RaveFriezeEven as Blue Ruin delves into the past with Proustian specificity, it does not succumb to nostalgic cliche about a time when young artists could achieve success almost overnight ... In contrast to the nostalgic tendencies found in some post-pandemic writing, Blue Ruin’s success stems from its uncompromising connection between the pains of the past and the decomposition of the present, without celebrating either. Through the simple story of a once-lauded artist becoming a delivery driver in an effort to push his career – and himself – to the limit, Kunzru creates a trajectory in which social tensions are rising, liberalism is disappearing and fascism is once more gathering momentum.
Sean Thor Conroe
MixedJacobinFuccboi is incredibly annoying. The main cause of this is the novel’s style: most of it written in a series of clipped, single sentence paragraphs that often suppress the subject or first word of the sentence ... But while Conroe is an aggravating stylist, he is also an original one. So I persisted through my frustrations—finding a more interesting book than I had anticipated ... For all its stylistic originality, the concerns of the novel are pretty consistent with those of his influences, the well-known big hitters of autofiction: Sheila Heti, Tao Lin, and Karl Ove Knausgård ... Fuccboi talks around things rather than about them ... Curiously absent in Conroe’s Fuccboi is the male promiscuity or coercion suggested by its title ... One of the successes of Conroe’s exploration of the complexities of contemporary masculinity is making this dishonesty function at the level of style rather than content ... Fuccboi goes to great lengths to convince the reader that it doesn’t have a plot. Close inspection reveals that all the narrator’s digressions and segues are ways of avoiding coming to terms with the facts of his life ... The most interesting elements of Fuccboi rest in this contradiction between Sean’s interior self, his unacknowledged bad behavior, his efforts to make himself dislikable, and the reality of his material life. He’s broke and suffering, and a highly profitable private health care system is ruining him ... Nevertheless, for all its strengths, Fuccboi does not transcend the limits of its genre. Like Heti’s, Lin’s, and Knausgård’s, Conroe’s autofiction remains unable to situate the interiority of its narrator in the broader stream of events, things, and people.
