Simp Lit

Review of Fuccboi (2022) by Sean Thor Conroe

I wanted as far as possible to approach this novel on its own terms, to provide an account of its formal and literary qualities, but I soon realised this wasn’t possible in any meaningful way. I also didn’t want to give too much consideration to its purported ‘message’', or ideological content, which are embellished impositions that I doubt the author holds dear. There have been other reviews that talk about these aspects of the work. Still, since most of these reviews have dutifully appeared in legacy media - they essentially amount to advertorials written by mercenary journalists, and like much else about this novel, can’t really be taken seriously. The PR strategy for this novel was clearly to muster some sort of controversy. But the only thing mildly controversial about this inane work is that it is (ostensibly, but clearly not fully) written by a man. It is, in the final analysis, merely a work of moronic arriére-garde ventriloquism.

Conroe has attempted to write a novel of the ‘voice’, a well-worn path. Many have attempted such a task, and some have come close. Still, none will ever surpass that poisonous 38-year-old petit-bourgeois GP from the Parisian suburbs, author of the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Céline’s voice was so compelling that after Voyage au bout de la nuit’s publication in 1932, it was so beloved by readers across the ideological spectrum, by communists and fascists alike, that each group tried to claim the writer as their own. They perceived within this voice something vital and ‘authentic’, rendered in a guttural yet harmonious French demotic that spoke of the near-universal shared experience of horror, brutality and abjection in the First World War.

Céline’s protagonist is a cowardly, duplicitous and unpleasant character, whom we cannot help but feel a great deal of sympathy for. Conroe attempts something similar, but it’s difficult to feel anything but bored indifference towards his protagonist. Unlike Céline, Conroe doesn’t have a secure notion of voice. The author feels keenly the condition of deracination. Perhaps there is nothing more American than this condition, which by virtue of its cultural hegemony, has inevitably become a global condition. The default voice of deracination is the voice of the current dominant popular culture – it is parasitic upon ebonics, hip-hop, internet patwa etc. This is, I suppose, Conroe’s voice. There’s nothing untoward or suspect about speaking this way, and I have no reason to doubt its authenticity to himself. One of my favourite things to do when abroad – living or on holiday – is to play pick-up basketball at the local park or open gym. When I lived in Tokyo I often played with kids who were high-school seniors or freshmen in the many American or international schools and universities in the city. Almost all of them were of Japanese or other Asian origin, and many had never set foot in the US or had American parents – but all of them spoke in a way very reminiscent of Conroe’s voice. It is then a voice with some potential for broad appeal within an emerging paradigm, one apparent even in this chaotic twilight of Pax Americana. The problem is not with the voice itself - annoying and cringe-worthy as it can be - but the vague, mealy-mouthed things it has been contorted to utter.

I once asked a feminist academic friend where the term ‘toxic masculinity’ originated, since it has the patina of a well-considered scholarly concept. She told me, quite vexedly, that it’s not a feminist term but one of those amorphous pseudo-academic concepts of protean meaning beloved by journalists. Perhaps Conroe, in the manner of Céline, wished to write a transgressive work that communicated the sometimes heady and febrile exuberance (the horror and the shimmer) inherent to masculinity but has instead been compelled to write a work which brings ‘toxic masculinity’ (whatever it is) into question through self-reflection and introspection…like a misbehaving child forced to repeat lines on a blackboard before he’s allowed to go out and play with his friends…but in the form of a book written in a very uninteresting, incoherent way. The child, however, is innocent because he is a child - because he does not yet know better.

I was a little hesitant to be overly harsh in my appraisal because many acquaintances have told me that the author is, to use a beloved Scottish descriptor, pretty ‘sound’. The only accommodation I can make to this, which I have no reason to doubt, is to be brief and not to dwell on details. Indeed, the harshest criticism I can make will also be the most simple. I don’t think Conroe has written the book he intended to write, or has in any way said what he intended to say. He has, rather, compromised whatever coherent artistic vision had for the sake of pragmatism, undoubtedly at the prompting of an overzealous and didactic editor. Perhaps this is what one must do to be published by a major publisher and accepted by their consumers. Maybe the author values this meagre approbation above all else. Of course, one is free to publish a book such as this, compromised by a tedious and confused architecture built upon the stillborn corpse of another work - potentially better, certainly more compelling - visibly buried under its foundations. But one cannot expect to be lauded or respected as an artist for such cowardice.