels can do. You're interested in signaling your taste.
On Lunar Park and the failure of autofiction
You say the 90s postmodernists failed at "meta-fictional transgression of the self." But Lunar Park isn't trying to transcend the self. It's trying to excavate it. The novel is not a clever game. It's a man being haunted by the ghost of his abusive father, by his own creation (Patrick Bateman), by the impossibility of escaping either.
You dismiss this as "paltry narcissistic impulses." But narcissism is not the same as trauma. And trauma doesn't perform for your approval. It just is.
You also say no one has succeeded at "truly transgressing the authorial self." Maybe that's because it's not an interesting goal. The self isn't a cage to escape. It's the only thing you have. Writing isn't about getting rid of the self. It's about telling the truth about it — even when that truth is boring, repetitive, or uncomfortable.
Ellis told the truth. You just didn't like what he said.
On Rob Doyle (since you clearly wanted to talk about him)
You say Doyle's style is "modest, familiar, earnest — like if Nick Hornby had written about piss fetishists in Berghain." That's a good line. I'll give you that. But then you spend pages calling him a "normie" for not being transgressive enough, while also admitting that Threshold was "admirable" and "relatable" until you changed your mind.
Here's the thing: relatability is not a crime. Neither is earnestness. Not every book has to burn down the house. Some just need to light a match. You're angry at Doyle for not being the writer you want him to be, instead of engaging with the writer he is.
That's not criticism. That's entitlement.
And your central piece of evidence against him — the passage about the pedophile teacher — is taken from a fictional adolescent alter-ego. You know this. You acknowledge it. But you still treat it as if Doyle himself endorses it. That's not "radical honesty." That's bad reading.
On Adam Lehrer and your own conflict of interest
You devote several paragraphs to praising Adam Lehrer — a writer you personally published through your own press — as a model of "genuine" transgression. You call his work "thrilling," "unashamed," "unapologetic." You say he commits fully to the principle of transgression, even if his views are "silly" or "protean."
This is not criticism. This is marketing. You're using a review of someone else's book to sell your own author. And you have the audacity to call Doyle a "normie"?
If you want to be taken seriously as a critic, disclose your conflicts of interest. Or at least pretend to have some self-awareness.
On your behavior in the comments
When someone disagreed with you — Lias Saoudi, Jamie Collinson — you didn't engage with their arguments. You called them "stupid middle-class English cunt," "Nick Hornby," and mocked their reading comprehension. You "had a little dance at their Substack."
This is not "radical honesty." This is insecurity with a vocabulary. You can dish it out, but you can't take it. The moment someone pushes back, you abandon the pretense of intellectual distance and go straight for the ad hominem.
That's not transgression. That's tantrum.
On what you actually got right
I'll give you this: your point about "crypto-transgression" — work that looks subversive but ultimately reinforces the system — is worth discussing. And your diagnosis of the "bourgeois bohemian" landscape (Berlin, drugs, techno, kink) as a theme park for middle-class seekers is sharp.
But you apply it so broadly, so arrogantly, that you end up dismissing everything that isn't your own taste. You're not a critic. You're a curator of your own ego.
Final note 😜
You wrote: "In art, as in life, there is nothing but outside."
Then step outside your own certainties for a moment. Try reading Ellis not as a "normie" or a "genius" but as a person who wrote what he saw. Try reading Doyle the same way. Try reading any writer without first deciding whether they're "transgressive enough" for your approval.
You might not like what you find. But at least you'll be reading — not just judging.
And next time someone criticizes you, maybe don't call them a cunt. It ruins the effect.
Sincerely,
A reader who finished Lunar Park — and still thinks about the ending.
P.S. You quote Nabokov writing on a typewriter balanced on a bidet, fleeing the Nazis, unsure of his English, but driven by an uncompromising style. That's a beautiful image. But you missed the point: Nabokov didn't write to be "transgressive." He wrote because he had to. The same way Ellis wrote. The same way Doyle writes. The same way any real writer writes — not to impress critics like you, but because the alternative is silence.
You should try listening to that silence sometime. You might learn something.
It's embarrassing how AI-inflected this diatribe reads. The “it's not this, it's that” appears about a dozen times, not to mention cringe-inducing milquetoast mic-drops like “solipsism with a vocabulary” that strongly suggest an LLM's idea of a witty dunk.
If you didn't actually write this with AI, your style is certainly a convincing facsimile.
Maybe you should have written the essay instead, Lizzy? You seem so intent on misreading and responding at such a staggering scale that it might be best if you just rewrote the whole thing, if it makes you feel better. But did you happen to read this part: “But transgression — whether “crypto” or Normie — is ultimately an infantile pursuit when pursued as an artistic telos. It is the mark of an impoverished and unrefined aesthetic sense that is, paradoxically, more compliant to the existing order because it is so easily satisfied and contented. The unruly child, after all, is easily and swiftly quieted when his irrational desires are indulged.”
What is the point of leaving a clearly AI generated comment?
AI slop from Lizzy sadly