We’ve come a long way since Jay McInerney’s bestselling Bright Lights, Big City hit the shelves — 40 years chronologically, although solving for the digital revolution’s impact on the human psyche, it might as well have been centuries ago. Even so, with regard to character arcs, ARX-Han, in his self-published and increasingly popular novel Incel, picks up right where McInerney’s famously second-person, nameless narrator left off. Just as McInerney, with his deadpan wit, eased us from skepticism into cynicism, ARX-Han’s Incel antihero, anon, continues the downward trajectory with mordant self-parody, sliding past nihilism into despair. Nothing new under the Black Hole Sun, so to speak. And while Incel’s content is compelling in its own right, what makes the novel truly interesting — maybe even important — is its innovative structure and style, which engage us on one level while illuminating the technological and generational divide on another.
Indeed, like a textual vortex, the narrative commands our attention — whirling steadily in the historical present while switching points of view, voices, tenses, and tones — pulling us close, sucking us in. Witness these opening sentences of the opening paragraphs in Chapter 1:
“I’m talking to the fifteenth girl I’ve approached when the switch flips in her brain.”
“You’re primordial slime, desperately crawling toward the ocean before the sun kills you of thirst.”
“Someone brushes the crook of your elbow, returning you to your senses.”
“A 2001 study on average American penis size pegged it at 2.34 inches flaccid and 5.48 inches erect.”
“A girl in a skintight miniskirt passes through the perimeter of my potential-interaction space . . . .”
“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan told us 60 years ago, referring to radio, television, and film, the dominant media of his time. True then, and even truer now, as we see in the above selection, fragmented yet cohesive, mirroring the modern, overstimulated psyche.
Set in a generic metropolis — less an actual lived-in place than a synthetic network of interaction modules (bars, dance clubs, restaurants) — we encounter a depersonalized urban habitat for our intrepid protagonists: a socially obtuse, racially biased duo whose behaviors span the gynophobic spectrum. On one end stands anon, the physically unassuming incel; and on the other, his lifelong friend Jason, the virile, devilishly handsome Korean American pickup artist — each as romantically shallow as a city street rain puddle: Jason, intentionally so, anon by default.
So the dating games proceed. Anon’s explicit goal is to lose his virginity at some point during the 353 days remaining until his 23rd birthday. Jason’s, evidently, is to fuck and discard as many women as possible. True to form, their approach is as calculated as it is crude. They rank potential partners on a 1-to-10 scale, with only those above 5.5 deemed worthy of pursuit. Like partners in crime, they split up, regroup, and confer — anon by far the most active, diligently tracking the interaction modules and keeping a precise log in his little red notebook.
Since shifting formats has become a common device in contemporary fiction, it comes as no surprise when, in Chapter 4, we cut back and forth between their real-time dialogue and a series of Jason’s day-old emails. As their conversation drifts — from anon’s recently lost girlfriend to hypergamy to their latest sparring sessions at the martial arts gym, where we first flash back to Jason’s tragic past — we alternate fonts and margins: one post after another, a copy-pasted excerpt from a pseudo-philosophical treatise by another anonymous source, an ALL CAPS DECLARATION FROM JASON HIMSELF, and a link to a PDF summarizing the evolutionary psychology of extra-pair copulation (EPC) in Homo sapiens. Yet the effect remains mildly disorienting, almost imperceptibly spatializing time and setting the stage for future experiments in nonlinearity. And though ARX-Han fully embraces the Western norm of writing from left to right and top to bottom, little else appears to be structurally off-limits from then and there on.
“Approaches: 205.
Phone numbers: 3.
Dates: 0.
Bangs: 0.”
Thus, the excitement never wavers. There’s an endless cascade of open tabs, each leading to another. Chatroom brawls. Porno. Random flashbacks to scenes of formative violence. More porno. Single-sentence paragraph pronouncements and prophesies. Real-time scenes of random violence. Hallucinatory projections. Still more porno. Recurring cognitive simulations of a prehistoric past. Insanely intriguing page-long lists of tangentially related, algorithmically entwined threads. New venues for anon’s maladaptive sex quest: shoe stores, clothing stores, one corner of the public square or another, where he approaches complete strangers — 6s, 7s, even a 5 — like an airborne salmon slamming into a dam. Like, as his sister Rachel puts it, “a creep . . . manipulating women into having sex with you . . . .” Recoiling at the word creep, he informs her after a long emotional pause:
“You haven’t refuted any of my beliefs.”
“Anon,” she says, “your life is a refutation of your beliefs.”
But anon is nothing if not a persistent, goal-oriented individual. While Jason claims perfect contentment with his simple “Zen-like” existence of training, fucking, and drinking, anon is intent on the loftier goal of completing his graduate degree in evolutionary psychology. Alas, it seems he is also to be thwarted in this effort by his thesis supervisor, Dr. Williams, who finds his lab work proposals unacceptable, or “definitionally outside of our wheelhouse,” as he puts it. Anon takes the criticism in stride, having already resolved to redesign the experiments. But when Williams adds, “someone reading this might draw some rather unfortunate conclusions of a political nature,” their conflict deepens. No longer just a disagreement over methodology, it becomes a microcosm of a larger struggle, encompassing the university system, academia at large, and the ideological undercurrents shaping the entire Western world.
A brilliant set piece — arguably the novel’s highlight — unfolds as Williams dissembles his student’s proposal with the eloquence of a seasoned pedagogue, revealing his dual role as both mentor and gatekeeper, before calmly burying it beneath layer upon layer of coded doublespeak. On and on he goes, deftly parrying all challenges and, at one point, contradicting one of his own mainstream arguments as part of an ingenious misdirection play. At long last, having steered his radical student into a nebulous, non-threatening intellectual cul-de-sac, he delivers his final pronouncement and walks out the door, ending an exchange sure to send a shiver down the spine of any careful observer with an individualistic mindset similar to the author’s.
Truth be told, Incel is not an easy read, nor does it try to be. Its protagonists are far from sterling fellows, their behavior rarely meeting basic standards of social etiquette or the law, for that matter. They are flawed, extreme — the one leaning towards autism, the other psychopathy — damaged, surely, by the traumas alluded to in their past. But the novel suggests something deeper, more insidious, something generational: a psychic side effect of information overload, of the gamification of social and romantic interaction, some limbic response to a blind, pitiless world where, despite our every pixel being archived somewhere, our names are still writ in water — a world where the illusion of movement masks profound inertia:
We click left, we click right, we swipe, we refresh, we scroll. We drag and drop. We copy and paste. We hover. We switch, we toggle, we link, we hyperlink. We upload, we download. We open tabs, close tabs, open them again. We clear cache but never memory. We lurk, we post, we ghost, we vanish. And after all that — we still don’t get laid?
“Approaches: 951.
Phone numbers: 38.
Dates: 3.
Bangs: 0.”
Hence the primal scream, of the lonely young American male. That’s Incel in a nutshell: a silent, swallowed scream, but a scream nonetheless, subtly portrayed as something “in the air,” a frequency or wavelength transmitted through spot-on dialogue, ever-present humor (though at times we need to adjust our eyes to the darkness in order to see it), and semantic dexterity, as seen in the writing itself — the text, the code — fluid, malleable, shifting to fit different applications, different psychological spaces. From chatroom invective to academic analysis, from complex scientific exposition to adolescent insults, from introspection to hallucination, it transports us, pausing for moments of descriptive elegance, such as:
“A girl in a white sundress and wide-brimmed hat walks by the bench I’m sitting on, the back of her dress gliding in a mildly levitative stance, carried from the energy of her forward momentum.”
Or:
“Outside the street shimmers from the aftermath of a heavy rainfall, blackened and moistened into the false texture of a quasi-organic surface that breathes and shimmers under a fine film of water.”
And then there are the passages that strain the limits of standard diction, syntax, and classification, like:
Operating under the nodal reflex of a well-worn defense mechanism, the dissolution occurs almost instantaneously. As the moorings of consciousness disengage from the primary faculties of my immediate sensorium, it elevates itself from the curved platform of my cranial cavity, observing the rapid disassembly of my body into a group of disconnected particles.
These passages suggest we turn to other disciplines for the terminology needed to decipher them — medical science for something like “neuroimagery” or philosophy for “ultramaterialist prose” — neologisms that signal a mode of composition relentlessly grounded in the tangible, devoid of metaphysical or emotional depth, reducing human experience to biology, economics, and physical interactions. Fascinating in their precision, and fun to run through ChatGPT for plain-English translation, but rather unsettling after reading the following from the same author:
“Insofar as fiction primarily seeks to examine human nature, it does so only in proportion to our ignorance of our own neurology. Science will always be above literature. One day, after filling the gaps in our knowledge, it will render the entire discipline obsolete.”
Without question, many of us dinosaurs hope that day never comes. But either way, ARX-Han is a voice worth listening to. His debut novel, Incel, merits careful consideration as a bellwether of contemporary American literature. With that in mind, given the exponential, possibly quantum progress of neuroscience, if his prediction about the future of fiction holds any weight, you might want to download a copy soon — before it’s too late.
Daniel Martin is a writer living in Kansas.
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Excellent review!
Definitely want to check this out thanks for the review!