cross-posted to substack: https://hermeticjournal.substack.com/p/book-review-incel

The problem with reviewing a book like Incel is the temptation to treat the review as a chance to offer a verdict on inceldom. But the novel doesn’t exist to critique or garner sympathy for sexless, alienated young men in particular.

Instead, it is an exploration of sadness, loneliness, and the cruelty of everyday existence, all of which are turned up to 100 because of our internet-addled brains. It depicts what happens when we are presented with too much information for our primitive minds to handle, when we possess knowledge unmediated by real experience, and when we are given unlimited digital opportunities to satisfy our whims but must ultimately exist in the physical world, with its pesky limits and constraints.

Anon, our narrator, is a contemptible loser. Of course, if you’re reading a self-published novel called Incel by a pseudonymous internet writer, you probably won’t be put off by Anon’s racism or sexism. You’re based, not some kind of Atlantic subscriber. But even putting aside his verboten opinions, Anon is misanthropic, arrogant, and a giant buzzkill. His narrative voice is tedious, full of evo-psych babble and long digressions about such subjects as “the basic neurobiology of memory” and the “anatomically optimized waist-to-hip ratio[s]” of the women he ogles at. His quest, which defines the plot of the novel, is no less miserable and lame: to have sex with a woman before his twenty-third birthday. Failing to do this, he plans to kill himself.

His only real relationships are with Jason, an eccentric Korean-American martial artist and, Rachel, his sister, who becomes increasingly put off by his misanthropy, racism, and mechanical approach to human interaction. Anon is a white supremacist and misogynist, and these relationships are strained, to say the least. But they save him from his home life—which mostly seems to revolve around masturbating—and his academic career, which is frustrated by the reductive anti-humanism of his approach to science.