Fuccboi is long on style and short on incident, written in a slangy staccato first-person prose that sounds admirably fresh, at least in the early pages, and helps propel the narrative past significant longueurs ... Men are 'bros' and women are 'baes,' while almost all proper names are reduced to initials ... It’s hard not to be amused by a sentence like this, which invites the reader to participate in a coded form of communication, a kind of clubhouse argot—to be one of the baes or bros. At its best Conroe’s prose seduces, and like all good writing, demands a degree of intimacy between narrator and reader. Fuccboi though he may be in certain regards, Conroe’s persona here is endearing in its persistent self-deprecation. He is constantly second-guessing himself, particularly with regard to his masculinity ... We feel his pain, but unfortunately, we don’t feel that of his ex, or any of the other characters in the book, who are more ciphers than characters in the traditional sense. The narrator is a solipsist ... But he’s good company—thoughtful, insecure and questing. And he has a distinctive, compelling voice that strikes me as utterly of its moment ... As bookish as this novel is, it seems like a genuine attempt to speak to some of those who don’t normally give a shit about books...while also being worth the attention of those who do.

The title is a provocation, the jacket copy is offensively ludicrous, the cover art is a joke (a funny one). And because it’s written in a kind of bro speak, any randomly chosen page of Sean Thor Conroe’s first novel, Fuccboi, is liable to provoke mockery. Already, its premise has provided ready-made memes for rubbernecks assuming the author isn’t in on the bit ... It’s not an accident or a taunt that the authorial voice steals liberally from American and British Black vernacular English ... There’s some caricature to the prose, but this language...isn’t wholly unrealistic. It crops up all the time on social media, and routinely prompts debates over the use of Black slang by people who are not Black. In practice, it’s often cringeworthy, and Sean’s justification of his style — that it’s meant to lure 'people who don’t read' — is the most offensive thing about it. But the author is candid about that process of appropriation ... Conroe uses the plausible deniability granted by autofiction to his advantage. Some of his trolling...can be attributed to the character. But sometimes, the text indicts its author. Sean asserts that one of the advantages of being a woman is that 'everyone needed moms; every woman could get paid to be a temporary mom.' It reads like parody but Conroe’s treatment of his female characters echoes the thought: Most of them are caretakers ... The male relationships are more compelling ... This is Conroe’s gift. Deeply tuned into his single character, he’s able to capture evocative moments in a fresh voice ... But Conroe’s investment in Sean, which comes at the expense of everyone else, makes the author less daring than he might otherwise be. Anytime Sean does something 'bad,' he’s redeemed in some way ... And at the end of the book, there’s a scene that I wanted to believe Conroe understood the discomfort of, in which Sean breaks up a domestic dispute between neighbors. But it hewed to the same pattern, and I couldn’t be sure whether or not he, the author, was being an idiot.

The novel is written entirely in FuccboiSpeak, a kind of fusion of street slang and Twitter cant ... Hand-drawn maps of 'Philly in the Time of the Fuccboi' bookend the novel and impart a sense of the epic to Conroe’s book, turning the lonely fuccboi into a sort of Greek hero roaming the streets on his own odyssey ... What Conroe does so excellently is enrapture us within the psyche of this unpleasant figure, entangle us with Sean’s brain worms and force us, reluctantly, to look again ... Dare I be so despotic as to proclaim Fuccboi a necessary novel? You bet I do ... How brilliant to finally have a novel that examines contemporary masculinity with such candour, with such humour and style as to immediately read like a modern classic. Sean Thor Conroe is a real one.

A startling, scabrous, big swaggy flex of a debut ... Sean’s a charmer...and he’s funny with it ... The author demonstrates his fictive priorities. Personality is privileged over facts, voice over content ... Conroe is a protégé of the late and beloved Giancarlo DiTrapano of Tyrant Books, a publisher whose relationship to the mainstream was energetically antagonistic. In Fuccboi, a similar attitude presents in two ways, one more successful than the other. First, and most appealingly, it’s in the book’s magnetic voice, specifically, the total commitment to the distinctive argot by which this type of urban, young-millennial American male is recognizable ... There’s a seductive confidence in his full-blown, take-me-or-leave-me style ... Fuccboi’s style proves to be a more successful vehicle for a fuck-the-mainstream taunt than its substance ... Our man-of-the-people author (alma maters Swarthmore College and Columbia University, annual tuition $54,856 and $66,880) is not The People. As a general principle, the distance between author and autofictive narrator should be respected—this is literature, not life, and this is literature about how a life becomes literature. It is notable, then, that the fictive Sean is not (unlike Conroe, whose biography he apparently shares in all other respects) an MFA candidate at Columbia ... Instead of staying somewhere in the uneasy realm...Conroe’s book takes a strivingly exculpatory swerve, and in the process betrays its project ... Abandoning unanswerable inquiry for an embarrassingly binary alternative, Fuccboi finally asks a very dumb question: Is ya boy A Good Guy or A Bad Guy? ... It’s an ending to comfort the comfortable.

The challenge [Conroe] confronts is a real pickle: how to update the tradition of the American male autobiographical novelist, writing about the concerns of a twentysomething on the make (which naturally include wrong-think and that notoriously problematic condition, lust) without censoring himself into insipidity ... This isn’t a plot novel, nor even much of a story novel. Conroe bets most of his chips on voice and by and large his writing has enough charm and freshness to keep him solvent ... Conroe’s punchy variant includes rap slang and internet speak, bc that’s how it is now, bruh ... Fuccboi’s main claim to newness lies in the narrator’s middle-way attitude to the ball-aching social justice religion that clogs the air of American cultural life, demanding moral and doctrinal purity ... By this meandering novel’s final third, I was no longer sure what the story was meant to be about, beyond the narrator’s ongoing presence on the page. The auto-novelist’s liberation from plot comes at the cost of submergence in life’s essential formlessness. Nevertheless, I enjoyed being led through the vagaries of Sean’s 'sus hetero bro' existence and appreciated his attempt to do what in 2020s America is tricky verging on taboo: to write like a man, not an ideal.

The first thing one notices about Fuccboi—possibly the only thing many will notice—is that it is written in a mix of laundered rap slang and college-seminar buzzwords. At times, especially in the early pages, it feels satirical ... Very briefly, I had high hopes for a millennial Big Lebowski: a perma-stoned man-child aimlessly gig-working through the contemporary wasteland. Then the novel takes a turn for the sincere that comes off as cynical, or at least as a parody being passed off as sincere ... Conroe is 30, but Fuccboi sometimes feels as if a Gen Xer wrote a book for the platonic millennial targeted by those pastel-hued subway ads ... Fuccboi is uneven, not only in quality but in tone. Is he serious, kidding, or just getting it wrong? ... The problem lies not in what might be termed either code switching or cultural appropriation, but in the book’s rampant use of the same worn-out text speak as a Verizon commercial ... What’s so bizarre about the book: underneath all the gimmicks, it’s not as bad as it might have been, which somehow makes it worse ... As of now, most of the of-the-moment millennial novels have been written by women. Publishers and critics both seem to want Fuccboi to be the straight millennial male swing at things. It’s not ... Fuccboi is neither a survey of modern heterosexual relations nor a glimpse of youth gone wild ... If anything, the viewpoint is strangely conservative. He listens to Joe Rogan podcasts and is preoccupied with the idea that his peers are 'too concerned with pushing their woke agendas, to actually challenge themselves to consider anything they didn’t already think' ... By failing to mine the heavy stuff to the same depth as the ordinary, Fuccboi becomes the opposite of its title: a lingering relationship short in stimulation.

Ultimately, the 'anti-woke' side of this book is so anodyne that one wonders whether Fuccboi, like the narrator’s pre-Fuccboi manuscript, may not have been a bit too edited-for-acceptability. And yet I think this book is earnest. If anything, its issue is not a lack of authenticity, but a surfeit thereof. It will be obvious to those who finish it that Fuccboi is the genuine stream of consciousness of the author, spilled with little self-censorship onto the page. All of this is presented with what one hopes is an at least slightly satirical sense of self-important militancy ... The problem is that this book, like so many others in its milieu, values 'authenticity' and 'realness' over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot). Fuccboi does accurately represent the cretinous depravity of the Millennial generation ... But though Fuccboi is playful and lively, often funny and sometimes moving, and certainly of its time, it does not fully succeed as a work of art.

Whether or not these passages are true to life, Conroe’s prose style favours street slang, internet shorthand, the one-line paragraph and the sentence fragment. If there’s a subject, often there’ll be no verb but rather a participle. If there’s a verb, often no subject. Most non-Sean characters are identified only by an initial, which makes them hard to keep track of across three hundred pages. But the minimalist style has its compensations: it’s funny, for one thing, and when it isn’t funny it can heighten the poignancy of Sean’s predicament ... None of this is especially profound, but it has the value of comic deflation. Absent is any of the daily online howling between the opposing sides in the culture wars. Rather there are the shifting mores of young people of different classes with clashing politics trying to get along with one another ... Not incorrect but somewhat trite takeaways ... Sean’s consciousness about race flicks on and off throughout the novel, but he is often a superfluous man ... It’s to this tradition that Fuccboi belongs and in which it succeeds. Conroe sums it up well in a line about the rapper Lil B and another artist: ‘For this, the subtlety of his subversion (where you couldn’t, like with Bolaño, quite decide 'whether or not he was an idiot'), Lil B was the goat.’ I feel you, bro.

The prose is a mixture of phonetically rendered contractions and online abbreviations ... If the above sounds insufferable, that’s because it largely is, both with and without context. But...it’s hard to give a sense of how funny, clever and infectious Conroe’s writing can be: how supple an instrument this voice is, how rhythmically and cumulatively rewarding when it feeds off its own energy. For internal riffs we could be in the absurd, side-shuffling mind of one of George Saunders’s characters. Yet this odd fluency is rarely sustainable over long passages. Serious engagement with early civilisation...or the first world war...can lack the self-consciousness that redeems its puerility ... behind the verbal front and modern engagement with gender politics, his book isn’t that different from existing novels about men on the make who regret infidelity to important partners, a form that for decades might have been the dominant mode in fiction. Fuccboi could signal that a new take on the old package can survive the modern publishing landscape; or that it will kill this possibility dead.

Fuccboi 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.

A series of drawn-out monologues and digressions, like the above, stand in for a structured plot, and the mainlining of junk food and drugs is the motor behind Sean’s life ... Conroe is bent on dopey humor: Sean’s exaggerated pauses cue up his single-word gags, which echo through the line breaks with theatricality. He trades with light self-deprecation on the gulf between serious and casual registers ... in alt-lit, everything is an object, even the people, and the comic potential of objectification is obviously fraught. Any comedian could tell you this: Say what you like about yourself—burrito addict, apparent leper, fuckboy extraordinaire—but if you turn another person into a smock with sexy legs, it’s not enough to claim that the joke is actually on you ... may represent the last fumes of alt-lit as a genre: its clubbish stylistic tics, its hatred of “mainstream” writing, its contempt for the novel as a form. Fiction is a medium, not an intercom; it is in its nature to complicate, tease, obscure. But when Scott McClanahan, one of Conroe’s peers, says Fuccboi 'sounds like no one I know,' it’s not because Conroe is 'utterly original' but because the rage of his book seems rote. Self-involvement, in the end, tends toward sterility: No good politics can develop from dealing only with yourself. Fuccboi mistakes narcissism for introspection, as so many alt-lit failures have before. Long before this novel is over, it’s reached a stylistic and moral dead end.

Fuccboi is Conroe’s I-novel ... His struggle with being masculine but woke is psychosomatically explored as he develops a debilitating skin condition that a dermatologist believes may be due to a lack of testosterone. While metaphors like this are overworked, Conroe’s stylish, conversational writing (he thanks his publisher for letting him write how he talks) is intriguing and will appeal most to experimental fiction readers.

A striking and hyper-stylized debut ... Sean demonstrates a passion for Nietzsche, Bolaño, and Wittgenstein, and offers credible insights on their work, sometimes by comparing it to hip-hop or vice versa. He also reveals some self-reflection by discussing the 'rape-y' elements of his work with 'editor bae'...which adds a bit of depth. Some will find Conroe’s prose fresh, others annoying, but he’s landed on an undeniably rich mix of ingredients for autofiction.