Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe: book review
Very rarely do I read books that I'm probably not the intended audience. I fit marketing stereotypes well, and I feel like, especially in the last decade, the lit fic trends are catered towards me, and that's also what I seek out. I read books about women in their twenties figuring out how to be women in their twenties with a few deviations here and there for the big award-winners or long listed books or whatever is capturing the book world imagination. But, usually, I'm reading books where the touch-points and in-jokes are all turned my direction—I was on that side of the internet, I remember the meme, the song resonates for me.
That was very much not the case with Fuccboi. Which wasn't a surprise. I didn't find the book through my usual channels. I discovered it through a friend and was intrigued because this friend doesn't read or like much contemporary fiction, especially internet-dealing fiction, but has held this book and its author in a certain esteem. And because it was a friend rec, I persisted when I otherwise would not have. And I'm glad that I did, honestly, because I felt like I found plenty worthwhile when I forced myself to locate the frequency this book chimed on and adjust myself to that.
The way that this book is very much my thing is that it's an Internet Novel. Both that it's set in the present day (or, well, 2017) and it dissects what it means to have our relationship mediated by technology and that it is literally written in the language of the internet. This was the part I struggled with a bit more. The fragments were fine. The slang terms—you see in real time just how fast things get dated. It's a period piece, though, set in 2017 and deeply soaked in 2017. And once I got over just how viscerally I cringe at the word "bae" (which, with an adjective to modify it, is how the main character refers to just about every woman in his life that's not his mom), I could appreciate bottling a particular time, place, and sub-culture. There's something interesting to me about hyper-specificity that made me think more critically about my initial response, which was—are you actually serious right now.
The book is autofiction. The main character is the author, though there are surely some liberties. I did appreciate that unlike books like Motherhood and Transcription that fancy themselves far more literary in the realm of autofiction, that this book, while it didn't have a true plot, did feel like a novel. The scenes link together and have meaning. He faces trials that he has to tangibly overcome. It feels like we're experiencing a section of Sean Thor Conroe's life rather than using characters and a thin setting to couch a ton of ideas that should've been an essay. And there are plenty of ideas. This is as much a reading and reflection log as it is a journal as it is a novel. But they all exist in service of the main character's journey of moving from this emotionally and physically broken state in the fallout of a break-up to picking up the pieces of his life and finally figuring out—after much trial and error—how to make something of it. The ideas are part of what help him get there, but they aren't the sole point of the book's existence.
For as much as the style was jarring initially, it is extremely fast to read when most sentences constitute their own line of text. I finished 50 pages the first time I causally picked it up to see what the book was about, and I find it a little intoxicating to be able to fly through a book. It's like candy. It kept me engaged through my skepticism. The funny thing, though, was that I found in the moments the book dipped into italics and Conroe played around with more conventional prose styles, a "and here's a bit of me writing my book" feeling, I didn't really want to read it. I wanted to keep racing at the 100mph pace he'd established, not slow down, not melt into description and adjectives, even though that's usually what I enjoy most in a book. In a way, it felt like he'd taught me to skim read and then was changing the parameters.
And I did find there to be a real emotional core to the work that was compelling. I felt for the main character, even though he'd created a lot of his problems himself. Life is hard, and I understand what it's like to have an emotional breakdown that then tips your entire physical body into meltdown. It's not fun. And it was interesting to get insight from a perspective I don't often get. Most of the novels I read from a male perspective are from middle aged men, usually dealing with family contexts or about teenage boys. I can't really think of the last time I read a book about a guy my age. There's a section of the book where the main character reflects on writing the book, how the goal is to say all the things that are too raw, too taboo to even say to a friend. To go for a complete sort of transparency, and that makes for some interesting moments. It asks thought-provoking questions. So much of the book comes back to wondering how much our thoughts count for in the grand scheme of morality—interestingly, I kept thinking about The Drama while reading the book. In that way, I agree with Conroe, that books are one of our best venues for exploring the dark, gross, the parts of reality we all pretend don't exist in polite company. But that can be a truly difficult spot to write from, to be judged as a public person from.
I think my original guess that this would be the dude-version of I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel lived up to reality. And if you've read and liked one, you'd probably find something interesting in the other book.
Overall: 4
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