50% Laughter, 50% Despair: A Dialogue with Jarett Kobek

When JARETT KOBEK says he writes garbage, he is not to be believed. The self-laceration is ubiquitous—"this is a bad novel," the narrator of I Hate the Internet (2016) says in so many words, throughout the text—but it should not be understood as false modesty, an anxious plea for affirmation, or as stylistic affectation. Such pronouncements are instead aspirational. "I try to make everything a little shitty," KOBEK explains in an interview, because, the argument goes, truly holding a mirror up to the surreal horror that is post-9/11 America necessitates a self-conscious abandonment of the figure of the romanticized writer, as well as the aesthetic project of literary realism.¹ Writers of "good novels," his narrator protests, have "missed the only important story in American life," "the world of hidden persuaders, of the developing communications landscape"—in other words, the internet.² It may be that the new

Jarett Kobek, self-portrait. Image courtesy of the author.

idioms and genres of self-expression and the accelerated temporal rhythms of multichannel communication are ill-suited to the mode of the "good novel." But KOBEK's argument is not about literary form or language, so one cannot point to Flarf, uncreative writing, Alt-Lit, or even Emoji Dick as counterexamples. KOBEK's indictment is more fundamental and his outrage more overtly, unreservedly, political. What US writers in particular have missed, his work suggests, is the extent to which life itself has been altered by an industry that has broken its utopian promise; that captures and capitalizes on every utterance; that rewards extremity, cruelty, and, yes, stupidity—in other words, the internet. It is all very sordid, but it does make for wonderful, albeit tragicomic, satire.

Lest it not be clear, I should stress: Kobek is perfectly capable of writing good novels and in fact has done so. ATTA (2011), his fictionalized biography of the hijacker Mohamed Atta, imagines 9/11 as an enactment of Atta's master's thesis, which railed against Western skyscrapers and idealized an "Islamic-Oriental city."³ It is incisive, elegant, and in many ways an emblematic work of academic fictocriticism. He has also written a carefully considered, sympathetic analysis of XXXTentacion, which uses the musician's social media presence to reflect on the question of separating the work and life of an artist. And here too he pursues his critique of the exploitative structure of social media, the coercive force of which is unevenly distributed. "Rich kids don't suffer the same Internet as poor kids," he dryly observes, noting the class markers in many a Twitch streamer's home.⁴

All of this paves the way for Kobek's summative polemic, Only Americans Burn in Hell (2019), equally well titled and quite rightly described by Alan Moore as a "scabrous portrait of an America lost in its insipid fantastic dreams while it is sliding into an abyss."⁵ The setup for the book, which is best analogized to a stand-up comedy set, with all of its seemingly digressive refrains, self-mocking confessions, and droll punchline, is this: Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land, goes to Los Angeles with her murderous bodyguard, Rose Byrne, in order to find her daughter. What else do you need from a novel, Reader, except perhaps a broadside against, in no particular order, the US publishing industry, NYU Abu Dhabi, fantasy and superhero films as war pornography, representational politics and call-out culture, homelessness in America, the endless war in Iraq, and Donald J. Trump as "the natural consequence of an entire society that adopted unending slaughter as its central function"?⁶ Scabrous it surely is, but it works because it is also sincere. Not content to catalog and lampoon the grotesqueries of our moment, the book enfolds a moral lesson in an elaborate story about gaining access to the pit at a Guns N' Roses concert at Staples Center with a friend dressed as a circus performer: we may all be in fairy land, but...