Substack and the American Novel

On Jarett Kobek's Oeuvre, and the New World Before Us

Max Ernst, The Beautiful Season, 1925, Oil on canvas

Most 21^st century novels don’t matter much. They matter, of course, to the people who write them, and to whatever dwindling subset of the wider public still reads them, but, here in America, at least, the majority of folks couldn’t care less. Of course, this sorry state of affairs has been kvetched about and argued over for a good hundred years — one could wallpaper the rooms of every still-aspirant writer in America with the lame-ass Death of the Novel squibs that have cropped up in the last quarter-century alone and still have enough left over to stock their bathroom cabinets with tissue — but the flimsiness of recent arguments can’t really cover the fact that the American novel really is now running on fumes. By this I mean not that there are no good, great, or inventive ones being written — God knows there are — but simply that the American public doesn’t care. No big whoop, I guess. (Did “they” ever care? To how many people does a work of art have to matter to be worthwhile?) But as the novelists I know go hopscotching from one social media platform to another, hoping to build up their audience, hoping to drum up some attention, hoping to do . . . whatever it is we’re doing, say, here on Substack, which platform some (including the editors of this very periodical) seem to believe represents something salvific for writers but towards which I remain, for reasons I will come to, deeply skeptical, I can’t help but think this represents a kind of endgame. The Big Five (four, two — however many now comprise what’s essentially a mono-corporation anyway) will continue to mostly deliver what I will euphemistically call material of varying quality; the larger indies, the Milkweeds and Graywolves, will continue their valiant efforts to plug the gap, and a lot of stuff that’s strong, much of the actual literature, will slip through the cracks and be forced to come from elsewhere. Which makes the enthusiasm some feel for this place understandable — the gatekeepers are failing, so why not get rid of them altogether? — but setting that matter aside for a moment, how did it come to this? When did American fiction become a specialty pursuit, or more importantly (and here I am forced to wave away a bunch of arguments, also very popular on this platform, about MFAs, about how no one wants to publish men, about, God help me, “woke,” a word no thinking person should ever invoke without scare quotes, arguments that are mostly reactionary bullshit, or that at best conjure the image of a blind person describing an elephant, mistaking its toe for its trunk) — why? Once upon a time we had Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, and James Baldwin — people whose names were familiar to normies, and whose books were often owned even by those who might not ever carve out the time or will to read them — going at it on live television, and now we have Rachel Kushner and Brandon Taylor, substantial names that may nevertheless be more likely to draw blank stares outside the world of writers than those of us who are writers care to think, squabbling by proxy with all the broader newsworthiness of a playground slap fight. What happened?

The internet. Obviously, the fucking internet, and even leaving aside the larger, and inescapable, fact that the “novel” is an Industrial Age technology, a product of the printing press as sure to be eventually eradicated by the Information Age’s more advanced machinery as the troika and the phaeton were by the automobile, I mean specifically the social and the streaming internet: those mechanisms by which a handful of tech barons have been able to carve up and arrogate for themselves the already over-fattened and mostly monopolized profits of the late 20^th century’s film, publishing, and music corporations. Against this, the novel doesn’t stand a chance, and strangely, despite a proliferation of recent-ish so-called “internet novels” (Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, etc.) that take on the social internet as an experiential subject, relatively few — yes, yes, I am aware of Dave Eggers’ The Circle, but I’m talking about books with teeth, here — have attempted to reckon with it as a system. (Not that “reckoning with it” would necessarily do anybody any good.)

Consider, then, Jarett Kobek, a writer who is almost as unheralded as they come. I say “almost” because Kobek’s second book, I Hate the Internet, was a huge bestseller in, naturally, Serbia, was translated into eleven languages — French, German, Bosnian, Japanese, etc. — and became something of a sensation upon its publication in 2016. Every other book of Kobek’s, however, remains largely obscure, including his third, The Future Won’t Be Long, which was snapped up by Viking with the hopes of capitalizing on I Hate the Internet’s success, and which sold, by Kobek’s own count, approximately three hundred copies. It’s my contention that Kobek is one of the most exciting writers in America today, that like (to name just a handful of highly dynamic practitioners whose names sometimes draw blank stares even among writers, which is a fucking shonda) Grant Maierhofer, Emily Hall, Garielle Lutz (OK, writers know Lutz, but I counted exactly one review of her spectacular Backwardness, for instance, a book that actually delivers on some of the promises that got people all fired up about Knausgård a decade or so back), Mauro Javier Cardenas, and others, Kobek is a writer who ought to be a household name, exactly as much as Norman Mailer — “that fat little fuck Norman Mailer,” to use Kobek’s own phrase — ever was.

Of course, not even Mailer — who, let’s remember, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City, directed more than one terrible film, wrote considerably more than one terrible novel (albeit he did manage at least one masterpiece, my own pick-to-click being Advertisements for Myself), assaulted Rip Torn, stabbed his wife, and made an ass of himself both on the page and on-camera more times than one can count —shared Kobek’s special genius for shooting himself in the foot. Take Kobek’s first book, published by Semiotext(e) in 2011. ATTA is a so-called “psychedelic biography”— in other words, novel — about, well . . . Mohammed Atta. Philip Roth would likely have — this is easy to imagine — decided to write his novel about 9/11 by satirizing (or simply describing, as he did with Charles Lindbergh in The Plot Against America) a figure like Dick Cheney. Mailer, whose appetite for self-aggrandizement outdid even Roth’s, might conceivably have strapped on his provocateur’s helmet to ventriloquize Osama bin Laden but it’s more likely (he may have sympathized with Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song and crawled out on a limb to describe Hitler’s childhood in The Castle in the Forest, but he was always more inclined to ally himself with straightforwardly Messianic figures like John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe or, well, Jesus Christ) he’d have curbed himself at George W. Bush. But where John Updike’s milquetoast Terrorist — the only other American novel I can think of offhand that tries to navigate a similarly anti-American point-of-view — gets tangled up in psychologizing and in trying to explain, or even just to “understand” its exoticized subject (the book’s title really gives the game away), ATTA does no such thing. Told in alternating first- and close third-person chapters, in a prose that is at once lean and sonorous, ATTA locks us into its protagonist’s head, makes no bones or excuses about said protagonist’s antisemitism, and guides us through the subject’s life, hewing closely to the known facts, which are scant but compelling (did you know Mohamed el-Atta only ever saw one movie, and it was The Jungle Book?), tugging inexorably toward its conclusion. It’s a compelling, if deeply disquieting, novel, and naturally it did not win the sort of plaudits those writers I just mentioned once did, although it was respectfully, if not exactly widely, reviewed. But the real story begins, I reckon, with I Hate the Internet, which Kobek published in America through his own We Heard You Like Books imprint, and which blew up when Bret Easton Ellis was photographed with a copy of the book in Vogue Italia. It went on to become a phenomenon at 2015’s Frankfurt Book Festival, and thus made a dent. But a dent, then, in what? Kobek’s novel hates the internet and what else? The book’s trigger warning — or, rather, its short chapter titled “Trigger Warning” — notes, among other things:

Capitalism, the awful stench of men, historical anachronisms . . . death threats, violence . . . faddish popular culture, despair, unrestrained mockery of the rich, threats of sexual violation, weak iterations of Epicurean thought, the comic book industry, the death of intellectualism, being a woman in a society that hates women, populism . . . genocide, celebrity, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, discussions of race, science fiction . . . unjust wars in the Middle East, 9/11, seeing the Facebook profile of someone you knew when you were young and believed that everyone would lead rewarding lives.

To which I would add, yes. For starters.

Kobek continues:

For more than half of a century, American writers of good novels had missed the only important story in American life. They had missed the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the developing communications landscape, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television.

And so, too, had they missed the full import of the last fifteen years. The symbolism sustaining the aesthetic and intellectual pursuits of the Twentieth Century was now meaningless. It was empty air. It was gone vacant, missing, collapsed between the weight of two towers.

That “world of hidden persuaders,” as Kobek puts it early on in I Hate the Internet, is his real concern, and not just in this book. The book is, at least nominally, the story of a San Francisco comic book artist named Adeline who “commits the only unforgivable sin of the Twenty-First Century” by speaking carelessly in a college classroom to which she has been invited. (The sin isn’t the speaking carelessly per se. The sin is “the social faux pas of being a woman who expressed unpopular opinions in a society that hated women.”) The remark is caught on camera, uploaded, and all sorts of headaches ensue. But Philip Roth-like inciting incident aside (one can’t help but think of The Human Stain here), Kobek isn’t remotely interested in plot, narrative tension, character development, or any of the things you’d expect from a “good” (or, at least, conventional, remotely realist-derived) novel. Indeed, as the passage above suggests, Kobek has a certain special contempt for what he calls “the good novel,” which, he reminds us, is a concept largely created for bourgeois American readers, underwritten by the CIA. Which, fine, we all know this by now — the CIA’s meddling with midcentury American arts culture, their promotion of abstract expressionism and “literary fiction” and The Paris Review and all that is old hat — but there remains a certain delight in watching Kobek turn the firehose of his contempt every which way (“This is a bad novel,” he asserts periodically, merrily drenching himself) as he tries to sort out what kind of form, and what kind of novel, might be equal to the Internet Age. What chance does any kind of novel stand in a world dominated by its “hidden persuaders” — Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Sheryl Sandberg, and Sergey Brin, etc., all of whom make appearances herein — and by those global finance networks (there’s also a Harvard-educated Saudi prince, HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who goes by his American sobriquet of “Dennis”) that stand behind them? He riffs recklessly and ferociously on individual subjects ranging from Jack Kirby to Beyoncé to Marina Abramović, from Twitter to the New York Times, inserts a Rothian self-doppelganger named “J. Karacehennem” (it’s worth noting, for the sake of anyone getting itchy about any possible Islamophobic undercurrents in his work, that Kobek is Turkish, the son of a Muslim immigrant), and does so with enough vigor and elan that one stops caring about whether I Hate the Internet is even a novel at all. It’s a blast, an absolute riot to read, and it’s only to praise-with-faint-damnation that I say I Hate the Internet is probably Kobek’s weakest book. It has the feel of someone chopping up his own house for firewood — and make no mistake, the axe is a whole lot sharper than that bit about CIA-sponsored fiction would by itself suggest — without having quite yet located his pack of matches. The assertion that it is a “bad novel” is, of course, a joke (if it is a bad novel, well, then so are Tristram Shandy, Jacques the Fatalist, Gulliver’s Travels; Kobek is working within a tradition), but it does sort of raise the question of where the author might go from here. Once you have pissed all over the concept of the “good novel,” what exactly are you supposed to do next?

The answer, of course, is to write a great novel — you know, the kind that at least reaches for the capital ‘G’ that remains latent inside that phrase. I would argue that The Future Won’t Be Long (the title, admittedly, is a bit of a botch, grafted on from a Spyro Gyra tune — Kobek is an omnivorous culture nerd, and one of his myriad subspecialties appears to be turn-of-the-seventies UK folk rock, references of which recur throughout these books — after his editor at Viking rejected its original, Everything is Horrible) is one of the best the last quarter-century has had to offer. It is also one of the all-time great New York City novels, one that nails life in Manhattan at the end of the 20^th century better than a million straining pretenders. (I kept thinking of Garth Risk Hallberg’s effortful City on Fire as I read, a book that strives for scale and importance only to arrive at ephemerality, while Kobek’s book, by drilling into the most ephemeral aspect of culture — Downtown Manhattan club life — arrives at these qualities effortlessly.) Two characters from I Hate the Internet recur, Adeline, ventriloquized here in her younger days as a posh, private-school-educated escapee from Los Angeles, and Baby (which is actually short for “Baby Baby Baby,” the moniker our otherwise-nameless protagonist bestows upon himself in the spirit of self-reinvention as he steps off a bus from Wisconsin), her best friend. The two meet in the East Village squat to which hapless Baby, a young, gay naïf whose bag is stolen the moment he disembarks, stumbles. Adeline takes him under her wing after he beats Adeline’s rapey squat-boyfriend bloody, and the two form a bond that will carry them through the decade ahead, as the former moves towards becoming the person we will meet in I Hate the Internet and Baby becomes, ultimately, a successful science-fiction novelist, throwing himself ever-deeper into club life until he is drawn into the dark orbit of that scene’s prince, the promoter Michael Alig. Baby and Adeline’s friendship is the glue — the emotional glue and the narrative glue — of a novel that feels almost shockingly tender, coming as it does on the heels of I Hate the Internet’s scattershot perversities (and on the heels of the book’s own incongruently gruesome first paragraph, which posits the violent death of Baby’s parents in graphic terms), and which remains richly rendered throughout. By “richly rendered,” I mean all the things Kobek kicks to the curb in I Hate the Internet — character development, scene-work, emotional engagement, more or less the whole kit-and-caboodle of “realist” fiction — are in play here. These people may be a little eccentric (Adeline’s voice is arch, affected, Holly Golightly-ish; Baby’s is volcanic, Whitmanesque, deliciously queer), but they are entirely persuasive, and somehow the antiphonal swing that sets up between them works perfectly. From the moment Baby steps off the bus, one feels it:

oh New York, oh your glorious people. Your Puerto Ricans, your Hebrews, your Muslims, your Chinese, your Eurotrash, that fat little fuck Norman Mailer, your uptown rich socialites, your downtown scum . . . They were all so beautiful! Many of them were hideous, really ugly with terrible teeth, but even the ugly ones were beautiful too! Oh I was in heaven . . .

One feels the energy that’s gonna power this novel all the way. It may feel at first like a tiny bit of a put on, but as we peel the cap back on Baby’s sexuality (“I was as queer as a wooden nickel, but Wisconsin hadn’t offered this yokel much opportunity for erotic love”) it’s like watching Kerouac’s “fabulous yellow roman candles” morph delightfully into ejaculating cocks.

The Future Won’t Be Long isn’t a dirty book to speak of, but it is an erotically and emotionally generous one, as it drags us through a decade (the book commences in September 1986 and concludes ten years later, on Christmas Day of 1996) of cultural upheaval. That decade, of course, happens to be the decade of the AIDS crisis, and of New York’s transformation from the rickety quasi-boom times of the Reagan era — they were “boom,” at least, if you didn’t happen to be gay, an artist, or a member of any other social or economic underclass — into the sleek, neoliberal cop-dominated Disneyland of Giuliani Time. Needless to say this transformation is the book’s real concern, but unlike I Hate the Internet, whose sociopolitical environment is foregrounded to a point where the characters are more like figures in a fable, here that environment is simply the world through which Baby and Adeline travel, one Kobek depicts with a documentary precision bordering on the uncanny. This is a novel filled with real places and real people, and as Baby and Adeline carom from Bret Easton Ellis’s 13^th Street apartment in the American Felt building to, uh, “that fat little fuck’s” pad in Brooklyn Heights, from Nell’s to The Limelight to Tunnel to The Mars Bar — all places of which I retain a sharp visual memory myself, where Kobek is not quite old enough to have encountered them firsthand — I found myself seized with a kind of vertigo as I read. How does he know this, I kept wondering? (He even gets certain details of my own tiny high school alma mater correct, things one would expect to remain inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t among its few hundred students circa 1983.) Kobek is a meticulous researcher, as subsequent books of his also make clear, but in this case the precision of detail isn’t exactly the point, or, rather, isn’t an end in itself. The Future Won’t Be Long is Kobek’s argument with the long tail of late capitalism, his turning over of the detritus — the movies, the nightclubs, the writers, the celebrities — that comprised the last, gasping breath of a culture that had not yet been fully corporatized, but was well on its way. This book has a plot, but much of it, too, is devoted to Baby and Adeline’s encounters with art (Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Huysmans’ Là-bas, songs by Love and Rockets and The Birthday Party, The Wonder Years) and with artists (Thomas Disch, David Wojnarowicz, Bret Easton Ellis), and to the riffs and interpretations that spring therefrom. If The Future Won’t Be Long has a flaw, and like all books that have any reasonable claim to greatness it has a strikingly pronounced one, it’s that the storyteller in Kobek and the cultural critic are somewhat at odds. By the final third of the book one wishes at times that one or the other of these two people (I preferred the critic) would get out of the way to clear room for the other. But it doesn’t really matter. In the end, The Future Won’t Be Long saw so deeply into that transition from Reaganism to Clintonism (“Both men abandoned probity, abandoned good thought, abandoned rational thinking, inhaled the jargon-saturated monocultures of Hollywood and Wall Street,” Baby notes, in thinking of these two presidents, and of the marginal distinction between them. “Both men well aware that the ability to sparkle on camera could blind an entire nation . . . I’d grown into an adult at the exact moment when society had abandoned adulthood.”) that one can feel it all over again. That era in which a fully naked hypocrisy — and, man, did we ever try not to notice it — erupted at the center of American life.

Three hundred copies. That’s how many people thanked Jarett Kobek for his honesty in anatomizing that hypocrisy. The Future Won’t Be Long was published in America at an inauspicious moment — a few months after the 2016 election, at which point people may have had other things on their minds than novels by emerging writers — and so it vaporized with barely a trace, but if it was merely the first book of Kobek’s to be published by a Big Five American press, he seemed to want to make sure it was the last. Only Americans Burn in Hell was published by Serpent’s Tail in the UK in the spring of 2019, and it kicks off with Kobek (the narrator, the author) being approached by an alumni officer from NYU, asking, as such officers usually do, for money. Kobek, aware that the university has recently built a campus in Abu Dhabi, financed entirely by the Emirates’ repressive regime, kindly tells the officer to get stuffed, then pivots to the dismal commercial failure (“Less than 300 copies” — I was rounding up!) of The Future Won’t Be Long.

Reader, this was shocking.

If for no other reason than the simple fact that The Future Won’t Be Long was published by Penguin Random House.

Penguin Random House is the biggest publishing conglomerate in the world. It’s a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation owned by another multibillion-dollar multinational corporation called Bertelsmann, which spent much of World War Two producing Nazi propaganda and using Jewish slaves to work in its factories.

My book was backed by Nazi money.

And it still failed.

Well, all right. Having slapped his alma mater in the face and kneed his previous publisher in the groin, Kobek blasts off for the stratosphere. Only Americans Burn in Hell is the author’s most unhinged book, his most disjunctive, and — it features, among other things, a fictitious Lou Reed song (“Do the Dookie”) that can only be heard by people who have accumulated enough wealth to become superhuman, a homicidal Rose Byrne, a bizarro fantasy narrative derived from Richard Johnson’s 17^th century Tom a Lincoln that is set largely in Los Angeles, a protracted — and rather gnarly — S&M scene between a Saudi prince named Dennis (reprised from I Hate the Internet) and a pair of sex workers, a lot (and I do mean a lot!) of brutal jabs at the classism, racism, and overwhelming idiocy of corporate publishing, and a thoroughly touching sequence about taking his best friend to see Guns ‘n Roses at the Staples Auditorium — least cohesive. But if you are interested in any of those topics — particularly the publishing stuff, as the book is more scathing on that subject than any other I’ve read — you won’t mind. (Really, it’s worth it for the lyrics to “Do the Dookie” alone.) This is Kobek’s Trump novel, his interrogation of the first term and its myriad discontents. Like the previous books, it is exceedingly difficult to summarize, and its primary pleasures derive from the way Kobek’s culturally omnivorous narrator — one moment he’s riffing sharply about the half-forgotten novelist Gloria Naylor’s book The Women of Brewster Place; the next he’s detailing how he managed to win a $1.2 million defamation suit against a Washington power broker’s son in the earlier days of the internet — can swing from subject to subject without ever losing control. As centrifugal as Only Americans Burn in Hell is — and it is wild — you never get the sense that Kobek is merely freestyling either. He has a destination in mind. And one thing this essay might not have yet adequately conveyed is what an absolute pleasure Kobek is to read. He’s no mandarin stylist — his prose runs punchy but flat — and he slashes with an awfully broad blade, but there’s a relentless energy, a leveling and ferocious intelligence that makes you feel reality is being stripped bare right in front of you. I’ve seen him compared to Houellebecq, but that’s not right. Where Houllebecq is a pure misanthrope, a crank, Kobek is a jester with a genuine affinity for other people, a sense of moral indignation and outrage that never devolves into moralizing outrage, largely because he understands what many literary arsonists don’t: that if anything you write is ever going to catch fire, it’s imperative to torch yourself first. (I kept thinking, while rereading Only Americans Burn in Hell recently, of the “burn it all down” pieties that prevailed among many online liberals during the first Trump era, and of how self-serving most of these seem in comparison to Kobek’s own ruthless examination of the period’s social media mores here.)

Still. An anti-novel, a conventional novel, a still-more-chaotic anti-novel. It’s easy to imagine the writer having boxed himself into a dead end here, consigning himself to writing ever more entropic screeds to what would almost certainly become ever more tiresome effect. (What’s the point of writing “anti-novels” if all you have to kick against are other novels and the internet?) Fortunately, Kobek found another path. In between The Future Won’t Be Long and Only Americans Burn in Hell there was another book entitled Do Everything Wrong, a short . . . well, I guess you’d have to call it a “psychedelic biography” also, of the rapper XXXTentacion. For those who don’t remember — 21^st century time, and 21^st century celebrity, burns fast — XXXTentacion started uploading music to Soundcloud in 2013, burst through to wider public consciousness with a song called “Look at Me” in late 2015, spent the next few years in and out of prison while he released a pair of albums and uploaded more music to YouTube, which would amass roughly nine billion views, and then was killed in an armed robbery in 2018. An unlikely — and unsavory, given X’s many well-documented, and self-admitted, instances of domestic violence and assault — subject for a book with any kind of literary dimension, Kobek takes on oblique tack here. Rather than approach XXXTentacion’s (real name Jahseh Onfroy) biography directly, Kobek relies largely on a forensic examination of Onfroy’s internet footprint — particularly the 26,654 tweets sent between 2012 and the end of his life — to tell the story. What emerges is not a lurid tale of excess and violent flameout, but rather a ruthless profile of what the social and streaming internet has done, and continues to do, to everybody. “Your body is a machine designed to produce a heightened response to stressful situations,” Kobek reminds us. “What happens if your interaction with the world is dominated by an engine of human contempt, designed by the ultra-wealthy to inform you that you are less than garbage?” This is a bluntly put, but not inaccurate, description of the social internet in general, and of Twitter in particular, and Kobek does not miss the implications and ramifications of what this engine does to Black and underprivileged people specifically. Do Everything Wrong (the title responds to a line that occurs late in the book: “If the whole game is rigged, and your behavior is constructed by invisible social pressures, then there’s only one thing left to do.”) is a minor work, a culvert off of Kobek’s mainstream, but it does pave the way for what remains, at time of writing, his current magnum opus.

Said opus is a two-book diptych that does something so preposterous — namely, appear to solve the Zodiac murders — it can be difficult to recommend with a straight face. Recommend it I do, though, and if I inevitably bend over backwards trying not to sound like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat when I do (“No, listen, I know — I don’t even care about the Zodiac that much, but—”), Kobek makes a startlingly lucid case. Lucid, but almost accidental. The first book, which is entitled Motor Spirit, was conceived without a sequel in mind. It plunges into the depths of the Zodiac killings with the intention of showing how they were rooted in the under-discussed violence of the San Francisco counterculture of the sixties. “Peace and love” was always a lie, Kobek means to argue (the book’s title refers to amphetamine psychosis, to the speed-induced mania that was prevalent among the Haight-Ashbury freaks more commonly associated with bucolic moods and hallucinogenic tripping), and so Motor Spirit takes us through the timeline from the first Zodiac murder, on December 20^th, 1968, all the way through to the aftermath of David Fincher’s 2007 film, Zodiac. As it does, Kobek branches backwards to the Yorkshire Ripper, sideways into the coterminous Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles, and to Manson henchman Bobby Beausoleil’s murder of Gary Hinman., but the heart of the book, though, is a forensic examination of the killings themselves, lodging them firmly in the context — a right-leaning counter-counterculturalism — in which they occurred. In some sense, you’d think this might not be necessary — didn’t Fincher’s film, which is largely based on Robert Graysmith’s two, seemingly exhaustive, nonfiction books about the murders, cover this stuff enough? — but somehow Kobek makes it work, driving deep into the anti-hippie disgust of the working- and middle-class communities surrounding Berkeley and San Francisco. Some of the book’s pleasure comes from the careful prodding of the author’s scalpel — the way he works around certain questions towards his own conclusions, operating very methodically to arrive at different ideas than Graysmith or Fincher appear to — and some from the skill with which the author reminds us without belaboring anything that he’s not so much investigating the murders as using them to explore a larger idea. One needn’t be especially interested in the Zodiac, I suspect, to find Motor Spirit compelling, and even those who have seen Zodiac, the film, more than once will find plenty to engage them. At the end of the book, Kobek trains his spotlight upon a suspect, a fellow named Richard Gaikowski, whose name first surfaced on the internet in the aftermath of Fincher’s film: someone who’s been found as a creator and haunter of message boards, and who seems to know a little too much about the killings, and whose timeline matches up with the Zodiac’s.

Only . . . Gaikowski isn’t Kobek’s suspect. Kobek’s suspect, a man named Paul Doerr, arrives in the diptych’s second half, bluntly entitled How to Find Zodiac. Like Gaikowski, Doerr is a late-breaking arrival, someone unconsidered during the Graysmith/Fincher era. In fact, Doerr is someone altogether unnoticed before Kobek observes him as a prolific letter writer to various underground periodicals. Rather than spend this book trying to prove Doerr is the Zodiac, Kobek does the opposite: he spends the book (which is told in a Maileresque, Armies of the Night-style third-person: “The bald-headed writer, the American, the Turk, Jarett Kobek, wanted to write a book called The Year of Death,” it begins) trying, unsuccessfully, to refute Doerr as a suspect. The deeper he gets into his research — the more he tries to find something that will rid him of his burdensome, unwanted because so improbable, suspicion that he has stumbled upon a hitherto-unknown suspect — the more the arrows pile up in the opposite direction. Kobek’s search leads him down a rabbit hole into a bizarre and unsavory world of rare counter-countercultural fanzines (in addition to writing letters, Doerr published several of his own, ‘zines with names like Hobbitalia and Mendocino Husbandry, which were printed in microscopic runs and were only ever available by mail order), Forteanism, and libertarian, survivalist cranks, of which Doerr was decidedly one. The book is not quite, or at least not forensically, conclusive, but How to Find Zodiac is mesmerizing in exploring a kind of sub-subculture of right-wing discontent, something that’s neither Bircherism or neo-Nazism — it’s weirder, less fixated on race or anticommunism than that — but which feels like the distinct precursor to things like 4chan and Gamergate. And if the case Kobek makes is a powerful one (powerful enough to have convinced even Doerr’s daughter, whose first inclination upon hearing of the book was to consider a libel suit, that her father may very well have been the Zodiac), it’s that peculiar underground in which Doerr was immersed that remains, for me, central to the book’s appeal.

“Appeal” is, of course, the wrong word. The worlds of How to Find Zodiac, of Motor Spirit and of Do Everything Wrong are each and all distinctly unappealing, a daisy chain of American violence in which rape and murder are forever only a shot (or a tweet) away. But taken together they form an outline, show us the borders of what Kobek’s wider project remains. If Do Everything Wrong, like I Hate the Internet and Only Americans Burn in Hell, is about social media, the derangements of the pre- and post-Trump internet, Motor Spirit and How to Find Zodiac are about that internet’s primordial roots. Which are not those of neoliberal 1990s startup capitalism, but rather the so-called “California Ideology” (as English media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron dubbed it in 1995), that mix of anti-state libertarianism and techno-utopian humanism that originally drove the internet’s creators to begin with. Squint just a little and you can see the line that connects Paul Doerr’s obsessions with J.R.R. Tolkien, guns, and natural-foods-based longevity to the ghoulish transhumanist fixations that obsess our contemporary internet overlords and their dipshit minions alike. In one sense, Motor Spirit and How to Find Zodiac are Kobek’s version of The Executioner’s Song, which likewise used American violence, and a strain of American paganism (in Mailer’s case, Mormonism) to explore the black insanity of the wider American spirit. But Kobek, that bald little fuck, takes it further, as his story ends not in the gas chamber (which is, after all, just the retributive arm of the state) but in the ether, in the conspiracy-minded whorls of the internet which may be the only place — after Pynchon, after Libra — the novel can ever come to rest anymore.

Which brings us right back where we started: to the internet, the novel’s graveyard. It would be nice to propose that Kobek has a solution for us, but, of course, he does not. I Hate the Internet climaxes with a rant from Kobek’s doppelganger, J. Karracehennem, a rant that is, I think — I no longer own a copy of Ayn Rand’s crushingly dim-witted novel to check, but just like our libertarian overlords I was once a fourteen-year-old, with a fourteen-year-old’s intellect, too — a parody of John Galt’s long monologue in Atlas Shrugged. “San Francisco,” Karracehennem declaims from a perch on Twin Peaks, addressing an agnostic gaggle of bemused tourists:

You are the worst place on earth! You have taken the dream of a bohemian enclave for misfits and morons and you have transformed it into a Disneyland for the nouveau riche. You have replaced your artists and your independent movie theaters with locally sourced restaurants! You have taken an enormous shit on the independent value of culture . . . You have taken the last true good thing, the initial utopian version of the internet, and you have perverted it into a series of interlocking fiefdoms with no purpose other than serving advertisements.

Karacehennem rolls on, eventually arriving at some choice words for writers.

Down with your literary people, San Francisco! Down with all literary people! Book people are the only people who had the natural resources to resist the Internet’s misery! Book people are the only people who have a halfway interesting argument to make against the Internet! Instead, book people rolled over like dogs at the kitchen table! The very first time that they saw a website! Begging their master for a scratch of the stomach! Publishing evolves and consolidates and rots from the inside but no technology can ever overwhelm Charlotte Brontë! Nothing can deal with Villette! Nothing ever changes, the world is the same as it was in 79 AD! The empire never ended! The only defense is William MAKEPEACE Thackeray and Gloria Naylor! Now all writers are on Twitter, pretending they can’t spell in pathetic attempts to win a larger audience! Fuck all of you! Fuck all of you except for Kevin Killian!

You cannot dismantle the master’s coffin with the master’s shovel, it turns out. Karacehennem’s rant is funny, and it turns every which way (“Fuck all language policing!” one moment, “The Internet is the last stand of the Patriarchy,” the next), but it certainly isn’t cathartic. Karacehennem just runs out of steam. (“How do you feel?” Adeline asks him. “It really didn’t do much,” Karacehennem says. “I guess it was worth trying.”) Kobek knows that the novel may be the more elegant technology — it is certainly the more free one — but there’s no going back now. “The illusion of the Internet was the idea that the opinions of powerless people, freely offered, had some impact on the world,” Kobek writes. “This was, of course, total bullshit, and based on a crazy idea of who ran the world . . . . The history of human destiny was money, the men who controlled it, and nothing more.”

And so we arrive again, too, at my own profound skepticism of Substack. By now we should all know that whenever someone starts yammering about “free speech,” as this platform’s CEO has been known to do in impressively mealy-mouthed fashion, they are completely full of shit. That Substack has made its bones platforming reactionary centrist assholes like Matthew Yglesias and disingenuous imbeciles like Bari Weiss (for whom speech should be free . . . until it is pro-Palestine!) really tells us all we need to know, and the fact that it also hosts many, many strong writers and thinkers who are none of these things doesn’t exactly dispel the concern. I’m not trying to go full Karacehennem here myself, nor trying to scold you for your own politics or for your presence on Substack (after all, here I am!), but I am proposing that this place, Substack, is the future of nothing, and that this very paragraph, in which I’m exercising my “free speech,” is itself, in one sense, total bullshit. I’m sticking pins in stupid voodoo dolls, calling out people who’ve already been called out enough (though it’s arguable that those two folks I mentioned could never be called out enough: my contempt for them is bottomless), exercising opinions that may indeed be sincerely held but are themselves just . . . noise. They’re far too pedestrian, and far too lacking in both interest and complexity, for me to ever want to put them in a novel, or even an anti-novel. And so I just lob them up here, panhandling for restacks, comments, and likes. “The illusion of opinions, freely offered, was encouraged because it made money for bankers,” Kobek writes, to this very point. “It made money for investors. It made money for manufacturers, who enslaved the citizens of far-off nations to build the devices required for the free offering of opinions.” To which you will say, well, OK, but are we not supposed to have opinions? It’s in the nature of capitalism to make money for bankers. Penguin Random House makes money for bankers! Surely Substack, which merely hosts Nazis, is better than PRH, which is owned by a corporation built by them! Perhaps you are right. There’s no denying that our old legacy institutions are failing writers — and, so, failing readers — left and right, and that many of those writers who are boxed out by that system and who deserve to be read arrive, happily, in my inbox, day in and day out, thanks to this very platform. But nothing here is free, no matter how much we pretend otherwise, and as the legacy world’s rentier class arrives, especially, the Tina Browns and Lena Dunhams who’ve been cropping up left and right on the ‘stack these past few months, the whole gang of neoliberal all-stars, my view of this platform, and of the novel’s future in relation to it, grows ever darker. Take it from someone who’s been in the game a while. I know a death rattle when I hear one . . .

And yet. I keep thinking of a passage that appears late in Only Americans Burn in Hell, one in which Kobek arrives at a conclusion one wouldn’t expect from — you’ll pardon the phrase here, but it is the author’s own sardonic self-description and not mine — “the towelheaded son of a dirty fucking immigrant camelfucker.” Late in the novel, after a long and distressing passage in which Kobek (“the American, the Turk”) is haunted by the ghosts of a million dead Iraqis, who tell him everything that’s on their collective and vengeful minds, the writer pivots to address the reader:

If for no reason other than the bloody-minded perversity of the damned, you might as well embrace the most discredited idea in Western life.

You might as well ride dirty with Jesus.

And his ultimate message.

It’s not like anything else is working.

You are more than your base impulses.

You don’t have to follow the script of your life.

Don’t be a dick.

The only things that they can’t monetize are individual acts of kindness.

Say a prayer, then, for Jarett Kobek, the American, the Turk, the dissident, the novelist, the genius, and the nut. Norman Mailer may have written a novel from the point of view of Jesus Christ, but Kobek has the far more stubborn — more radical, more countercultural, and certainly more deserving of attention and applause — inclination to propose that we go on and act like him. From inside the burning house of American fiction, a structure Henry James once proposed “has a hundred windows,” but now seems to consist mostly of basement rooms and broom closets, this seems unlikely to rescue us also, but one never knows. It happens to be the only thing that matters, and the only hope we’ve got.

Matthew Specktor's books include The Golden Hour, out now from Ecco Press, Always Crashing in the Same Car, and American Dream Machine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. A founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he lives in West Hollywood.