Lars Iyer's Blog, page 16

'Nietzsche and the Burbs is an anthem for young misfits and a hilarious, triumphant book about friendship'. Michael Schaub reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs at NPR.

Steve Mitchelmore reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs at This Space. 

New interview at Bookmarks at The Literary Hub, based on five books I've chosen that concern visionary youth. 

Nietzsche and the Burbs out in the US. UK readers will need to wait until January 9th. 

Nietzsche and the Burbs featured in Vol. 1 Brooklyn December preview.

And in the Chicago Review of Books books to read this December. 

Michael M Grynbaum reviews Nietzsche and the Burbs for the New York Times.

A clique of misfit teenagers in suburban England sit on adulthood���s cusp, lamenting their middle-class lives and fretting for their futures. Enter a new boy, a stranger booted from a posh academy, who scrawls ���NIHILISM��� on the cover of his notebook and elevates the group���s ennui into something more profound. They call him Nietzsche, as in Friedrich. We never learn his real name.

Not much happens in ���Nietzsche and the Burbs,��� a peculiar new novel by Lars Iyer. The final 10 weeks of high school go by. There are house parties and bicycle rides and exams. Only one member of the group, Chandra, serves as narrator, but the novel���s voice is a collective one: an angsty adolescent Greek chorus. ���Who are we supposed to be?��� it asks. ���What are we supposed to want? Are we any different from the people we hate? Won���t we have to become like them in the end?���

It goes on like this. Nietzsche keeps a sad blog about the suburbs (���Nothing will happen, not today���). The group watches ���Melancholia��� and reads Dostoyevsky. Drugs are taken, and sex, very occasionally, is had. ���Why are we so tired, at the peak of our lives?��� the narrator asks. ���Why are we falling asleep, at the peak of our lives?��� Think ���On the Genealogy of Morality��� meets ���The Breakfast Club.���

You may be unsurprised to learn that Iyer is a longtime lecturer in philosophy (he currently teaches creative writing at Newcastle University). His last novel, ���Wittgenstein Jr.,��� is a funhouse version of this one; it fictionalized the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a modern-day Cambridge professor, as seen through the eyes of his students. ���Nietzsche and the Burbs��� sticks to the same formula, illuminating and gently mocking the ideas of its title subject.

There is humor here. Iyer���s teenagers are recognizable, painfully so: They worry about modern plagues like school shootings, natural disasters and the rot of late capitalism. (No wonder they���ve gone nihilist.) Such melodrama will be familiar to anyone who has suffered through the affliction that is being 18. Iyer, who has a gift for capturing the cadence of the young, charts the overlap between the philosophers he reveres and the juveniles he teaches. ���All adolescents are philosophers,��� Chandra observes, ���and all philosophers are adolescents at heart.���

At 345 pages, ���Nietzsche and the Burbs,��� like any well-meaning professor, can belabor its point. The novel idles for long stretches, and there���s too much space between memorable sentences, like the one that compares an erection to a ���narwhal���s tusk.��� Characters blur together; only one, Paula, a jaded lesbian who falls in and out of love, stands out. The Nietzsche character remains a cipher until the end.

Scholarly readers ��� or those with access to the Wikipedia page for Continental philosophy ��� will find that in-jokes abound. Like Friedrich, Iyer���s Nietzsche has an overbearing sister, a father who died young and a crush on a girl named Lou. (The real Nietzsche pined for the writer Lou Salom��.) One imagines the faculty club guffaws when a character wonders, ���Does being clever always make people miserable?���

But Iyer���s talent is best deployed in scenes that plumb the poignancy of finishing high school and leaving home ��� a moment when one���s world can be at once filled with kaleidoscopic possibility while also disintegrating. As he watches classmates frolic in an end-of-term field day, Chandra identifies the odd feeling of nostalgia for the present day: ���A valedictory air. A last-of-the-last-days air. There���s not much school left. There���s not long to go. Days ringing out in the infinite. As though they will never pass. ��� As though these last, languorous days will last forever.���

This is a near-perfect evocation of childhood���s elegiac end. And it proves Iyer���s literary talents can occasionally match his philosophical ones.

Nietzsche and the Burbs reviewed  by Jane Ciabattari at BBC Culture. 

The charismatic new boy who has arrived at a suburban Wokingham high school from a private school fits in immediately with a crew of rebels who adopt him, protect him, and serve as the chorus to his journey through the last nine weeks before exams. They dub him Nietzsche, and cast him as lead singer in their metal band, the Burbs. His lyrics lead them: ���The sky is hollow. The stars are blind.��� They share drugs, alcohol, philosophical discussions, parties and cycling trips through the suburbs. (���There should be signs: Warning: Low Meaning Zone. Hazard: Nihilism.���) They support Nietzsche when he confides with them about his mental breakdown, and when he finds love. Iyer���s swiftly paced, gently satirical fifth novel builds to a startling crescendo. 

Chicago Review of Books selects Nietzsche and the Burbs as one its books to read this December. 

London launch of Nietzsche and the Burbs at the London Review Bookshop on January 28th, with Jon Day at 7PM. It's a ticketed event (buy them here) - they sold out before the day last time.

New review at Shelf Awareness:

Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer (Melville House, $16.99 paperback, 352p., 9781612198125, January 9, 2019)

Lars Iyer (Wittgenstein Jr.) makes nihilist philosophy hip and fun in his highly entertaining tragicomedy Nietzsche and the Burbs.

The novel introduces a group of disaffected teenagers finishing their last year of secondary school before heading out into the big, uncaring world: Art, Merv, Paula and the narrator, Chandra. The foursome inducts into their clique a new student, whom they nickname Nietzsche due to his gloomy disposition and pessimistic outlook on life. They sense he is intellectually superior, perhaps braver, and thus look up to him as a kind of leader. The four get him to front their rock band, called Nietzsche and the Burbs, believing music can save them from the banality of life. For his part, Nietzsche plays in the band--though not as enthusiastically as his friends would like--and spends most of his time developing a philosophy of the suburbs, posting on his blog about his conclusions while participating in the parties and the general hullabaloo of high school.

Iyer writes in short, emphatic elliptical sentences, a little maddening in their repetition but effective in creating a mood of rebellious adolescence. The style works in portraying the young characters' molten thoughts and emotions, as well as in satirizing the suburbs and school life. The group lives and studies in a suburban English town aptly named Workingham, which comes to symbolize the "hangover of history," the final phase of humanity distinguished by a nauseating sameness. As much fun as Iyer has in hilariously sending up tract houses and golf courses, he's at his satirical best describing the social stratification in the school. It's not the jocks or the "beasts" that rule the day, but rather the "drudges," those complacent, phone-addicted students who seem to have succumbed entirely to first-world mediocrity.

There's something daring and poetic in the main characters' resistance to suburban culture. They take drugs, they read books, and they play music that defies categorization. In their nihilism, they talk about affirming their lives in a significant way, through art, through suffering. Iyer brings Nietzschean philosophy to heady, raucous life, fleshing out the ideas of nihilism and existentialism in ways that few books do. The characters don't just talk philosophy; they embody it in their decisions and actions. They test their surroundings with radical ideas. It's an exhilarating ride, evoking the grandiosity of youth and the dynamics of counterculture itself. Of course, there's a tragic arc to the story. Beneath every uproarious protest cry is something human and fallible, Iyer sharply reminds readers.

The brilliant, relentless drive of the narrative of Nietzsche and the Burbs demands a certain amount of stamina from readers. But the payoff is great. Perhaps not since Don DeLillo's White Noise has a novel so funnily and savagely lifted the veil on Western postmodern culture. What's underneath is hard to explain. Some may find darkness, others beauty. -- Scott Neuffer