Incel is a difficult book. Not that it's difficult to read on a sentence-by-sentence basis. No, ARX-Han has crafted a highly readable style for this difficult novel.
What's difficult about it, then? What makes it difficult is that it places the reader directly inside the thought process of its protagonist. It lets the incel show us his own self-understanding. A little like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, there's no trace of an authorial voice pointing out, “Here's where anon’s thought process goes wrong.”
And anon's mind is a deeply uncomfortable place.
Incel
Also like the Underground Man, the protagonist in Incel is unnamed in the text. On the rare occasions when the other characters in the novel call him by name, they merely address him as “anon,” because of course they do. For the most part the novel is written in the first person, although at tense moments it will switch to second person and really blur the line between you and anon.
So what's your problem? Pretty much what you'd guess from the novel’s title. You are a 22-year-old graduate student in evolutionary psychology (because of course you are) and your virginity has outlasted its welcome. You've decided to commit suicide on your 23rd birthday if you fail to change this situation by the end of the current year.
(And by the way–Incel isn't exactly a laugh-a-minute novel because anon takes himself so seriously. But the passage where he describes his chosen method for suicide really is deliciously funny.)
Most of the novel follows your attempts to get laid, your troubles in convincing your professor and fellow graduate students that your terrifying ideas for research studies are actually really good, and your experiences on the more anonymous ends of the hell known as the Internet. You also meet up with your sister Rachel every once in a while so the two of you can misunderstand each other. And you go drinking with your buddy Jason an awful lot, even though you're well aware that he's a really lousy wingman.
Research
Possibly the clearest picture we get of anon's problem comes when he's telling his fellow grad student, Andrew, all about his research ideas. Starting with some old studies where it was found that human females show physiological signs of arousal when watching recordings of chimps mating, he figures, “Well, why not get a couple of undergraduates together and track the woman's arousal the whole time?”
Andrew explains to him all the reasons this is a bad and even horrifying idea, but anon really doesn't get it.
And he doesn't get it, but he also knows he doesn't get it. He takes the same sort of systematic attitude toward approaching women that he would have liked to apply to an academic study. He tracks how many women he's approached in public, how many numbers he's been able to get, how many dates that's translated to, and how many times he's been able to seal the deal.
Which is really one of the high points of Incel as a novel. It's all in here. The unnatural feeling of forcing yourself into these interactions with total strangers. The feeling that everyone around you is scrutinizing and judging your every movement when all you're doing is trying to act on your most basic drive to connect. The approaches that seem to go so well, that get your hopes up only to lead to nothing at all.
There's a whole record here of types of emotions that rarely get expressed because they're not permissible. The feeling of going home to jerk off to pornography after a failed date with a woman you were only semi-attracted to. It takes an uncommon courage and vulnerability to write passages like this, let alone to put them out in front of the world.
Anon shows some remarkable self-awareness now and then. The word “autistic” gets thrown around a lot in the novel, whatever it means, and one thing it seems to mean is that anon is especially bad at modeling the mental states of others. He thinks about approaching women in terms of an experimental process–which is kind of inevitable when you're walking into these interactions expecting to be shot down over and over and over. On at least one occasion anon talks about how intellectualizing is a defense mechanism we use to shield ourselves from an unbearable pain.
Because the lives of women really are a black box for anon. Either because of his narrow goal-oriented approach, his analysis of everything from an evo psych angle, or simple autism… he has no felt sense of whether he's connecting with a woman or not. He gets better over time, after piling up painful experience on painful experience, but he's never sure what's going on in the other's mind.
Rarely have I ever seen the abyss of a woman's desire get such a painfully real evocation as in this novel.
Science
One of the more interesting little sub-themes of the novel comes from anon's attitude toward stories and literature as a whole. ARX-Han appears to be highly aware of some of the paradoxes in this area, which even if they're not fully developed in this novel might point to a further development in his work.
Anon is a scientist, through and through. He has a clear intellectual commitment to the idea that what really drives our actions is our genes’ need to propagate themselves. He has very little patience for narrative, religious, or metaphorical methods of expressing truth.
On at least two occasions in the novel, the tension between anon's scientific worldview and the fact that he's the narrator in a novel comes tantalizingly near the surface. The first of these comes near the beginning of the novel, where anon gives us a heart-rending story explaining why his friend Jason got into fighting.
But then anon pulls the rug out from under us and says, “No, it's all genes, and stories are meaningless.”
The second time comes quite a bit later in the novel, when anon is chatting up a girl who just so happens to be an undergraduate Political Science major, minoring in Literature. He doesn't say anything to her, but we're treated to some thoughts about how scientific progress will inevitably make literature obsolete. Once again, anon takes it as a given that the ends of literature are better served by scientific knowledge–and once again, he's too worried about feminine judgment to express himself freely.
This line of thought isn't hugely developed in the novel, but it was highly intriguing whenever it showed up. And it sort of underscores the fact that the scientific digressions in the novel never achieve the kind of pathos found when anon encounters a wounded bird that's fallen out of a nest, or a worm that's crawled onto a sidewalk.
Because there is real pathos in the novel. Anon is well aware that people like him are caricatured as emotionless robots. And even though he's intellectual committed to the idea that it's all a matter of genes… he still saves a worm that's crawling over the sidewalk.
Anon never quite seems to work out the tension between his harsh Darwinian worldview and the fact that he's basically a kindhearted person.
The Part About Racism
I realize I've been trying to sweep this under the rug, but it's prominent enough in the novel that it needs to be mentioned. Anon is super racist. Like, enough that I almost stopped reading the novel about 100 pages in, where he spends a few paragraphs on a lengthy description of how much he can't stand the way Chinese people eat and then tries to redefine racism so it doesn't apply to him.
Probably it's inevitable that a novel of this sort will at least glance on the subject of racism. And in anon's defense, even if he's theoretically a racist he's pretty bad at being racist, considering that his best friend is Korean.
So just be aware that's in there.
The End
Incel is a novel about a not-particularly-pleasant character with a not-particularly-pleasant worldview. And while I don't want to go into detail about the end or get into spoiler territory, I will say the ending isn't without hope. Anon realizes, pretty painfully, that his worldview has been lacking and that other people suffer in complex ways that can easily escape his notice.
To sum up, Incel is a brave novel. With this novel, ARX-Han dares to bring light to a kind of experience that usually gets dismissed with a laugh if it's discussed at all. If this makes it a difficult novel it's because it's all too real and it's an all too honest depiction of a type of person who has become all too common.
This is the sort of novel that stares into the abyss. The sort of novel that allows a type of humanity to express its own truth in its own terms, without editorializing or trying to make things pretty. The sort of novel more writers ought to have the courage to write.
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