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.

Anon is a wryly funny narrator. Nothing he says is funny; only his status as caricature of an internet-poisoned conscious is. As we follow Anon from his university to the bars and malls he uses to “approach” women (and Anon methodically records all such approaches), we realize he is an absurd mishmash of tropes and memes, so much so that it borders on making the narrative unbelievable. But for every over-the-top, this-could-never-be-a-real-person moment in Incel (for instance, Anon’s use of the phrase, “I have to return some videotapes” after a failed sexual encounter) there is a loneliness and desperation that is recognizably human.

Or, it is at least recognizable to those of us who feel we have lost something after spending a bit too much time online. Thus, Incel is one of the few novels that takes seriously the tragedy of us digital natives: a sense of both having grown up too fast and being locked in arrested development. Anon has seen hundreds of bare breasts and pussies before he fucks, he has had refined the art of conversation with other Reddit nerds instead of flesh and blood human beings, and he has developed an understanding of psychology far removed from the common sense of everyday social interactions. And we are all—even if we avoid porn and the edgier corners of the internet—becoming more like Anon.

Anon eventually completes his quest: he has sex before turning twenty-three. But his suffering does not end. It only ceases to be unique. Having finally done The Big Thing he is forced to confront the petty suffering of day-to-day life. The tragedy of the incel lies in the banality of his misery. It is a universal tragedy: being horny—wanting and not getting—is the human condition, and Incel is a brilliant exploration of how this condition is altered by a lifetime spent online.

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