Watching Another Man Drown

On Alex Kazemi's 'New Millennium Boyz'

Teen Punks in Washington Square Park, New York City, 1997, Photograph, Getty Images

There’s this David Letterman line that sometimes runs through my head. It’s from a 1987 episode with Crispin Glover, an appearance the actor now cheekily avoids talking about. There’s a good reason for that: The segment ends with Glover trying to kick Letterman in the head.

But I’m not interested in the kick. The line I love, the one that’s stuck with me all these years after seeing it, comes a little earlier. The setup is important: Glover is in tight bell-bottoms and platform shoes, talking about being a movie star and tabloids reporting on his every move. As he speaks, he rocks back and forth on the couch. At the time, people thought he was having a breakdown or maybe just on drugs, but looking back from 2025, it’s clear this is intended to be culture-jamming performance art. The point, I suppose, is something about celebrity culture.

For a few minutes, Letterman tries righting the segment, but Glover steamrolls him every time, jumping from one non sequitur to the next. As the bit drags on, you can see Letterman becoming frustrated, growing impatient with Glover’s resistance to finding something that works. Finally, Letterman looks beyond his guest to Paul Shaffer, his band leader. “Paul, is this the first time you’ve seen another guy drown?”

It’s that expression, that image of drowning, that I love. It feels more accurate than saying something’s “failing,” or “bombing,” or “flopping.” It evokes so much more pain — the lungs filling up with water, the slow sinking to the bottom. It implies the whole wretched disaster could’ve been avoided. What were you thinking? Why’d you go out so deep if you didn’t know how to swim?

It’s not that Letterman is too square to get the piece; the man was a pioneer of high-concept meta-television, happy to embrace weird for weird’s sake. No, the problem with Glover’s performance is that it only exists to call attention to Glover. It relies on a flawed but pervasive idea that something must be interesting, maybe even profound, simply because it’s disorienting.

And I’ve found the phrase, the drowning, has real utility. It was there when I was teaching and constantly subjected to ill-prepared student presentations. It was there at my first and only corporate job when I listened to the CFO crack jokes about quarterly earnings. I don’t only direct it at others, though; I’ve been the guy drowning, too. Just recently it was there when a mechanic asked for basic details about my car. “Is this the first time you’ve seen another man drown?” The first time? No way. It’s got to be in the thousands by now.

The most recent, though, was while reading Alex Kazemi’s New Millennium Boyz. When it was released in hardcover in 2023, the novel seemed like it was made for the cultural moment, with jacket copy that presented it as a too-real exploration of masculinity, an iconoclastic text that would offend both the intolerant Left and the book-banning Right. Ellen Hopkins, the YA author who wrote the perennially-censored Crank, wrote, “I will forever defend Kazemi’s ability to write this book and entertain his intended audience against those who’d torch all three.” On the cover, front and center, was a co-sign from Bret Easton Ellis calling Kazemi his “favorite millennial provocateur.”

For a while, the framing worked. New Millennium Boyz was deemed a “must-read” and “anticipated” by NYLON and W. There were puffy interviews with Kazemi in Vanity Fair and Dazed. The 1975’s Matty Healy, a figure who’s no stranger to provocation, even posted a photo of the book on his social media. Pop Crave, a stan-centric social account with two million followers, posted updates about the book like it was written by Troye Sivan.

Then something strange happened. For whatever reason, Kazemi and his team began courting tastemakers in the very small, very online indie lit scene. I suppose this was an attempt at gaining underground credibility. Perhaps someone suggested “male shitposters in their thirties” were the book’s ideal demographic. Maybe it was both.

To say the strategy didn’t work is an understatement. The shitposters pointed out that the book’s publisher, Permuted Press, was distributed by Simon & Schuster, and alleged that Kazemi’s big name blurbs and fawning press had been bought. He was cast as an interloper — an industry plant leeching off the underground — and struggled to shake the label. (Unsurprisingly, this is not the first time this argument has been leveled at a hyped-up writer supported by the Big Five. See Conroe, Sean Thor.) Even now after almost two years, Kazemi’s name is still a punchline in some circles. A recent ad in an indie lit mag read, “Fuck best small fictions fuck pushcart prizes fuck Donald Trump and most importantly FUCK Alex Kazemi.”

But, undeterred, the paperback for New Millennium Boyz has quietly arrived, with a new cover and promises that the 2025 version is “uncensored, uncut & loaded with deleted scenes & bonus features.” It sounds less like a literary novel and more like a limited edition DVD, something that is more fitting now that Muse Films has acquired the book. I was intrigued, if only because I didn’t understand why Permuted or Muse would invest in a narrative and a book that simply hadn’t moved units. I figured there must be more than the stories that had been told in both the puff pieces and the take downs. After years of reading about the book, I figured it was time to finally, you know, read it.

The novel follows Brad Sela, a Y2K everyboy who plays by the rules of his suburban community and, as a result, appears destined for Berkeley. Beneath the squeaky clean exterior, though, Brad’s got a darker side, something he mostly satisfies by living vicariously through what he sees on MTV. When he loses his virginity at summer camp, he can’t help but frame the experience as something happening on a screen: “I close my eyes and pretend the tits that I’m grabbing are Carmen Electra’s. Splice. I think about a Britney Spears lookalike sucking my dick in a park bathroom.”

Things change when he starts his senior year and meets two transfer students, Lusif and Shane, contrarians who gleefully flout respectability. The duo despises Total Request Live, preferring the moody work of Marilyn Manson and Gregg Araki to the sunny aesthetics of blink-182 and American Pie. Lusif, in particular, is a proto-edgelord, so obsessed with offending that it’s unclear what, if anything, he believes. Brad admires their fuck-all attitude and begins spending time with them, entranced by their willful defiance and invigorated by the darker energy they project.

That’s not a terrible premise and it raises some interesting questions about taste, identity, and cultural capital. The problem is Kazemi’s writing can’t support it. Here’s Brad talking with his mom, who suggests that the violent things he enjoys could have a negative impact:

“You really think that the people my age who saw Blade wanted to leave the theater and join a secret society vampire cult? I mean, it’s ridiculous how you think that entertainment creates violence and influences the youth of America.”

“I’m never going to stop believing that Scream is dangerous.”

“Mom! They used the real-life sequel tagline to market the movie so they could spook teenyboppers into buying tickets! Also, you know that leaving Tony Robbins tapes on my bed with a ‘Love Yourself’ sticky note does not motivate me. It does the total opposite, like want-to-dive-into-a-pool-of-alligators opposite.”

Conversations like this one occupy the bulk of New Millennium Boyz. Multiple characters speak, yet this is the novel’s singular voice. It’s “casting tape fiction” with the fluency of an LLM. It’s endless pop culture references stuffed into baldly expositional, unrealistic dialogue. Kazemi is apparently trying to make a point about the way young men were (and are) seduced by media, but I have a hard time imagining a reader who wouldn’t grasp that within the first chapter.

A few pages later, it’s tedious. After that, it’s downright annoying. While reading, I was reminded of Glover, of the way he kept hammering away at his bit. “The press, they can do things,” he tells Letterman, who nods politely, waiting for it to end.

Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin have used this sort of painfully monotonous narrative voice, but to great effect because they eventually show their hands: Both Less Than Zero and Taipei have bursts of vivid interiority that remind readers of their genuine abilities. The monotony in those books lulls readers into the characters’ deadened frames of mind. Kazemi, though, simply trudges forward in this style for close to 250 pages. There’s nothing that suggests an obscured intention or a clever double game; you get the feeling he’s operating at his full powers.

It was at that point that I rewatched the Letterman clip for the umpteenth time and realized I’d missed an important detail. Shaffer, at first, doesn’t understand who’s drowning in the metaphor. “Are you talking about you or him?” he asks Letterman. “Yeah, no: me,” Letterman responds, flashing his gap-toothed grin. Staring down the remaining 75 pages of New Millennium Boyz, I could relate.

According to Kazemi, the book’s shittiness is the point. “It was a red herring. It was a bit of a trick,” he told Interview. “It was sort of to make you think that you’re getting into a novel that’s going to make you feel all the feelings millennials associate with watching She’s All That sick in bed with bone broth.” The book is bad, stiff, and unrealistic because the pop culture it’s criticizing is bad, stiff, and unrealistic. Also, I suppose, millennials love bone broth in bed.

Before the end of the book, Kazemi raises the curtain to expose his grand illusion. “We ran out of tropes. There was nothing left to show. We covered all the taboo topics,” Lusif tells Brad after revealing his plan to shoot up the prom. “The worst part is that this isn’t even shocking. It’s not like you had any moments of character development where you could’ve had a turning point and changed,” Brad eventually replies. TRUE! I wrote in the margin.

“Honestly, I’m not that inspired by literature,” Kazemi said back in 2023. Like Brad and his friends, Kazemi’s real inspiration is the screen. I wasn’t mad reading those words, but I was confused. If you don’t like literature, why write a book? Why use a form that thrives on interiority and empathy if you’re not interested in either?

When Glover returned to Letterman a few weeks after his infamous appearance, it was ostensibly to apologize for his erratic performance, but when the time came, Glover couldn’t articulate his thoughts. “I wanted it to be this interesting kind of a thing that would happen that people would find interesting,” he says. Letterman offers a wry smile, unsatisfied. “What was the point to it, other than just interest?” Glover laughs. “Well, I mean, that kind of was the point. Interest.” Then he laughs again, uncomfortable with how stupid it sounds out loud.

When I returned to Kazemi’s ill-fated press junket after reading New Millennium Boyz, I noticed a similar willingness to distance himself from his work, saying he’s a “performance artist” and “a simulacrum.” “[Alex Kazemi] has nothing to do with me,” he told LitReactor. “He’s something more ephemeral and he is whoever the person engaging with him creates him to be in their head.”

That’s all bullshit, of course, a move that’s not that different from claiming your book is intentionally bad. It’s unnecessary defensiveness, akin to the juvenile posturing that defines the titular New Millennium Boyz. “Everything is about image,” Brad says at one point. “It’s pathetic, and yet I’m the number one victim.”

I don’t believe Kazemi is the detached semiotician he claims to be, because I’ve heard a Kazemi that suggests otherwise. A week and a half after New Millennium Boyz was released, he appeared on 1storypod, frustrated and disillusioned, regretting how he’d let the promotional push overshadow the book itself. “I feel like my team kind of fucked up in marketing to these people,” he admitted, recalling the missteps. “There’s no fucking friends in that world.” Maybe it was a simulacrum, but it sounded real to me.

I didn’t suddenly love Kazemi or his book, but I was surprised at how easily a few minutes of vulnerability complicated my impressions of him. It was a far more compelling narrative than the facile morality play of the novel. Unlike his characters, he was suddenly living, breathing — a human rather than just lines on a page. I saw him out at sea, waving his arms in a panic. I imagined throwing him a life jacket.

Kevin M. Kearney’s writing has appeared in Slate, Stereogum, The Millions, and elsewhere. His second novel FREELANCE is now available from Rejection Letters. More info at kevinmkearney.com.