NUTCRANKR is a better novel than its author's Twitter persona would lead you to expect.
It's funny, for one thing. It contends with the important questions of the day. And it's short, which always helps.
NUTCRANKR tells the story of one Spencer Grunhauer, a graduate of one of America's more prestigious liberal arts colleges. (A recurring line in the novel which, intentionally or not, called up memories of the time when Himself showed us all what water is.)
In the tradition of A Confederacy of Dunces (which I've never read) and Don Quixote (which is a book long enough to overstay its welcome), NUTCRANKR is a story of a strange, sad man who does really weird things. But to keep from being a downer about the whole thing, Dan Baltic adds in some jokes and some really top-notch descriptions of (female) breasts.
Who is Dan Baltic, by the way? Well, Dan Baltic, a talking dog with a pope hat who runs a podcast, is the author of NUTCRANKR. Like, he put all the words together in order, and everything. I'm not sure if he can hold a pen or work a keyboard with his doggy paws, so he might have had to use his pope hat to speak to the Holy Spirit so the HS could record his words. Sort of like the Prophet Muhammad, but in reverse.
Anyway, it's not time to write Mr Balto's hagiography yet. It's just time for me to tell you all about why you should put your filthy lucre into Dan's filthy hands. The lesson of NUTCRANKR, like the lesson of the Gospel of John, is after all that a man ought to pursue his own personal self-interest.
The Plot
Now, when I talk about the plot, I don't mean there's anything sneaky or nefarious going on. So put that out of your little head, sweet cakes. No, I just mean, like, what the book's about.
And what the book's about, is it's about Spencer Grunhauer. Which is why it's kind of a sad and deranged book in spite of the jokes. Because Spencer Grunhauer is a little bit of a sad and deranged man. But he's also relatable, because he's sad and deranged in a fictional way that just so happens to resemble the way a growing chunk of America's contemporary reading public is sad and deranged in real life.
He's just like you, for real. If you happen to be a weirdo of Spencer's ilk.
Sort of the running joke in the book is that Spencer's life is actually pretty pathetic and sad, but he doesn't see it because he has delusions of grandeur. He's always internally comparing himself to the likes of Achilles, the Übermensch, Immanuel Kant, Aeneas, and other names from books you probably didn't actually read in college. He's always internally reminding himself how everyone around him is beneath him–in his thoughts, Spencer repeatedly thinks of his long-term love interest as a "piglet" who is "below his station." And ultimately, Spencer's delusions of grandeur lead him to comically misinterpret everything around him in increasingly disastrous ways.
You can see here some of Spencer's kinship with the man of la Mancha. Don Quixote reads one too many books of adventure and derring-do. This radically warps his sense of reality and causes him to do things like charge the proverbial windmills. ("Don't you see they're giants?") But even though Don Quixote takes things too far now and then and is mostly played for laughs… there's ultimately a kind of nobility in his devotion to his misguided ideal. Don Quixote may be ridiculous, but his attempts to live nobly really do prove to be ennobling.
It might not be far wrong to read NUTCRANKR as a novel about whether or not ennobling devotion to an ideal is possible in 21st-century America. Because Spencer Grunhauer, like Don Quixote, tries to bring a certain ideal into reality. Whether he succeeds or not… well, I already told you he's like Don Quixote.
(Oh he's also like Goethe's Werther, by the way. Just in case I forget.)
The Project
So: what exactly is Spencer Grunhauer's ideal? That's kind of a difficult question for anyone to answer because Spencer's ideal is a confused thing and he does a really, really bad job at living up to it. You'll notice there's a real dissonance between Spencer's internal monologue and what he actually dares to say and do when there are real stakes on the table.
(He's all about saving the historic West and combatting degeneracy, but when his big tiddy goth GF wants to go to the 2016 Women's March he eagerly dons the pussy hat, kind of thing.)
At any rate, NUTCRANKR is an example of a kind of thing no one without a bomb squad certification should touch lightly–a political novel.
So I'll go ahead and spit it out–Spencer Grunhauer is a right-wing crank. He's mostly concerned with the looming threats of communism, feminism, the historic and cultural decline of Western civilization, Michel Foucault, and Davos Daddies. (I'm not sure what a Davos Daddy is, but given the fact that there's a major thread of sadomasochism in the novel I'm assuming it's a sexual fetish and I approve entirely.) And he's working on a Project to solve these ills.
Spencer's Project mostly appears on the message boards of 3Chain–a fictional message board site that appears in the fictional world of the novel. This is where Spencer works tirelessly and consistently to frame his worldview and right the wrongs that threaten all of us. The novel is a little fuzzy on the actual details of the Project, but we are given more than a few tantalizing glimpses of what a world run by Spencer's lights would look like.
Most important to the novel's plot, we hear about the Spousal Distribution System. Spencer's basic idea is that suitable young men (such as Spencer) should have the government provide them with suitable young wives, for breeding purposes. As you'd imagine, this idea gets Spencer into some tense situations that drive the plot of the novel along and lead Spencer to his ultimate catastrophe or apotheosis.
I won't sugar coat this: Spencer is so out of touch that he doesn't realize how out of touch he is. His ideals are a confused mess of wish-fulfillment and rationalization. He lacks the courage of his convictions. He never seems quite sure whether he wants to restore Christendom, bring back the glory that was Rome, or institute some kind of futuristic eugenic caste system. He's an ungrateful little twerp who is constantly hiding from his own insignificance by coming up with a laundry list of reasons he's better than everybody around him.
But for all that… Spencer Grunhauer is no stranger. Anybody who is even the tiniest bit like Spencer will find moments in this novel that are like looking into a mirror under harsh light. We're talking like, gas station bathroom at 2 AM harsh light here, folks. It's not pretty and everyone can see all of your pores.
NUTCRANKR
By now you're probably wondering where this punchy little novel gets its title from. Well, I'm not telling you.
… all right, I'll tell you a little, teensy bit. It's pretty much exactly what you're thinking. Only it doesn't explicitly come into the novel till near the end, and it's wonderfully horrible. Anyone who has ever had an issue with a social media company will understand Spencer's frustration.
And speaking of the end of the novel… it's mesmerizing. One of those finales that casts everything that came before in a new, ambiguous haze. It's a thinker, all right, is all I'm saying.
Hauntings
So: is Spencer Grunhauer a hero? Well… no. Absolutely not. In no way. Not even the tiniest bit of one.
Except… he is trying. He might be blind to his own faults, but he clearly sees some of the problems of our post-industrial civilization we've willfully blinded ourselves to. There's an implication in the novel that Spencer Grunhauer is haunted by the specters of the past. It may be that some of these hauntings continue, regardless of our conscious attitude toward them.
In Spencer Grunhauer and in NUTCRANKR as a whole, Dan Baltic has wittily (if not exactly sympathetically) brought to life one of the major symptoms of our time. Spencer may not be a hero, but his spirit is alive and among us. In every message board and every social media site, in every gentrifying neighborhood and every prestigious liberal arts college, he lives, he breathes, and he poasts. He might lurk behind the next anon account you come across today.
I think I've said enough here to make it clear that NUTCRANKR is not a novel for the thin-skinned, whatever their politics may be. Although, let's be real, its title alone should warn the unprepared away. That being said, NUTCRANKR is a tight, firm little confection that does credit to its author as an artist, if not as a human being. Absolutely worth reading and Dan Baltic is one to watch.
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