This Book is Fucking Stupid

Christopher Nosnibor This Book is Fucking Stupid (2013)
One problem with post-modernism is, in my view, that it's just too easy. Any fucking idiot can implement some ham-fisted attempt to disguise the fact of his masterpiece being a pile of shit by cleverly drawing attention to it being a pile of shit, and I'm not fooled. I've done it myself. When, after two years of a fine art degree specialising in the moving image, I experienced terminal exhaustion with my admittedly juvenile films and videos failing to garner the tutorial praise I thought they deserved, I switched to churning out a series of videos about the medium of video because I thought that was what my tutors wanted, or at least expected, and that seemed to be what they responded to. It was a piece of piss. I was spewing out that self-aware shit like a spigot. One of them was called Made in One Day and its subject was the fact of it having taken me only one day to make the piece from start to finish; and my 2.2 average grade accordingly went up to a 2.1 for about six months, at least until it became obvious that I was just working the system.

Post-modernism, Nosnibor suggests somewhere or other in this novel, or anti-novel as he calls it, seems mostly concerned with the death of certain media; and so this one is concerned with the death of the modern novel. This places me in an unfortunate position because I'm not really sure what that is, although hopefully it's not Fifty Shades of Shite. I have a hunch the modern novel may have been the stuff Marian used to read, usually either because she'd found it cheap in a charity shop or had read an article about it in Time Out - worthily yawnsome shite such as Life of Pi or Alexander McCall-Smith, the sort of thing which has generally made me feel slightly proud of my criteria being is there a fucking big spaceship on the front cover, or at least maybe an alien? I'm not entirely sure, but if Marian was into it, then it probably needs to die, so fair enough. I never quite worked out why she read what she read, or why she liked anything she liked, but I always had the impression that personal taste wasn't a factor, because she wasn't really interested in anything, not exactly.

Curiously enough, our relationship had certain parallels with that of Ben and Ruth in this anti-novel, and while this may not in itself be significant, it's significant to me as the reader, which is probably the point, or one of them. Nosnibor is clearly a massive fan of William Burroughs, and specifically the cut-up technique he employed to such dynamic effect, although Nosnibor is possibly unique in being a massive fan of William Burroughs doing something other than just going through the same motions. The principal of the cut-up technique is on one level the invocation of a degree of realism not found in the more traditionally structured narrative. The cut-up does to text - and by text we mean information - what, for example, Boccioni did for representational art when he painted The Street Enters the House, an image of his mother - so it is presumed - intersected by the details of her environment, street, balcony, buildings, noise, and even a passing horse; because if this sort of montage does not necessarily represent its subject, it is  nevertheless closer to our non-linear experience of the same. Yes it is.

Along the same lines regarding dialogue:

People don't speak in neatly formed and perfectly punctuated sentences, and don't wait for their interlocutor to finish speaking before they begin: words tumble from the mouth of everyone, they double back and repeat themselves, they contradict themselves, they stumble and stutter, they utter inanities, non-sentence, non-sequiturs, cutting one another up, speaking over one another and finishing one another's sentences, and not always correctly.

This applies to human experience as much as it does to what we say in that our descriptions of the same tend to follow particular types of linear narrative which don't always genuinely reproduce that which is described. This Book is Fucking Stupid therefore strives for something closer to experience by shattering its own narrative and blending it with other material, often written directly from the author's point of view. So we have the two friends described on the back cover as they wrestle with mid-life crises cut in with Nosnibor explaining what he's trying to do, reviews of the novel, or possibly reviews of other novels. It appears disjointed if you're expecting progress from one place to another in the traditional order, but nevertheless adds up to a surprisingly coherent whole.

There are problems, or at least I had a few problems, but they may be deliberate. Certainly the endless typos, fuck-ups and misspellings seem too incongruous to have been left in by accident, and almost seem to work as a way of involving the reader in the editing process, drawing us in to the narrative, making us accomplices - which is, by the way, almost certainly the wankiest sentence I've ever written. Additionally, the characters aren't particularly sympathetic and possibly because why should they be? Nosnibor slips in lines from Killing Joke, Whitehouse, Foetus and others, just like I've been prone to do back when I imagined a mention of my fave band would get the reader on my side, lending the scene I'd just written with my bright green crayon all the majesty of the closing bars of Killing Joke's Rubicon. I already wrote about how much I hate that sort of thing back in May, so I'll avoid repeating myself beyond stating that references to Editors, Interpol, Foo Fighters and others get on my tits at least as much as anyone else half my age going on about how I should check these guys out because they sound like Joy Division or Bauhaus, when the former were never as good as their legend would have it and the latter were shite even at the best of times - more or less just some cartoon vampire saying behold the spider in a spooky voice through an echo box over and over; but, I've a feeling that's exactly the point.

Fucking Stupid invokes the boredom of a meaningless existence founded on half-assed hopes and cultural detritus circling round and round and round, connecting with its subject like nothing before - or not very much before - leaving the modern novel with nothing else left to do; or something like that. I suppose I still prefer Bukowski and his like for this sort of thing, but Nosnibor kind of goes one further by making his characters such unglamorous wankers that he kills all potential for romance stone dead. I'm assuming that was his intention.

The funny thing is that I read this immediately after a couple of nights spent watching James Corden and Matthew Baynton's The Wrong Mans on Hulu - a generally amusing but faintly irritating comedy more or less epitomising the BBC's rebranding of artistic spontaneity and freewheeling chuckles as a generic corporate resource - and so I found myself reading Ben and Stuart as characters played by James Corden and Matthew Baynton in the show, because they kind of are, except rather than being funny, it's just depressing, and there's thankfully no-one to pull a comic long-suffering face every ninety seconds.

This Book really should be Fucking Stupid, or at least just plain awful, and yet somehow it succeeds, because it is; and therefore isn't, if you see what I mean. I'm impressed.