... delightful ... a hilarious book that also manages to be a genuinely moving look at the end of adolescence ... isn't a plot-heavy novel; it's more of a character study told through a series of darkly funny conversations among the four friends (and, to a lesser extent, Nietzsche, who doesn't talk much). That's not to say it's boring at all — Iyer's dialogue is so funny, and rings so true, that it's something of a challenge not to read the whole thing in a single sitting ... Disgruntled teenagers are famously hard to know, but Iyer depicts them accurately and with a real sensitivity, never mocking or condescending to them. He captures their adolescent bravado beautifully ... Crucially, though, he also captures the moments when they let their guard down, when they forget to be disaffected for a few minutes and open themselves up to happiness ... observant, funny and compassionate. It's obvious that he loves his characters, and his enthusiasm for them is contagious — it's impossible not to root for these hard-edged but sweet kids, even as they practically beg you to disdain them. Nietzsche and the Burbs is an anthem for young misfits and a hilarious, triumphant book about friendship.
... Iyer makes nihilist philosophy hip and fun in his highly entertaining tragicomedy ... Iyer writes in short, emphatic elliptical sentences, a little maddening in their repetition but effective in creating a mood of rebellious adolescence. The style works in portraying the young characters' molten thoughts and emotions, as well as in satirizing the suburbs and school life ... As much fun as Iyer has in hilariously sending up tract houses and golf courses, he's at his satirical best describing the social stratification in the school ... There's something daring and poetic in the main characters' resistance to suburban culture ... The characters don't just talk philosophy; they embody it in their decisions and actions. They test their surroundings with radical ideas. It's an exhilarating ride, evoking the grandiosity of youth and the dynamics of counterculture itself. Of course, there's a tragic arc to the story. Beneath every uproarious protest cry is something human and fallible, Iyer sharply reminds readers ... The brilliant, relentless drive of the narrative of Nietzsche and the Burbs demands a certain amount of stamina from readers. But the payoff is great. Perhaps not since Don DeLillo's White Noise has a novel so funnily and savagely lifted the veil on Western postmodern culture. What's underneath is hard to explain. Some may find darkness, others beauty.
Not much happens ... Think On the Genealogy of Morality meets The Breakfast Club ... There is humor here. Iyer’s teenagers are recognizable, painfully so ... Iyer, who has a gift for capturing the cadence of the young, charts the overlap between the philosophers he reveres and the juveniles he teaches ... like any well-meaning professor, can belabor its point. The novel idles for long stretches, and there’s too much space between memorable sentences ... Characters blur together; only one, Paula, a jaded lesbian who falls in and out of love, stands out. The Nietzsche character remains a cipher until the end ... Scholarly readers — or those with access to the Wikipedia page for Continental philosophy — will find that in-jokes abound ... Iyer’s talent is best deployed in scenes that plumb the poignancy of finishing high school and leaving home...a near-perfect evocation of childhood’s elegiac end. And it proves Iyer’s literary talents can occasionally match his philosophical ones.
Lars Iyer’s follow-up to the celebrated Wittgenstein Jr is another attempt to treat his erstwhile academic specialism, European philosophy, as the basis for deadpan observational comedy ... The result is certainly creditable—vivid, tickling and spry. It’s also remarkably unkempt ... Iyer is eager to exploit the rich opportunities for comic juxtaposition ... But Iyer also sees past putative incongruities to something continuous or mutually illuminating ... a strange process occurs whereby something that looks like shorthand—a bit of thumbnail scene-setting—soon gives way to obsessive completism. The threat of prose-poetry often hovers and doesn’t always dissipate ... What’s frustrating about these local tendencies is that the novel is also distinguished by genuine conceptual compactness. Iyer makes light work of exploring the ways in which a 19th-century German philosopher, or his present-day descendant and doppelganger, would and wouldn’t feel right at home in the home counties. But his tendency to make the reader live that reality, in all its blog-friendly and italics-worthy drabness, seems less like a crucial part of the project—intentional immersiveness, perhaps, or self-conscious garrulity— than a straightforward failure of craft.
The novel covers ten weeks in the lives of...sixth-formers ... in lyrical and often moving passages. And at the same time, it is an affectionate satire on intellectual life and a certain sort of grand philosophical thinking ... Iyer’s prose is immersive, dominated by dialogue, and his plot is recursively repetitious (in the way that schooldays and revision are). The almost formless story is given order by precise time markers: the novel is broken down into weeks, each broken into days. Individual passages, read in isolation – with the friends’ meandering yet pugnacious ruminations, interspersed with bursts of sweary rudeness – form sharp, witty vignettes of bright teenagers grasping for meaning ... But with paragraph after paragraph of this stuff, chapter after chapter, it starts to feel relentless ... At times it shifts from the merely tedious to the almost insufferable.
Iyer wants readers to take these characters seriously, in the sense that we grow to love them and sympathize with their interior work of becoming. But Iyer also wants us to laugh at them (and maybe by extension ourselves) ... I hear echoes of O’Connor, who wrote that ours is 'an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.' I can feel the tone of this piece start to teeter into seriousness ... Yet the novel encourages us to adopt a certain kind of hopefulness, so that when we have ceased our ironies and our laughter, when the [Bo] Burnam-esque absurdities no longer suffice, maybe it’s Dostoevsky’s Idiot who will have the last laugh. Possibly his laugh won’t be just another expression of nihilism, a contempt for all created things. Perhaps his laughter will be more like the communal banter that endears us to Iyer’s characters, and which is itself a sympathetic affirmation that existence is good, that our individual lives are good, and good that we exist together.
How closely fictional Nietzsche is meant to resemble the real thing is moot except for the fact that the fictional one has gone off his meds. Uh-oh. Some readers may find the often-allusive book too clever by half; others will delight in its wit. In either case, the book is a model of originality. Clever, indeed.
... a funny campus novel about despair ... Iyer neatly captures the way Nietzsche’s philosophy of the eternal return is a perfect fit for cynical teenagers who are sure it’s all been done, but Iyer also wants to explore how frantic teenage emotions challenge their assurances; suicide, love, sex, and self-destructive instincts all figure in the plot. As for comedy, Iyer has a knack for the one-upping banter that demonstrates maturity and insecurity at the same time. The cycles of hope-despair-repeat among the characters get repetitive, but credit Iyer for thinking big ... Dark, brooding fun.
... devastatingly withering ... Iyer turns his keen eye and sharp sense of humor to the suburbs ... Despite their cynicism and aversion to any platitudes, the nihilist heroes discover the sincere thrill of being young in high school, as they run through a gamut of heartbreaking, hilarious, and exhilarating experiences with love, drugs, and the immediate and terminal future. The individual characters tend to get lost in Iyer’s dense narration, and they are occasionally too clever for cleverness’s sake. But readers will be endeared by Iyer’s skillful portrayal of their deep tenderness and uncertainty despite it all, even if they’d hate for readers to know it.
