Here’s a fun game we can play. I’m going to give you some quotes from a few recently published novels. Some of them are vaguely associated with an infamous downtown scene in New York. In this scene everyone’s either young or cool or beautiful, and they’re all skinny and smoke cigarettes, and they laugh at all the fussy pieties of the world, and they’re all constantly online while also constantly going to parties. According to the young, cool and beautiful people, they’re trying to find a new and authentic literary voice in an age of social and technological disintegration. They’re trying to carve out their own space, away from the prissy bullshit of the mainstream literary world, where they can write something real. They’re enraptured by the surging raw nowness of the internet, and they think literature that tries to rise above that is just blinding itself to the way we actually live today. They want to bear witness to their times, and yes, they want to have fun and look good while doing it, because otherwise what’s the point?
According to people who mostly don’t get invited to their parties, these people are all fascists. When they say they’re just interested in art and beauty, they mean they want the freedom to be evil. And it’s true, there are weird energies sloshing around. Coke and ketamine, flash photography, but also Simone Weil, a primly overserious Catholic piety, an austerity, a hunger for order. Weight lifting. Avant-gardes have not always been interested in opening up new freedoms for everyone. Art is not always innocent.
Anyway, some of the lines I’m about to quote come from this cool and possibly evil scene. Others are from two other contemporary writers. One is Sally Rooney, the fantastically successful but fundamentally very unhip millennial novelist. Her characters are all consumed by the question of how to be good people under late capitalism. Books for people whose gums come down too low over their teeth. I don’t think anyone has ever accused Sally Rooney of being a fascist, although she has had some pushback over her unwavering solidarity with Palestine. The second is Rupi Kaur, the most successful poet to have never actually read any poetry. Her books are read by people who introduce themselves by asking your star sign and then, before you can respond, immediately start talking about themselves for 45 minutes. She has sold over twelve million of them. Nobody has ever accused her of being a fascist either.
All you have to do is work out which of these lines come from the basic, normie literary mainstream, and which come from the weird, dangerous, redpilled avant-garde. Here they are:
1. Being young is having a million questions while loving a mystery that will never be solved.
2. “Yeah, I feel like I’m just figuring out now how the world works,” I said. “It’s like, my relationship, the affirmation I got from it, enabled me to retain my infantile delusions.”
3. Parts of my body still ache from the first time they were touched
4. The user’s most recent update, posted three hours earlier, was a photograph of a pigeon in a gutter … The caption read: same. The post had 127 likes. In her bedroom, leaning against the headboard of the unmade bed, the woman clicked on this post, and replies appeared underneath.
5. I scrolled past a picture that a poet from New York had posted, of a skeleton holding a can of beer and a cigarette, with the text “let’s do tomorrow?” below it; a picture of a friend of a friend from Cleveland, a photographer, wearing a sun hat behind a pale-blue rope fence, with the caption “July baby.”
Give it a think. If you’re curious, the answer is that number three is from Rupi Kaur’s the sun and her flowers, with some capitalization added to make it slightly less obvious, and number four is from Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. One of the names for the scene that the rest of the lines come out of is alt lit. But alternative how? Alternative to what?
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According to the writers of the downtown scene, mainstream literature has backed itself into a dead end. I don’t disagree. We are systematically eradicating every single creature on the face of this planet except pigs, chickens and cows, while carrying out a generational scientific experiment on our children, in which we hook them up to an infinite digital dopamine drip from the day they’re born and see what happens. (So far, we’ve discovered that they don’t learn how to read or form ordinary social or sexual relationships, and that many turn into some kind of deranged political extremist.) A large and growing proportion of our written text is being generated by machines. Our culture seems to be spiraling into a feedback loop of homogenized thoughts and ideas, where originality is sidelined in favor of the predictable and the algorithmically optimized. In fact, one of those machines wrote the last 28 words, from “our culture seems” on. The ground is collapsing under our feet, and mainstream literature’s response is to publish hundreds of books about grief, intergenerational trauma, and a teenage girl’s struggle to accept herself.
Back in 2022, the critic Alex Perez kicked off a brief firestorm when, in an interview with Hobart magazine, he attributed the tedium of mainstream fiction to the fact that “80% of agents/editors/publishers are white women from a certain background and sensibility” who “want to wear their little tote bags and hang out in their midtown Manhattan offices with their fellow career gals and go to lunch and brunch.” Most of the editors at Hobart resigned in protest at the interview—“regressive, harmful, and also just boring writing”—but Perez was far from the only person saying this kind of thing. Just the previous year, none other than Sally Rooney had put a broadly similar sentiment in the mouth of one of her ambiguously autobiographical characters. “Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who’s publishing who in New York. … Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times?” Maybe you get off easier if you don’t bring gender and class into it. Or maybe at a certain point you get famous enough that you stop having to squeal honeyed compliments every time some acquaintance publishes a book, and you can say what’s plainly true: that most of this stuff is flimsy, bloodless and totally insufficient to the world as it actually is. So if something comes along that claims to be an alternative, that feels like the sort of claim that might be worth evaluating.
But weirdly, this is not what critics have been doing. Instead, the alt-lit books have come sheathed in a big wad of discourse, and most of that discourse has been, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the scene. I’m mildly fascinated by scenes, in the same way that I’m interested in capitalism and religion and magic and every other system that assigns value to things based on its own mysterious set of criteria running entirely orthogonal to quality. But the existence of this particular scene is not noteworthy in itself. Writers have always done this. Actors hang out with other actors, musicians hang out with other musicians, tax accountants hang out with other tax accountants and writers hang out with other writers. They go to parties and marry each other’s exes and write books about it, and then their friends all pretend those books are better than they actually are: this is the world. There have also always been writers who hate all this incest and clannishness so much that they barely write about anything else. Wyndham Lewis wrote Tarr more than a century ago and it’s one long howl against the smug pink scene of mediocre artists all living off their parents’ money. It’s Montparnasse instead of Dimes Square, but nothing really changes. The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.
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I ended up reading seven very different books, published between 2021 and 2024, but almost all of them have one very significant thing in common. According to my edition’s back cover, Tao Lin’s Leave Society is “deeply felt.” The inside flap of Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi promises a “searching examination of what it means to be a man.” Dasha Nekrasova’s blurb for Peter Vack’s Sillyboy calls it “agonizingly honest.” Honor Levy’s My First Book “illuminates what it is,” per its catalog copy, to be “completely sincere.” Meanwhile, Levy’s own blurb for Matthew Davis’s Let Me Try Again says it’s “beyond irony and sincerity” but also “just real.” Interview magazine praised the “disarming sincerity” of Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. Everything wants you to know that it’s very sincere.
I found it confusing at first, the sincerity. Before I decided to read the work, my only exposure to alt lit had been Lin’s Leave Society, which I’d read on the recommendation of the art critic Dean Kissick, who’s a sort of downtown-scene fixture. He suggested I read Leave Society because Lin writes about steppe nomads, and I have a deep admiration for steppe nomads—although, he warned, Lin is “firmly opposed to them.” So I read Leave Society. It’s about a writer called Li who is sick and wants to be well. He spends his nights reading PDFs about all the ways that society makes people sick. Nuclear radiation, electromagnetic radiation, pesticides, sleep-disrupting blue light, fluoridated water, “unnatural frequencies” and the “broken human-nature symbiosis” that “caused cancer and other diseases.” When he was a teenager, his lung collapsed; he’s “suspected since middle school that he was constantly being poisoned and/or that he was cursed.” Now he’s discovering “that both and more seemed to be true—he was radioactive, malnourished, dysbiotic, degenerate, brainwashed, brain damaged.” He learns that the world is irreparably broken because six thousand years ago a peaceful, matriarchal, nature-worshipping society was violently overthrown by a cruel “dominator culture” from out of the steppe, who worship Yahweh and spray their crops with poison. The only way to be well in a poisonous society is to leave.
Most of the book consists of Li’s attempt to exit this poisonous world by constantly terrorizing his Taiwanese parents. He forces his father to have his mercury fillings removed, and to stop taking statins. “Statins, he’d read, caused cancer, depression, amnesia, dementia, and other problems, like twitching.” He hectors his mother into dropping her thyroid medication and swapping white rice for fermented kohlrabi, since “starch fed a species of bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae.” He drags them both on regular healthy walks in the mountains. (To his credit, he’s kind to the family dog, an elderly poodle called Dudu.) Despite it all, Li is still constantly in pain. He spends most of the book vomiting, celibate, regularly dosing himself with weed and LSD, talking to his parents and his agent and no one else. Few of his attempts at getting well go as planned—for instance, when he tries cayenne pepper as a natural headache remedy. “In the library, he swallowed two capsules at a time with chamomile tea. At 5:52 p.m., minutes after ingesting all six capsules, he stood with increasingly troubling pain. He entered a bathroom, sat on a toilet, put his glasses on the floor, and held his head, moaning. He vomited reddish water.”
I assumed that Leave Society was a deeply ironic book. All I knew about Tao Lin was that he belonged to the original alt-lit movement, which emerged in the early 2010s and borrowed its forms and themes from the internet, and that he was the link between the original movement and its even more online second wave. Since the internet is a kind of theater, reconfiguring the entire planet into a stage for your self-performance, in which the authenticity of the voice is always in question and nobody knows you’re a dog, it made sense that this would be a playful, ironic kind of fiction. Here, the dramatic irony is that everything Li does to make himself well is just feeding the neuroses that are so obviously the real source of his sickness. If there’s never any moment where the book says so explicitly, it’s because its irony is so consummate: it wears a straight face throughout; the facade never cracks. I mentioned this to Dean and he told me I’d got it wrong. “Tao Lin is very much autofiction, not at all ironic, militantly unironic even.” He was right. Some of Lin’s most recently published material is an essay about how he’s using medicinal leeches to remove microplastics and glyphosates from his bloodstream. This follows a 7,500-word essay on how he cured his autism by eating sauerkraut. It has 127 footnotes.
There is, in fact, something luminous about Tao Lin’s sincerity. I feel bad for having ever doubted it, for viewing everything through my own damaged cynicism. I don’t think he’s right about starch being poisonous and I certainly don’t think he’s right that he’s cured his autism, but his simplicity is great and placid and immovable, like a mountain; all you can really do is admire it. When Boris Pasternak’s name came up in one of the execution lists, Stalin is supposed to have crossed it out and said, “Leave that holy fool alone.” I don’t feel the same generosity toward Fuccboi.
Fuccboi feels like it ought to be some kind of a joke. For one thing, it’s called Fuccboi. There’s a big fantasy-style map at the front of the book of “Philly in the Time of Fuccboi.” Also, if you open up the book to a random page, as I just did, you discover the whole thing is written like, well, this:
It only took a couple sips to realize the Whole Foods patio was blown.
V was like Fuck this, let’s hit the beach.
So we mished it, in their rental car, down Wilshire.
Along the ocean.
To the beach.
But Fuccboi is not a joke. Map and title aside, I think Fuccboi might be the most po-faced, self-serious novel I have ever read in my life. It is, as Hermione Hoby noted in Bookforum, a Künstlerroman: the story of how an artist came to maturity. Here, the artist is called Sean Thor Conroe, and Fuccboi is the chronicle of how he “committed whole hog to that Art Life” and wrote his masterpiece, which is, of course, none other than Fuccboi itself. According to the marketing copy, this book is “slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself.” But there is nothing even remotely sly going on. We are meant to be very impressed by the way Fuccboi name-drops Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke and Bolaño—he went to Swarthmore—while also taking loads of drugs, calling everyone bro or bae, and saying things like “what I’m finna do, bruh, is fuck up this torta!” We are meant to be charmed by his sensitivity and self-awareness, and by the way this sensitive and self-aware boy still manages to keep it 100 percent real and raw. We are meant to empathize with his struggles, which are many. Fuccboi is living in mostly self-imposed poverty, delivering Postmates and inhabiting increasingly sus areas of Philadelphia. He has a debilitating skin condition and he’s not truly over his ex bae. He’s trying to write a book about his attempt to walk across the United States from coast to coast, but an “editor bae” keeps making him remove “every savage, ugly, testosterone-fueled, shameful thing it had been the most difficult to write. … Everything I wrote so others might be more aware of such flagrant tendencies in themselves.”
This, clearly, is the book in which he gets to be savage. Fuccboi has very little time for mainstream “literature,” which means “insulated, masturbatory bullshit completely irrelevant to the culture.” Later, he delivers a kind of manifesto:
Writing was different now, everyone could do it, trying to write in a way that established an elevated stance above readers and other writers was fuckshit.
A fuckboy move.
Stop tryna be fancy; share some shit.
Fuccboi’s main virtue is its honesty. Conroe writes about real shit, and he writes how he talks. But there are just a few hints that something else might be going on. Before his walk book, Conroe attempted to write another, on literature and femicide, a big ambitious tome on “why men were men, women women, and fathers rapists.” Later, he discovers that a friend he showed some passages to secretly thinks Conroe “tries to say too much in each sentence.” And so, years later, we end up with Fuccboi: a collection of sentences that don’t try to do anything at all.
Reading Fuccboi made me feel crazy. Conroe spends essentially the entire book congratulating himself for being raw and honest and genuine, and he does so in a mode that’s totally artificial and totally contrived.
It’s not just Fuccboi, of course. There’s a seam of enforced ingenuousness running through most of these books. Honor Levy peppers hers with apologies. “SORRY! WAS THE PRESENT TENSE ANNOYING? DO THESE CAPITAL LETTERS BOTHER YOU? SO SORRY!” Jordan Castro’s purposes also seem to require some soppy interactions with a dog. The reason I read Peter Vack’s novel Sillyboy is that when I took a photo of all my new alt-lit books and posted it online with the caption “I’m going to get to the bottom of this whole business—once and for all,” he reposted it and added: “@samrkriss bro buy Sillyboy for ur article bro come on bro u won’t get to the bottom of it unless u do bro seriously bro it’s not all 6 figure deals and pr teams bro it’s @c4gbooks books bro it’s pussy from alt lit 2.6 bro it’s the Manny roast bro it’s the Topos Too Ministry of Public Enlightenment bro.” I couldn’t parse most of the second half of that, but now, having read Sillyboy, I understand why Vack has endorsed the idea that his book belongs to something called “post-irony.” Post-irony is when you share so many incomprehensible memes that you can then write a leaden and hammy book about your male neurosis, featuring sentences like “Sillyboi came to LA, got a tattoo, and changed the spelling of his name—the conventional ‘y’ that cannot help but exist in a perpetual state of questioning ‘Y, Y, Why,’ replaced with the daring ‘I,’ the fuck-you ‘I,’ the ‘I’ that proclaims his new identity, his ‘I, I, I!’” and if anyone notices, it just means they’ve ambiently failed to get it.
Shortly before Fuccboi came out, it was the subject of a rebuke titled “FUCK, BOY!” by the writer Sam Pink. Pink alleged that Conroe had received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar advance while ripping off his style. “A kid who went to Swarthmore and Columbia using this kind of language as though it’s who he is, is just hilarious. It’s not even like, modern slang, it’s all from ten years ago. Which is probably what happens when you grow up on the internet and not actually around the streets you claim.” Much later, Conroe responded. “The thing that’s most backwards about Pink’s essay is the character attacks and slander, his claims about me being some ‘well connected rich kid’ who ‘manipulated’ my way into Fuccboi coming out how it did. … The meaning of this story is: when you listen to your inner calling and risk everything, take leaps of faith, have the courage to be vulnerable, to go against the grain, and stick to your vision even when the world denies you over and over, there’s still hope of finding a place for yourself in the world.” I don’t cite all this to take a position one way or the other. But it’s interesting that Conroe chooses to write his response like this. He’s laying himself bare here, defending his reputation: surely this is the time to use his rawest, most honest, most unaffected language. But he doesn’t say “Your essay is hella fkin sus bro. On God I just followed my dreams bro it’s like Yoooo how tf did I manipulate shit?” Why not?
To be clear, I don’t have any problem with writing that’s contrived and artificial; what I object to is contrived and artificial writing that pretends to be naïve and sincere. If it’s really all about having the courage to be vulnerable, I think the bravest thing would be to keep trying to do things with sentences, even at the risk of doing too much. A lot of alt lit strives toward a mode of writing that’s unmannered, unaffected and natural, which is, when you think about it, a deeply conservative ethos, even if what it produces doesn’t look much like the unmannered, unaffected and natural writing of the nineteenth century. You don’t need to exercise the creative imagination or try to forge a new and surprising path through words: just open up, express yourself, be real. Art is simply a way to, as Fuccboi has it, “INVESTIGATE YOURSELF, DOG!” And since the creative transformation of the world through art is fuckshit and a fuckboy move, art’s claim to importance comes solely from the honesty and authenticity of the author. This is why Conroe is so wounded by the accusation that he’s a phony: when everything is staked on sincerity, the work only has value if your authenticity is beyond reproach.
If critics have unfairly focused on the sceniness of this kind of writing, then, it’s at least partly because the writers have told us that the hipness of the author’s persona is the standard by which these works are to be judged. What I find weird, though, is the idea that in doing so, this hyper-sincere, hyper-vulnerable and hyper-personal writing is somehow different to the literary mainstream. MFA programs have been churning out plain, unaffected prose for decades now. It all reads like a confession, or a journal, or sometimes an accusation. Seven years ago, culture digested Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story “Cat Person” as if it were a true story, and set about trying to punish its villain. So much contemporary fiction—young-adult books in particular, but by no means exclusively—sells itself on the marginalized identities of its authors, rather than their writing or insight. A book is significant not for its literary qualities but because it’s by a queer woman of color, or because it offers an unflinching look at Asian American identity, or because it’s drawn from three generations of lived experience. How is the premise of Fuccboi or Sillyboy remotely different? In fact, both try to carve out their niche by representing the identity group that many believe is most deeply marginalized by the current publishing industry—that is, men. Our characters might ogle an ass every so often, but the form is the same. (By the end, we’re meant to understand that for all their flagrant tendencies, both Fuccboi and Sillyboi fundamentally have their hearts in the right place. Although Sillyboy at least actually describes a heterosexual sex act; Conroe can’t bring himself to do it.) How did the reactionary-chic lower-Manhattan underground end up expressing exactly the same fundamental view of art that Perez had identified with the brunching midtown mainstream?
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The other supposed difference between alt lit and ordinary lit is, supposedly, the subject matter. Alt lit delights in the mundane and the quotidian. There’s usually a relationship that neither party seems particularly interested in. Conversations that don’t really go anywhere or express anything significant. The flip side of earnestness is numbness, indifference. In fact, these books are usually consumed with the most boring thing any of us do, which is scrolling aimlessly on our phones.
Basically every review of Honor Levy’s My First Book has found it necessary to reproduce the first paragraph of its first story, which is called “Love Story,” so I may as well do the same. When you open the book, you’re greeted with this:
He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup R1b. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiiii. It was a meet-cute. They met. It was cute. Kawaii. UwU. The waifu went, pick me, and the statue did, like a tulip emoji. If their two lips had met he would have tasted seed oils, aspartame lip gloss, and apple red dye 40 on her tongue. She would have tasted creatine, raw milk, and slurs on his.
The people who only saw a screenshot of this first page seem to have hated it, hated it with an intensity only available to the brain-rotted and extremely online when they encounter something even more online and brain-rotted than themselves. This white-hot stream of Zoomer meme drivel. The rest of the story includes the phrases “/a/ poster arc,” “drink her bathwater,” “kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin,” “Rawr XD,” “withered Wojak,” “oneitis” and “RETVRN,” and I am not proud that I am 33 years old and got every single reference in the whole breathless thing. But some of the reviewers were forced to admit that there’s actually something quite compelling about this. And there is; I think “Love Story” is, ultimately, a good and interesting story; it gestures beyond the digital to a real romantic relationship. But it sets a pace that the rest of the book can’t quite match.
To be fair, there are other high points. The finale, “Pillow Angels,” has some similarly fun and interesting deployment of brain rot as a narrative medium. “We all want to be Dachau liberation day—skinny for spring break on Little Saint James.” “ISIS blew up the moon.” Sometimes Levy’s sentences are perfect. A story called “The End” features an interlude on Xipe Totec—the flayed one, god of maize, who wears the skin of the sacrifice victim as a coat—and American apocalypse. “He let them turn him into syrup. His revenge is sweet.” (This may as well have been written to attract my interest in particular.) But after a few paragraphs on Aztec religion and Mormon supersoldiers, the interlude ends. “First-person-present mode activated, sorry.”
Honor Levy could be a very interesting writer if she could write more about the things that are actually interesting. But instead, she has to live up to her advance PR as the voice of Generation Z, which means she has to write about online. So you get stories like “Internet Girl,” in which her narrator mentions being eleven years old and performing for strangers on webcam. “One point for showing my tongue. Another for showing my bare feet. Flash the camera for five points. Take off our shirts for more. Twirl around the room and so on and so on until I am naked and I have won.” It’s an interesting, unsettling image. It deserves better than to slop about in a story that’s not much more than a chum-bucket of disconnected references to Neopets and Club Penguin and DeviantArt. The encounter is interesting, but the cultural infrastructure that surrounds it is not. Even the physical infrastructure would be a better counterpoint. Instead of writing the names of all these websites, she may as well have talked about modems and network switches and border gateway protocols—the precise copper content of the wire that carries naked eleven-year-olds to a stranger’s screen.
It’s weird that the alt-litterateurs think there’s something radical in all this authenticity stuff, but it’s downright baffling that they think there’s anything remotely subversive in being online. That’s the whole of contemporary literature! A good chunk of My First Book is taken up by “Z Was for Zoomer,” a series of mini essays on an alphabetical list of internet terms. Autism, based, cringe, doomer, edgelord. Levy thinks millennials’ memes are weak, but here she’s adopting a very distinctly millennial form, which is the sort-of introspective essay about some facet of internet culture. “Cringe is a response in our core, in the pit of your stomach. It is both a judgment and a fear, natural and created by the ideas we hold.” It’s giving Jia Tolentino. It’s giving all the hundreds of books of essays about growing up online by people in their thirties. There’s no lack of mainstream fiction doing the same general thing, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. But really that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok. The recent glut of normie novels about trying to be a good person, or minor racial contretemps between professional-class narcissists, or hot girlies who don’t really do anything in particular—all of these are attuned to the sensibilities of an implicitly online public, whose sense of what might be an interesting topic for literature is downloaded directly from Twitter. The most mainstream Obama-endorsed fiction is now more like a feed than anything else: a series of sharp little lines, minute observations, quips, for you to quote on social media. The whole culture industry is just the internet’s auto-coprophagy, feeding its own waste back into the system. You are not radical or cutting-edge because you remember Neopets.
There are, it’s true, some internet-native forms that might have literary promise: the fake Reddit r/AmItheAsshole story, and the 4chan greentext. Both of these, though, are structured modes for telling ordinary, narrative stories about psychotic family members or your own autistic blunders. Often they involve the kind of rooting around beneath the surface of the world, extracting moral meaning from ordinary social events, that used to be the job of thick realist novels. Why did I act this way? Why did my mother-in-law? Here’s a greentext:
>be me
>girl i know is a nursing student
>solid 9/10
>tells me she knows how to test for testicular cancer and can show me
>tell her i learned in health class in high school and can do myself
>i’m pretty sure i’m a fucking idiot
Here are some titles of r/AmItheAsshole stories:
AITA for despising my mentally handicap sister?
AITA for suing my girlfriend after she had my 1967 impala project taken to the scrapyard?
AITA for refusing to pay for my sister’s husband’s surgery with my inheritance/college money?
AITA for kicking out one of my bridesmaids for showing up in the wrong dress?
You might notice what’s missing here. Nobody would read a story on the internet that’s about being on the internet, how crazy it is that we’re all online, wow, floating around in the delirious stream of it all, visiting various websites and using apps, so cool, so now. That stuff only ever comes up in print. Maybe the best thing you can say about the internet is that it still has the capacity to occasionally refer to things other than itself.
This is why I think “Love Story” is the most successful story in Levy’s book: not because of its molten stream of memespeak, but because in many ways it’s the most conventional, and the least about the internet. Unlike the other stories, it has two well-defined characters and a plot that proceeds in a straightforward linear fashion. The boy and the girl fantasize about each other through concepts they’ve received online. They chat about nothing. But eventually she starts to feel his interest waning, and in a last-ditch effort she sends him a nude. “There she was on his screen, in his hand, all of her, a small pale animal thing, scarred and scared in the fluorescent public bathroom light.” A sudden irruption of the real, somatic, sensuous world into this abstract digitized noosphere. He’s repulsed. “Ew. Frailty. Roastie. Deuteronomy 22:20-21. Done. Get thee to a nunnery. Begone Thot.” Now we see the girl behind the anime waifu. “She crawls into an unmade bed, feral girl summer, mouse mode in her burrow, vermin instincts kicking in.” But then he has a change of heart. “It hit him, something sent from the beyond, a burning white light, a growing echo of music, the opening notes of MGMT’s ‘Little Dark Age.’ And then it began: images flashing, hyperspeed through his mind … Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward.” He decides to commit to being in love. “He wanted her now as she was: messy and pure, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, this thing to be called woman.”
I don’t read this as a particularly happy ending. Our marble-statue avatar can only incorporate his online girlfriend’s physical being by translating it back into the language of MGMT meme edits, reincorporating it on the terrain of the abstract and bloodless. Maybe Levy would disagree. But this is why “Love Story” is a genuinely good story: it’s an autonomous artistic object rather than a decorative fragment of its author; it has that gap between words and meanings through which literature can seep in.
There’s a similar attempt to put the internet back in its real-world context in Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. The entire book takes place over maybe two and a half hours, exhaustively documenting everything a wannabe writer does as he distracts himself from working on his novel. When he makes yerba mate, Castro describes every sip in psychotically precise detail. “I pursed my lips, inhaling air with the hot tea in a burst of focused sucking, a small sip, the tea touching my tongue but not the roof of my mouth.” When he goes to the toilet we hear about that too. “I made sure to apply pressure carefully while wiping, once, from front to back; my legs buzzed as I leaned forward, my thighs pressing into the rounded edge of the seat.” Later he becomes upset that one side of the toilet paper is more soiled than the other. But the upshot of all this is that when our novelist is sitting on the toilet, using his phone, there’s no giddy excitement about all the lurid streams of information and derangement pouring into his bathroom. Just a very precise account of what it’s actually like to go online:
Sitting on the toilet, I exited Instagram, having only been on it for five or so seconds, and then immediately reopened it. I scrolled, swiping up with my thumb and tapping gently on the screen to stop the scroll at each picture: the face of a writer who I’d never met; an ominous Japanese-seeming structure; a friend’s painting; a plate containing baked beans, white bread, eggs, and what appeared to be breaded fish. I double-clicked the circle button at the bottom of my phone and swiped repeatedly up, exiting Instagram, as well as all the other apps that had been open: Safari, Twitter, iMessage, Apple Music, and Gmail. I tapped the Safari icon … which brought me to the internet on my phone, which looked different than on my laptop. Here, there were two rows of icons: the top, unlabeled, containing links to the Apple website and the Bing, Google, and Yahoo! search engines; the bottom contained frequently visited websites—Twitter and Facebook.
I tapped Twitter, then double-clicked the circle button at the bottom of my phone and swiped up, exiting everything. I instantly reopened the internet and tapped Facebook. I tapped the notifications button and, seeing no new notifications, double-clicked the circle button at the bottom of my phone and swiped up. My behavior barely entered my consciousness; I was like a mouse in a laboratory, reacting to stimuli.
I tapped Instagram.
The novelist in The Novelist is not called Jordan Castro. He’s writing a piece of autofiction about an earlier time in his life, when he was very Fuccboiishly taking and selling a lot of drugs and occasionally waking in the middle of the night to projectile-shit all over his walls. Now he drinks yerba mate and calls shit poop. The authentic self he’s trying to perform on the page no longer exists, but that’s not why he finds it impossible to actually write his novel: he thinks the problem is that it’s in the third-person present tense, which has rendered it “lifeless and voiceless and empty and bad.” Meanwhile, what’s really preventing him from writing anything is the fact that he’s constantly scrolling blankly through social media. In particular, he’s haunted by another writer who is called Jordan Castro, a deeply controversial literary figure, constantly making crazed pronouncements and writing “body-fascist” novels that are rejected by all right-thinking people. “I looked at Jordan Castro’s Twitter frequently, but didn’t follow him, because I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why I followed him.” Our novelist worries that Jordan Castro would probably dismiss his novel. Toward the end of the book, he decides to abandon his current project and write a piece of invective against an obnoxious bien-pensant novelist friend called Eric. “Eric is dismissive of anything counterintuitive, of anything paradoxical, of anything requiring real effort, I wrote. He is afraid, and egotistical, and lazy.” He’s finally writing, getting into the flow of it. But then, without any real decision on his part, his satire starts turning into a pompous manifesto. He’s writing about how Eric fears suffering, but suffering is part of what makes life tangible, and how meaning allows us to transcend our material conditions, and how the external world comes into being through the internal. Stuff he doesn’t believe, and which doesn’t even really make sense. “I was almost entirely taking on the tone and worldview of Jordan Castro.”
It’s not just that the internet distracts you from making art: the situation is much worse than that. It sidles into the process itself. It replaces your thoughts and words with the thoughts of a digital entity that is not quite yourself but not quite something else either.
I liked The Novelist. It’s genuinely funny; it plays around with the self rather than breathlessly insisting on it; it has enough self-awareness to be charming rather than annoying. It knows how to deploy a little bit of knowing irony, which makes it much more pleasant to read than some piece of frenetic, earnest self-exposure. But while The Novelist accurately diagnoses the problem with trying to produce fiction in the internet age, it doesn’t really offer up any new alternatives. In many ways, this is a very old-fashioned type of novel. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, who sometimes seem to think literary prose was invented in 2014, Castro is willing to read books from the past. Authors who are no longer young and beautiful, who you would not run into at anyone’s party, who might even be very unfashionably dead. Thomas Bernhard is an obvious influence; in issue 32 of this publication, he cited Nicholson Baker as another. But the meandering details and the ambiguous self-insertion reminded me more of Martin Amis. It was Amis who had the idea of calling his character John Self, and then introducing a slightly pathetic background figure called Martin Amis. Amis was a radical and innovative artist, forty years ago.
In the last pages of The Novelist, our nameless narrator has another idea for a book, one like Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but “instead of sitting in a wing chair at an artistic dinner, the protagonist could be sitting in front of his laptop, looking at social media.” Once, novelists engaged with the literary past to explore all the different things you can do with words. Joyce regurgitating the entire canon in a single chapter of Ulysses. Castro’s gaze is narrower, and he does it for a very different reason. His return to other, older forms is ultimately a way of indicating what’s been lost, what’s no longer possible. All experiments are over. We are not going anywhere other than where we are. The last line: “I continued on the path then turned around.”
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To be honest, I don’t know either how to get out of this bind and start moving again. I’m not sure what it would take to make literature feel genuinely vital and necessary again. My current best plan is to set off a series of small but loud bombs across New York such that if you mapped out the explosions they would spell the words PLEASE CONSIDER WRITING ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN YOURSELF. But maybe I don’t need to resort to terrorism. Within the world of alt lit, at least, there are a few signs that things might improve.
Matthew Davis’s book Let Me Try Again is squarely aimed at the heart of the alt-lit scene. It doesn’t just have an Honor Levy blurb; she also turns up in a party scene toward the end. It’s published by a press that markets itself as “the house of the canceled,” with titles from Alex Jones, Woody Allen and other authors dropped by more mainstream imprints. Davis promoted his book on Red Scare. But it’s also an honest-to-God satire. The narrator of Let Me Try Again is a prudish Gen Z hypersperg called Ross Mathcamp who says things like “I was about eight-elevenths done with the shake.” Ross thinks he’s the most brilliant person alive. He doesn’t understand why people get so upset by all his brilliant ideas, like solving the abortion debate by issuing everyone a single abortion voucher, and then allowing them to freely trade the vouchers on an open market. (If you oppose abortion, you can express your preferences by simply refusing to sell your voucher.) In the first paragraph he misuses the word “inimical.” The book is not achingly raw and honest; it’s an extended joke at its narrator’s expense. There’s an actual ironic distance at work, a gap between author and text, rather than the ersatz irony that’s produced whenever a writer references enough memes in print. Maybe it’s not great that I’m forced to praise a book simply for rediscovering one of the basic functions of writing, but here we are. Admittedly, some of the book’s jokes fall flat; there are repeated attempts at physical slapstick, which does not work in a purely text-based medium. It could have used the attention of a publisher that wasn’t also working on books like Profiles of the Vaccine-Injured: “A Lifetime Price to Pay.” Still, this book is still trying to do things, even at the risk of failing. A few steps back out into the wide domain of the possible.
One of the failures of Let Me Try Again, though, is especially notable. My copy arrived with a note from a PR person describing the novel as a “literary exploration of love, grief, and obsession,” and drawing my attention to the chapter in which the narrator’s teenage sister suddenly decides to convert from secular Judaism to traditionalist Catholicism, citing the Gospel of Matthew and G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. This thread is one of the weakest in the book. There’s no satire and no insight; the sister simply regurgitates some Christological arguments and demands Ross baptize her, which he does, using a “World’s #1 Older Brother” mug. But it’s easy to understand why it’s there: lately, a lot of edgy young women are professing a newfound faith in the Catholic Church; Honor Levy is one of them. Because Let Me Try Again is a satire, responding to the particular milieu it comes out of, the nowness of its now, it has to represent this particular trend, or else it’ll be out of date. But it’s also very obvious that the reason so many young people are falling into the clutches of Rome is that they’re exhausted by the present. More interesting than God or the miracle at Fatima is the weight of the Church itself: all its layers of canon laws and rites and traditions, building up on top of each other like two thousand years of grime. The mosaics, the ruins. You don’t have to chase after every facet of this basically thin and tedious present that keeps producing books about itself: you can plunge into eternity instead. Matthew Davis the Catholic might understand this; Matthew Davis the writer does not.
Maybe the most promising of the alt-lit books I read was Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel. A good chunk of the book is still taken up by stories about being young and a girl, young and upper-middle-class and an American and a girl in the age of online. Cash, like Levy, writes about Neopets starving to death. (If one writer does this, it’s a fun quirky image; two, and there’s something in the water.) But there are also experiments in something else, a direct engagement with the texture of words and worlds. Some of the vignettes are directly satirical: a marketing agency tasked with rebranding Islamic terrorism; a lonely woman who hires strangers from the internet to join her for a thirtieth-birthday slumber party. But there are weirder combinations too; images that might be satirical if they referred directly to anything tangible, but instead unsettle from just the other side of familiarity. Biblical plagues slowly becoming normality, shading into the language of teen gossip. Blood and frogs, but “Madeline brought the lice. That one wasn’t God. Madeline brought the lice from a boarding school in Vermont.” In Let Me Try Again, teenage girls suddenly start talking about God; here, God is suddenly cast as a kind of teenage girl. Another frenemy on your contacts list. The slumber party experience includes prank calls, Bitcoin mining and group sex. At the end they freeze our narrator’s eggs. “I say I’ve always imagined having a family the old-fashioned way. She says, ‘I’m not paid to indulge in pipe dreams. I’m paid to facilitate the classic slumber party experience which entails understanding our limits as people.’” Later, there’s a world in which the big hyper-invasive tech company collecting data on everyone is only doing so to sell you personalized scent pods. “Those who ate the pods and survived later developed grotesque ailments like flesh-eating rashes and fevers and late-onset Schizophrenia and the longest recorded nosebleed in history.” One character’s boyfriend sometimes “tosses the scent pods to the squirrels in her front yard and makes her watch as they eat them, their little bodies writhing and contorting until they slowly shut down.” She “tries not to read too much into this.”
I think this is a more interesting way of writing about the present: one that’s shot through with something else. Little pieces of a more mythic past, or a crueler future, scattered into the familiar LA scene.
A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being. A few people are trying. Lately Tao Lin has been giving lectures on DMT and near-death experiences; he believes fully and sincerely that there is a life after death—in other words, a life after the self. Maybe Sean Thor Conroe should have another go at that big book he intended to write, the one about why “men were men, women women, and fathers rapists”—the one he abandoned to write about himself instead.
Art credit: Shuang Li, The portrait of the Artist as a young man, 2023. Resin, acrylic paint, charms, fabric; 21 × 17 × 2 in. Courtesy of Peres Projects.
Here’s a fun game we can play. I’m going to give you some quotes from a few recently published novels. Some of them are vaguely associated with an infamous downtown scene in New York. In this scene everyone’s either young or cool or beautiful, and they’re all skinny and smoke cigarettes, and they laugh at all the fussy pieties of the world, and they’re all constantly online while also constantly going to parties. According to the young, cool and beautiful people, they’re trying to find a new and authentic literary voice in an age of social and technological disintegration. They’re trying to carve out their own space, away from the prissy bullshit of the mainstream literary world, where they can write something real. They’re enraptured by the surging raw nowness of the internet, and they think literature that tries to rise above that is just blinding itself to the way we actually live today. They want to bear witness to their times, and yes, they want to have fun and look good while doing it, because otherwise what’s the point?
According to people who mostly don’t get invited to their parties, these people are all fascists. When they say they’re just interested in art and beauty, they mean they want the freedom to be evil. And it’s true, there are weird energies sloshing around. Coke and ketamine, flash photography, but also Simone Weil, a primly overserious Catholic piety, an austerity, a hunger for order. Weight lifting. Avant-gardes have not always been interested in opening up new freedoms for everyone. Art is not always innocent.
Anyway, some of the lines I’m about to quote come from this cool and possibly evil scene. Others are from two other contemporary writers. One is Sally Rooney, the fantastically successful but fundamentally very unhip millennial novelist. Her characters are all consumed by the question of how to be good people under late capitalism. Books for people whose gums come down too low over their teeth. I don’t think anyone has ever accused Sally Rooney of being a fascist, although she has had some pushback over her unwavering solidarity with Palestine. The second is Rupi Kaur, the most successful poet to have never actually read any poetry. Her books are read by people who introduce themselves by asking your star sign and then, before you can respond, immediately start talking about themselves for 45 minutes. She has sold over twelve million of them. Nobody has ever accused her of being a fascist either.
All you have to do is work out which of these lines come from the basic, normie literary mainstream, and which come from the weird, dangerous, redpilled avant-garde. Here they are:
Give it a think. If you’re curious, the answer is that number three is from Rupi Kaur’s the sun and her flowers, with some capitalization added to make it slightly less obvious, and number four is from Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. One of the names for the scene that the rest of the lines come out of is alt lit. But alternative how? Alternative to what?
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According to the writers of the downtown scene, mainstream literature has backed itself into a dead end. I don’t disagree. We are systematically eradicating every single creature on the face of this planet except pigs, chickens and cows, while carrying out a generational scientific experiment on our children, in which we hook them up to an infinite digital dopamine drip from the day they’re born and see what happens. (So far, we’ve discovered that they don’t learn how to read or form ordinary social or sexual relationships, and that many turn into some kind of deranged political extremist.) A large and growing proportion of our written text is being generated by machines. Our culture seems to be spiraling into a feedback loop of homogenized thoughts and ideas, where originality is sidelined in favor of the predictable and the algorithmically optimized. In fact, one of those machines wrote the last 28 words, from “our culture seems” on. The ground is collapsing under our feet, and mainstream literature’s response is to publish hundreds of books about grief, intergenerational trauma, and a teenage girl’s struggle to accept herself.
Back in 2022, the critic Alex Perez kicked off a brief firestorm when, in an interview with Hobart magazine, he attributed the tedium of mainstream fiction to the fact that “80% of agents/editors/publishers are white women from a certain background and sensibility” who “want to wear their little tote bags and hang out in their midtown Manhattan offices with their fellow career gals and go to lunch and brunch.” Most of the editors at Hobart resigned in protest at the interview—“regressive, harmful, and also just boring writing”—but Perez was far from the only person saying this kind of thing. Just the previous year, none other than Sally Rooney had put a broadly similar sentiment in the mouth of one of her ambiguously autobiographical characters. “Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who’s publishing who in New York. … Why do they pretend to be obsessed with death and grief and fascism—when really they’re obsessed with whether their latest book will be reviewed in the New York Times?” Maybe you get off easier if you don’t bring gender and class into it. Or maybe at a certain point you get famous enough that you stop having to squeal honeyed compliments every time some acquaintance publishes a book, and you can say what’s plainly true: that most of this stuff is flimsy, bloodless and totally insufficient to the world as it actually is. So if something comes along that claims to be an alternative, that feels like the sort of claim that might be worth evaluating.
But weirdly, this is not what critics have been doing. Instead, the alt-lit books have come sheathed in a big wad of discourse, and most of that discourse has been, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the scene. I’m mildly fascinated by scenes, in the same way that I’m interested in capitalism and religion and magic and every other system that assigns value to things based on its own mysterious set of criteria running entirely orthogonal to quality. But the existence of this particular scene is not noteworthy in itself. Writers have always done this. Actors hang out with other actors, musicians hang out with other musicians, tax accountants hang out with other tax accountants and writers hang out with other writers. They go to parties and marry each other’s exes and write books about it, and then their friends all pretend those books are better than they actually are: this is the world. There have also always been writers who hate all this incest and clannishness so much that they barely write about anything else. Wyndham Lewis wrote Tarr more than a century ago and it’s one long howl against the smug pink scene of mediocre artists all living off their parents’ money. It’s Montparnasse instead of Dimes Square, but nothing really changes. The thing that actually matters about a scene is the work it produces. So I decided to read the work.
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I ended up reading seven very different books, published between 2021 and 2024, but almost all of them have one very significant thing in common. According to my edition’s back cover, Tao Lin’s Leave Society is “deeply felt.” The inside flap of Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi promises a “searching examination of what it means to be a man.” Dasha Nekrasova’s blurb for Peter Vack’s Sillyboy calls it “agonizingly honest.” Honor Levy’s My First Book “illuminates what it is,” per its catalog copy, to be “completely sincere.” Meanwhile, Levy’s own blurb for Matthew Davis’s Let Me Try Again says it’s “beyond irony and sincerity” but also “just real.” Interview magazine praised the “disarming sincerity” of Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. Everything wants you to know that it’s very sincere.
I found it confusing at first, the sincerity. Before I decided to read the work, my only exposure to alt lit had been Lin’s Leave Society, which I’d read on the recommendation of the art critic Dean Kissick, who’s a sort of downtown-scene fixture. He suggested I read Leave Society because Lin writes about steppe nomads, and I have a deep admiration for steppe nomads—although, he warned, Lin is “firmly opposed to them.” So I read Leave Society. It’s about a writer called Li who is sick and wants to be well. He spends his nights reading PDFs about all the ways that society makes people sick. Nuclear radiation, electromagnetic radiation, pesticides, sleep-disrupting blue light, fluoridated water, “unnatural frequencies” and the “broken human-nature symbiosis” that “caused cancer and other diseases.” When he was a teenager, his lung collapsed; he’s “suspected since middle school that he was constantly being poisoned and/or that he was cursed.” Now he’s discovering “that both and more seemed to be true—he was radioactive, malnourished, dysbiotic, degenerate, brainwashed, brain damaged.” He learns that the world is irreparably broken because six thousand years ago a peaceful, matriarchal, nature-worshipping society was violently overthrown by a cruel “dominator culture” from out of the steppe, who worship Yahweh and spray their crops with poison. The only way to be well in a poisonous society is to leave.
Most of the book consists of Li’s attempt to exit this poisonous world by constantly terrorizing his Taiwanese parents. He forces his father to have his mercury fillings removed, and to stop taking statins. “Statins, he’d read, caused cancer, depression, amnesia, dementia, and other problems, like twitching.” He hectors his mother into dropping her thyroid medication and swapping white rice for fermented kohlrabi, since “starch fed a species of bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae.” He drags them both on regular healthy walks in the mountains. (To his credit, he’s kind to the family dog, an elderly poodle called Dudu.) Despite it all, Li is still constantly in pain. He spends most of the book vomiting, celibate, regularly dosing himself with weed and LSD, talking to his parents and his agent and no one else. Few of his attempts at getting well go as planned—for instance, when he tries cayenne pepper as a natural headache remedy. “In the library, he swallowed two capsules at a time with chamomile tea. At 5:52 p.m., minutes after ingesting all six capsules, he stood with increasingly troubling pain. He entered a bathroom, sat on a toilet, put his glasses on the floor, and held his head, moaning. He vomited reddish water.”
I assumed that Leave Society was a deeply ironic book. All I knew about Tao Lin was that he belonged to the original alt-lit movement, which emerged in the early 2010s and borrowed its forms and themes from the internet, and that he was the link between the original movement and its even more online second wave. Since the internet is a kind of theater, reconfiguring the entire planet into a stage for your self-performance, in which the authenticity of the voice is always in question and nobody knows you’re a dog, it made sense that this would be a playful, ironic kind of fiction. Here, the dramatic irony is that everything Li does to make himself well is just feeding the neuroses that are so obviously the real source of his sickness. If there’s never any moment where the book says so explicitly, it’s because its irony is so consummate: it wears a straight face throughout; the facade never cracks. I mentioned this to Dean and he told me I’d got it wrong. “Tao Lin is very much autofiction, not at all ironic, militantly unironic even.” He was right. Some of Lin’s most recently published material is an essay about how he’s using medicinal leeches to remove microplastics and glyphosates from his bloodstream. This follows a 7,500-word essay on how he cured his autism by eating sauerkraut. It has 127 footnotes.
There is, in fact, something luminous about Tao Lin’s sincerity. I feel bad for having ever doubted it, for viewing everything through my own damaged cynicism. I don’t think he’s right about starch being poisonous and I certainly don’t think he’s right that he’s cured his autism, but his simplicity is great and placid and immovable, like a mountain; all you can really do is admire it. When Boris Pasternak’s name came up in one of the execution lists, Stalin is supposed to have crossed it out and said, “Leave that holy fool alone.” I don’t feel the same generosity toward Fuccboi.
Fuccboi feels like it ought to be some kind of a joke. For one thing, it’s called Fuccboi. There’s a big fantasy-style map at the front of the book of “Philly in the Time of Fuccboi.” Also, if you open up the book to a random page, as I just did, you discover the whole thing is written like, well, this:
But Fuccboi is not a joke. Map and title aside, I think Fuccboi might be the most po-faced, self-serious novel I have ever read in my life. It is, as Hermione Hoby noted in Bookforum, a Künstlerroman: the story of how an artist came to maturity. Here, the artist is called Sean Thor Conroe, and Fuccboi is the chronicle of how he “committed whole hog to that Art Life” and wrote his masterpiece, which is, of course, none other than Fuccboi itself. According to the marketing copy, this book is “slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself.” But there is nothing even remotely sly going on. We are meant to be very impressed by the way Fuccboi name-drops Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke and Bolaño—he went to Swarthmore—while also taking loads of drugs, calling everyone bro or bae, and saying things like “what I’m finna do, bruh, is fuck up this torta!” We are meant to be charmed by his sensitivity and self-awareness, and by the way this sensitive and self-aware boy still manages to keep it 100 percent real and raw. We are meant to empathize with his struggles, which are many. Fuccboi is living in mostly self-imposed poverty, delivering Postmates and inhabiting increasingly sus areas of Philadelphia. He has a debilitating skin condition and he’s not truly over his ex bae. He’s trying to write a book about his attempt to walk across the United States from coast to coast, but an “editor bae” keeps making him remove “every savage, ugly, testosterone-fueled, shameful thing it had been the most difficult to write. … Everything I wrote so others might be more aware of such flagrant tendencies in themselves.”
This, clearly, is the book in which he gets to be savage. Fuccboi has very little time for mainstream “literature,” which means “insulated, masturbatory bullshit completely irrelevant to the culture.” Later, he delivers a kind of manifesto:
Fuccboi’s main virtue is its honesty. Conroe writes about real shit, and he writes how he talks. But there are just a few hints that something else might be going on. Before his walk book, Conroe attempted to write another, on literature and femicide, a big ambitious tome on “why men were men, women women, and fathers rapists.” Later, he discovers that a friend he showed some passages to secretly thinks Conroe “tries to say too much in each sentence.” And so, years later, we end up with Fuccboi: a collection of sentences that don’t try to do anything at all.
Reading Fuccboi made me feel crazy. Conroe spends essentially the entire book congratulating himself for being raw and honest and genuine, and he does so in a mode that’s totally artificial and totally contrived.
It’s not just Fuccboi, of course. There’s a seam of enforced ingenuousness running through most of these books. Honor Levy peppers hers with apologies. “SORRY! WAS THE PRESENT TENSE ANNOYING? DO THESE CAPITAL LETTERS BOTHER YOU? SO SORRY!” Jordan Castro’s purposes also seem to require some soppy interactions with a dog. The reason I read Peter Vack’s novel Sillyboy is that when I took a photo of all my new alt-lit books and posted it online with the caption “I’m going to get to the bottom of this whole business—once and for all,” he reposted it and added: “@samrkriss bro buy Sillyboy for ur article bro come on bro u won’t get to the bottom of it unless u do bro seriously bro it’s not all 6 figure deals and pr teams bro it’s @c4gbooks books bro it’s pussy from alt lit 2.6 bro it’s the Manny roast bro it’s the Topos Too Ministry of Public Enlightenment bro.” I couldn’t parse most of the second half of that, but now, having read Sillyboy, I understand why Vack has endorsed the idea that his book belongs to something called “post-irony.” Post-irony is when you share so many incomprehensible memes that you can then write a leaden and hammy book about your male neurosis, featuring sentences like “Sillyboi came to LA, got a tattoo, and changed the spelling of his name—the conventional ‘y’ that cannot help but exist in a perpetual state of questioning ‘Y, Y, Why,’ replaced with the daring ‘I,’ the fuck-you ‘I,’ the ‘I’ that proclaims his new identity, his ‘I, I, I!’” and if anyone notices, it just means they’ve ambiently failed to get it.
Shortly before Fuccboi came out, it was the subject of a rebuke titled “FUCK, BOY!” by the writer Sam Pink. Pink alleged that Conroe had received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar advance while ripping off his style. “A kid who went to Swarthmore and Columbia using this kind of language as though it’s who he is, is just hilarious. It’s not even like, modern slang, it’s all from ten years ago. Which is probably what happens when you grow up on the internet and not actually around the streets you claim.” Much later, Conroe responded. “The thing that’s most backwards about Pink’s essay is the character attacks and slander, his claims about me being some ‘well connected rich kid’ who ‘manipulated’ my way into Fuccboi coming out how it did. … The meaning of this story is: when you listen to your inner calling and risk everything, take leaps of faith, have the courage to be vulnerable, to go against the grain, and stick to your vision even when the world denies you over and over, there’s still hope of finding a place for yourself in the world.” I don’t cite all this to take a position one way or the other. But it’s interesting that Conroe chooses to write his response like this. He’s laying himself bare here, defending his reputation: surely this is the time to use his rawest, most honest, most unaffected language. But he doesn’t say “Your essay is hella fkin sus bro. On God I just followed my dreams bro it’s like Yoooo how tf did I manipulate shit?” Why not?
To be clear, I don’t have any problem with writing that’s contrived and artificial; what I object to is contrived and artificial writing that pretends to be naïve and sincere. If it’s really all about having the courage to be vulnerable, I think the bravest thing would be to keep trying to do things with sentences, even at the risk of doing too much. A lot of alt lit strives toward a mode of writing that’s unmannered, unaffected and natural, which is, when you think about it, a deeply conservative ethos, even if what it produces doesn’t look much like the unmannered, unaffected and natural writing of the nineteenth century. You don’t need to exercise the creative imagination or try to forge a new and surprising path through words: just open up, express yourself, be real. Art is simply a way to, as Fuccboi has it, “INVESTIGATE YOURSELF, DOG!” And since the creative transformation of the world through art is fuckshit and a fuckboy move, art’s claim to importance comes solely from the honesty and authenticity of the author. This is why Conroe is so wounded by the accusation that he’s a phony: when everything is staked on sincerity, the work only has value if your authenticity is beyond reproach.
If critics have unfairly focused on the sceniness of this kind of writing, then, it’s at least partly because the writers have told us that the hipness of the author’s persona is the standard by which these works are to be judged. What I find weird, though, is the idea that in doing so, this hyper-sincere, hyper-vulnerable and hyper-personal writing is somehow different to the literary mainstream. MFA programs have been churning out plain, unaffected prose for decades now. It all reads like a confession, or a journal, or sometimes an accusation. Seven years ago, culture digested Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story “Cat Person” as if it were a true story, and set about trying to punish its villain. So much contemporary fiction—young-adult books in particular, but by no means exclusively—sells itself on the marginalized identities of its authors, rather than their writing or insight. A book is significant not for its literary qualities but because it’s by a queer woman of color, or because it offers an unflinching look at Asian American identity, or because it’s drawn from three generations of lived experience. How is the premise of Fuccboi or Sillyboy remotely different? In fact, both try to carve out their niche by representing the identity group that many believe is most deeply marginalized by the current publishing industry—that is, men. Our characters might ogle an ass every so often, but the form is the same. (By the end, we’re meant to understand that for all their flagrant tendencies, both Fuccboi and Sillyboi fundamentally have their hearts in the right place. Although Sillyboy at least actually describes a heterosexual sex act; Conroe can’t bring himself to do it.) How did the reactionary-chic lower-Manhattan underground end up expressing exactly the same fundamental view of art that Perez had identified with the brunching midtown mainstream?
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The other supposed difference between alt lit and ordinary lit is, supposedly, the subject matter. Alt lit delights in the mundane and the quotidian. There’s usually a relationship that neither party seems particularly interested in. Conversations that don’t really go anywhere or express anything significant. The flip side of earnestness is numbness, indifference. In fact, these books are usually consumed with the most boring thing any of us do, which is scrolling aimlessly on our phones.
Basically every review of Honor Levy’s My First Book has found it necessary to reproduce the first paragraph of its first story, which is called “Love Story,” so I may as well do the same. When you open the book, you’re greeted with this:
The people who only saw a screenshot of this first page seem to have hated it, hated it with an intensity only available to the brain-rotted and extremely online when they encounter something even more online and brain-rotted than themselves. This white-hot stream of Zoomer meme drivel. The rest of the story includes the phrases “/a/ poster arc,” “drink her bathwater,” “kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin,” “Rawr XD,” “withered Wojak,” “oneitis” and “RETVRN,” and I am not proud that I am 33 years old and got every single reference in the whole breathless thing. But some of the reviewers were forced to admit that there’s actually something quite compelling about this. And there is; I think “Love Story” is, ultimately, a good and interesting story; it gestures beyond the digital to a real romantic relationship. But it sets a pace that the rest of the book can’t quite match.
To be fair, there are other high points. The finale, “Pillow Angels,” has some similarly fun and interesting deployment of brain rot as a narrative medium. “We all want to be Dachau liberation day—skinny for spring break on Little Saint James.” “ISIS blew up the moon.” Sometimes Levy’s sentences are perfect. A story called “The End” features an interlude on Xipe Totec—the flayed one, god of maize, who wears the skin of the sacrifice victim as a coat—and American apocalypse. “He let them turn him into syrup. His revenge is sweet.” (This may as well have been written to attract my interest in particular.) But after a few paragraphs on Aztec religion and Mormon supersoldiers, the interlude ends. “First-person-present mode activated, sorry.”
Honor Levy could be a very interesting writer if she could write more about the things that are actually interesting. But instead, she has to live up to her advance PR as the voice of Generation Z, which means she has to write about online. So you get stories like “Internet Girl,” in which her narrator mentions being eleven years old and performing for strangers on webcam. “One point for showing my tongue. Another for showing my bare feet. Flash the camera for five points. Take off our shirts for more. Twirl around the room and so on and so on until I am naked and I have won.” It’s an interesting, unsettling image. It deserves better than to slop about in a story that’s not much more than a chum-bucket of disconnected references to Neopets and Club Penguin and DeviantArt. The encounter is interesting, but the cultural infrastructure that surrounds it is not. Even the physical infrastructure would be a better counterpoint. Instead of writing the names of all these websites, she may as well have talked about modems and network switches and border gateway protocols—the precise copper content of the wire that carries naked eleven-year-olds to a stranger’s screen.
It’s weird that the alt-litterateurs think there’s something radical in all this authenticity stuff, but it’s downright baffling that they think there’s anything remotely subversive in being online. That’s the whole of contemporary literature! A good chunk of My First Book is taken up by “Z Was for Zoomer,” a series of mini essays on an alphabetical list of internet terms. Autism, based, cringe, doomer, edgelord. Levy thinks millennials’ memes are weak, but here she’s adopting a very distinctly millennial form, which is the sort-of introspective essay about some facet of internet culture. “Cringe is a response in our core, in the pit of your stomach. It is both a judgment and a fear, natural and created by the ideas we hold.” It’s giving Jia Tolentino. It’s giving all the hundreds of books of essays about growing up online by people in their thirties. There’s no lack of mainstream fiction doing the same general thing, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection. But really that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Everything that’s published now is shaped by the forms and concerns of online, whether it’s explicitly about the internet or not. Our bestselling poets write what are essentially Instagram captions. Publishers live or die at the mercy of BookTok. The recent glut of normie novels about trying to be a good person, or minor racial contretemps between professional-class narcissists, or hot girlies who don’t really do anything in particular—all of these are attuned to the sensibilities of an implicitly online public, whose sense of what might be an interesting topic for literature is downloaded directly from Twitter. The most mainstream Obama-endorsed fiction is now more like a feed than anything else: a series of sharp little lines, minute observations, quips, for you to quote on social media. The whole culture industry is just the internet’s auto-coprophagy, feeding its own waste back into the system. You are not radical or cutting-edge because you remember Neopets.
There are, it’s true, some internet-native forms that might have literary promise: the fake Reddit r/AmItheAsshole story, and the 4chan greentext. Both of these, though, are structured modes for telling ordinary, narrative stories about psychotic family members or your own autistic blunders. Often they involve the kind of rooting around beneath the surface of the world, extracting moral meaning from ordinary social events, that used to be the job of thick realist novels. Why did I act this way? Why did my mother-in-law? Here’s a greentext:
Here are some titles of r/AmItheAsshole stories:
You might notice what’s missing here. Nobody would read a story on the internet that’s about being on the internet, how crazy it is that we’re all online, wow, floating around in the delirious stream of it all, visiting various websites and using apps, so cool, so now. That stuff only ever comes up in print. Maybe the best thing you can say about the internet is that it still has the capacity to occasionally refer to things other than itself.
This is why I think “Love Story” is the most successful story in Levy’s book: not because of its molten stream of memespeak, but because in many ways it’s the most conventional, and the least about the internet. Unlike the other stories, it has two well-defined characters and a plot that proceeds in a straightforward linear fashion. The boy and the girl fantasize about each other through concepts they’ve received online. They chat about nothing. But eventually she starts to feel his interest waning, and in a last-ditch effort she sends him a nude. “There she was on his screen, in his hand, all of her, a small pale animal thing, scarred and scared in the fluorescent public bathroom light.” A sudden irruption of the real, somatic, sensuous world into this abstract digitized noosphere. He’s repulsed. “Ew. Frailty. Roastie. Deuteronomy 22:20-21. Done. Get thee to a nunnery. Begone Thot.” Now we see the girl behind the anime waifu. “She crawls into an unmade bed, feral girl summer, mouse mode in her burrow, vermin instincts kicking in.” But then he has a change of heart. “It hit him, something sent from the beyond, a burning white light, a growing echo of music, the opening notes of MGMT’s ‘Little Dark Age.’ And then it began: images flashing, hyperspeed through his mind … Odysseus and Penelope, Eloise and Abelard, Adam and Eve, Bella and Edward.” He decides to commit to being in love. “He wanted her now as she was: messy and pure, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, this thing to be called woman.”
I don’t read this as a particularly happy ending. Our marble-statue avatar can only incorporate his online girlfriend’s physical being by translating it back into the language of MGMT meme edits, reincorporating it on the terrain of the abstract and bloodless. Maybe Levy would disagree. But this is why “Love Story” is a genuinely good story: it’s an autonomous artistic object rather than a decorative fragment of its author; it has that gap between words and meanings through which literature can seep in.
There’s a similar attempt to put the internet back in its real-world context in Jordan Castro’s The Novelist. The entire book takes place over maybe two and a half hours, exhaustively documenting everything a wannabe writer does as he distracts himself from working on his novel. When he makes yerba mate, Castro describes every sip in psychotically precise detail. “I pursed my lips, inhaling air with the hot tea in a burst of focused sucking, a small sip, the tea touching my tongue but not the roof of my mouth.” When he goes to the toilet we hear about that too. “I made sure to apply pressure carefully while wiping, once, from front to back; my legs buzzed as I leaned forward, my thighs pressing into the rounded edge of the seat.” Later he becomes upset that one side of the toilet paper is more soiled than the other. But the upshot of all this is that when our novelist is sitting on the toilet, using his phone, there’s no giddy excitement about all the lurid streams of information and derangement pouring into his bathroom. Just a very precise account of what it’s actually like to go online:
The novelist in The Novelist is not called Jordan Castro. He’s writing a piece of autofiction about an earlier time in his life, when he was very Fuccboiishly taking and selling a lot of drugs and occasionally waking in the middle of the night to projectile-shit all over his walls. Now he drinks yerba mate and calls shit poop. The authentic self he’s trying to perform on the page no longer exists, but that’s not why he finds it impossible to actually write his novel: he thinks the problem is that it’s in the third-person present tense, which has rendered it “lifeless and voiceless and empty and bad.” Meanwhile, what’s really preventing him from writing anything is the fact that he’s constantly scrolling blankly through social media. In particular, he’s haunted by another writer who is called Jordan Castro, a deeply controversial literary figure, constantly making crazed pronouncements and writing “body-fascist” novels that are rejected by all right-thinking people. “I looked at Jordan Castro’s Twitter frequently, but didn’t follow him, because I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why I followed him.” Our novelist worries that Jordan Castro would probably dismiss his novel. Toward the end of the book, he decides to abandon his current project and write a piece of invective against an obnoxious bien-pensant novelist friend called Eric. “Eric is dismissive of anything counterintuitive, of anything paradoxical, of anything requiring real effort, I wrote. He is afraid, and egotistical, and lazy.” He’s finally writing, getting into the flow of it. But then, without any real decision on his part, his satire starts turning into a pompous manifesto. He’s writing about how Eric fears suffering, but suffering is part of what makes life tangible, and how meaning allows us to transcend our material conditions, and how the external world comes into being through the internal. Stuff he doesn’t believe, and which doesn’t even really make sense. “I was almost entirely taking on the tone and worldview of Jordan Castro.”
It’s not just that the internet distracts you from making art: the situation is much worse than that. It sidles into the process itself. It replaces your thoughts and words with the thoughts of a digital entity that is not quite yourself but not quite something else either.
I liked The Novelist. It’s genuinely funny; it plays around with the self rather than breathlessly insisting on it; it has enough self-awareness to be charming rather than annoying. It knows how to deploy a little bit of knowing irony, which makes it much more pleasant to read than some piece of frenetic, earnest self-exposure. But while The Novelist accurately diagnoses the problem with trying to produce fiction in the internet age, it doesn’t really offer up any new alternatives. In many ways, this is a very old-fashioned type of novel. Unlike a lot of his contemporaries, who sometimes seem to think literary prose was invented in 2014, Castro is willing to read books from the past. Authors who are no longer young and beautiful, who you would not run into at anyone’s party, who might even be very unfashionably dead. Thomas Bernhard is an obvious influence; in issue 32 of this publication, he cited Nicholson Baker as another. But the meandering details and the ambiguous self-insertion reminded me more of Martin Amis. It was Amis who had the idea of calling his character John Self, and then introducing a slightly pathetic background figure called Martin Amis. Amis was a radical and innovative artist, forty years ago.
In the last pages of The Novelist, our nameless narrator has another idea for a book, one like Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but “instead of sitting in a wing chair at an artistic dinner, the protagonist could be sitting in front of his laptop, looking at social media.” Once, novelists engaged with the literary past to explore all the different things you can do with words. Joyce regurgitating the entire canon in a single chapter of Ulysses. Castro’s gaze is narrower, and he does it for a very different reason. His return to other, older forms is ultimately a way of indicating what’s been lost, what’s no longer possible. All experiments are over. We are not going anywhere other than where we are. The last line: “I continued on the path then turned around.”
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To be honest, I don’t know either how to get out of this bind and start moving again. I’m not sure what it would take to make literature feel genuinely vital and necessary again. My current best plan is to set off a series of small but loud bombs across New York such that if you mapped out the explosions they would spell the words PLEASE CONSIDER WRITING ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN YOURSELF. But maybe I don’t need to resort to terrorism. Within the world of alt lit, at least, there are a few signs that things might improve.
Matthew Davis’s book Let Me Try Again is squarely aimed at the heart of the alt-lit scene. It doesn’t just have an Honor Levy blurb; she also turns up in a party scene toward the end. It’s published by a press that markets itself as “the house of the canceled,” with titles from Alex Jones, Woody Allen and other authors dropped by more mainstream imprints. Davis promoted his book on Red Scare. But it’s also an honest-to-God satire. The narrator of Let Me Try Again is a prudish Gen Z hypersperg called Ross Mathcamp who says things like “I was about eight-elevenths done with the shake.” Ross thinks he’s the most brilliant person alive. He doesn’t understand why people get so upset by all his brilliant ideas, like solving the abortion debate by issuing everyone a single abortion voucher, and then allowing them to freely trade the vouchers on an open market. (If you oppose abortion, you can express your preferences by simply refusing to sell your voucher.) In the first paragraph he misuses the word “inimical.” The book is not achingly raw and honest; it’s an extended joke at its narrator’s expense. There’s an actual ironic distance at work, a gap between author and text, rather than the ersatz irony that’s produced whenever a writer references enough memes in print. Maybe it’s not great that I’m forced to praise a book simply for rediscovering one of the basic functions of writing, but here we are. Admittedly, some of the book’s jokes fall flat; there are repeated attempts at physical slapstick, which does not work in a purely text-based medium. It could have used the attention of a publisher that wasn’t also working on books like Profiles of the Vaccine-Injured: “A Lifetime Price to Pay.” Still, this book is still trying to do things, even at the risk of failing. A few steps back out into the wide domain of the possible.
One of the failures of Let Me Try Again, though, is especially notable. My copy arrived with a note from a PR person describing the novel as a “literary exploration of love, grief, and obsession,” and drawing my attention to the chapter in which the narrator’s teenage sister suddenly decides to convert from secular Judaism to traditionalist Catholicism, citing the Gospel of Matthew and G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. This thread is one of the weakest in the book. There’s no satire and no insight; the sister simply regurgitates some Christological arguments and demands Ross baptize her, which he does, using a “World’s #1 Older Brother” mug. But it’s easy to understand why it’s there: lately, a lot of edgy young women are professing a newfound faith in the Catholic Church; Honor Levy is one of them. Because Let Me Try Again is a satire, responding to the particular milieu it comes out of, the nowness of its now, it has to represent this particular trend, or else it’ll be out of date. But it’s also very obvious that the reason so many young people are falling into the clutches of Rome is that they’re exhausted by the present. More interesting than God or the miracle at Fatima is the weight of the Church itself: all its layers of canon laws and rites and traditions, building up on top of each other like two thousand years of grime. The mosaics, the ruins. You don’t have to chase after every facet of this basically thin and tedious present that keeps producing books about itself: you can plunge into eternity instead. Matthew Davis the Catholic might understand this; Matthew Davis the writer does not.
Maybe the most promising of the alt-lit books I read was Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel. A good chunk of the book is still taken up by stories about being young and a girl, young and upper-middle-class and an American and a girl in the age of online. Cash, like Levy, writes about Neopets starving to death. (If one writer does this, it’s a fun quirky image; two, and there’s something in the water.) But there are also experiments in something else, a direct engagement with the texture of words and worlds. Some of the vignettes are directly satirical: a marketing agency tasked with rebranding Islamic terrorism; a lonely woman who hires strangers from the internet to join her for a thirtieth-birthday slumber party. But there are weirder combinations too; images that might be satirical if they referred directly to anything tangible, but instead unsettle from just the other side of familiarity. Biblical plagues slowly becoming normality, shading into the language of teen gossip. Blood and frogs, but “Madeline brought the lice. That one wasn’t God. Madeline brought the lice from a boarding school in Vermont.” In Let Me Try Again, teenage girls suddenly start talking about God; here, God is suddenly cast as a kind of teenage girl. Another frenemy on your contacts list. The slumber party experience includes prank calls, Bitcoin mining and group sex. At the end they freeze our narrator’s eggs. “I say I’ve always imagined having a family the old-fashioned way. She says, ‘I’m not paid to indulge in pipe dreams. I’m paid to facilitate the classic slumber party experience which entails understanding our limits as people.’” Later, there’s a world in which the big hyper-invasive tech company collecting data on everyone is only doing so to sell you personalized scent pods. “Those who ate the pods and survived later developed grotesque ailments like flesh-eating rashes and fevers and late-onset Schizophrenia and the longest recorded nosebleed in history.” One character’s boyfriend sometimes “tosses the scent pods to the squirrels in her front yard and makes her watch as they eat them, their little bodies writhing and contorting until they slowly shut down.” She “tries not to read too much into this.”
I think this is a more interesting way of writing about the present: one that’s shot through with something else. Little pieces of a more mythic past, or a crueler future, scattered into the familiar LA scene.
A writer can’t not respond to the present, because it’s the only thing that’s actually here. A writer can’t be anyone other than themselves. But an obsession with raw surging nowness or authentic personal experience can often just feel like an excuse for incuriosity. If mainstream literature shows it’s possible to be deeply incurious while maintaining a superficial commitment to diversity, alt lit shows that a superficial commitment to being countercultural and different doesn’t guarantee much either. There is probably no shortcut to a better literature, but a start might be writing that tries more ambitiously to escape its own confines, expanding into the large and sensuous world we actually inhabit, in all its contradictory and ironic dimensions. This writing would take a genuine interest in other people, other eras and other ways of being. A few people are trying. Lately Tao Lin has been giving lectures on DMT and near-death experiences; he believes fully and sincerely that there is a life after death—in other words, a life after the self. Maybe Sean Thor Conroe should have another go at that big book he intended to write, the one about why “men were men, women women, and fathers rapists”—the one he abandoned to write about himself instead.
Art credit: Shuang Li, The portrait of the Artist as a young man, 2023. Resin, acrylic paint, charms, fabric; 21 × 17 × 2 in. Courtesy of Peres Projects.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.