Nietzsche and the Burbs

September 30, 2019
In this devastatingly withering follow-up to 2014’s Wittgenstein Jr., Iyer turns his keen eye and sharp sense of humor to the suburbs. There’s a new boy in the London suburb of Wokingham, recently transferred from a posh private school after he lost his scholarship. He’s taken in by his new high school’s resident group of misfit creative types, who name him Nietzsche, after his pseudo-deep blog and the giant NIHILISM scrawled across his notebook. Though one of the misfits, Chandra, an Indian boy with creative writing ambitions, is technically the narrator, the novel is written from a plural first-person perspective that folds together Chandra’s voice with those of his friends, all of whom are deeply devoted to two things: their death metal band and cynicism. Nietzsche, then, is the perfect lead singer for a band that makes “the music that comes after music. Fucking ghost music, man.” Despite their cynicism and aversion to any platitudes, the nihilist heroes discover the sincere thrill of being young in high school, as they run through a gamut of heartbreaking, hilarious, and exhilarating experiences with love, drugs, and the immediate and terminal future. The individual characters tend to get lost in Iyer’s dense narration, and they are occasionally too clever for cleverness’s sake. But readers will be endeared by Iyer’s skillful portrayal of their deep tenderness and uncertainty despite it all, even if they’d hate for readers to know it.

October 1, 2019
A group of prep schoolers reckon with their ennui thanks to doom metal and a new classmate nicknamed after a famous nihilist. Iyer has found a niche in seriocomic fiction about very serious philosophers: Wittgenstein Jr (2014) was a funny campus novel about logic, and this follow-up is a funny campus novel about despair. At its center is a group of students in Wokingham, 20 miles away from London, eager to finish classes and move on with their lives. But as their final semester begins, a new arrival, kicked out of his previous school under vague circumstances, at once unsettles their relationships and sharpens their cynicism. The new boy scribbles "NIHILISM" in his notebook, is prone to dark and gnomic pronouncements in class ("All things die in time"), and maintains a blog musing on the meaning(lessness) of suburbia ("Nothing will happen here....Unless the voiding of time is itself an event"). His dour temperament quickly earns him the nickname Nietzsche. (We never learn his real name.) The clique soon welcomes him at school and, later, at band practice, where they're laboring on droning, sludgy rock that evokes their angst. Iyer neatly captures the way Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal return is a perfect fit for cynical teenagers who are sure it's all been done, but Iyer also wants to explore how frantic teenage emotions challenge their assurances; suicide, love, sex, and self-destructive instincts all figure in the plot. As for comedy, Iyer has a knack for the one-upping banter that demonstrates maturity and insecurity at the same time. The cycles of hope-despair-repeat among the characters get repetitive, but credit Iyer for thinking big: That little garage band is determined to "start a new society" and be a "clue to a new way of life." Dark, brooding fun.

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Starred review from October 15, 2019
Paula, Art, Merv, and Chandra?a coterie of sixth-formers in a British secondary school, would-be nihilists in training wheels. When they discover the new boy in school is himself a nihilist, a philosopher manqu�, they quickly adopt him, dubbing him Nietzsche, inviting him to join their band as singer, and naming the band Nietzsche and the Burbs. Ah, the burbs, the focus of their sneering attention, their cynicism, their conviction that, though they might escape them temporarily, they will ultimately wind up back in their clutches. Their story, which takes place over the course of 10 weeks, is narrated by Chandra in a vaguely stream-of-consciousness voice replete with sentence fragments, omnipresent snippets of burbs philosophy, and extended conversation among the coterie. Nietzsche himself has little to say except for his pithy blog posts: e.g., Perpetual imminence. Eventless events. Nothing happening except for this nothing is happening. What is the book about? The kids' quotidian school life, the occasional party, drinking, and Nietzsche?the real one, not the intriguing imitation. The limited action leads up to a denouement: an actual public performance by the band. Does it go well? Let's just say readers won't be surprised by the answer. How closely fictional Nietzsche is meant to resemble the real thing is moot except for the fact that the fictional one has gone off his meds. Uh-oh. Some readers may find the often-allusive book too clever by half; others will delight in its wit. In either case, the book is a model of originality. Clever, indeed.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)