FICTION
If Nietzsche Were in High School
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NIETZSCHE AND THE BURBS
By Lars Iyer
By Lars Iyer
A clique of misfit teenagers in suburban England sit on adulthood’s cusp, lamenting their middle-class lives and fretting for their futures. Enter a new boy, a stranger booted from a posh academy, who scrawls “NIHILISM” on the cover of his notebook and elevates the group’s ennui into something more profound. They call him Nietzsche, as in Friedrich. We never learn his real name.
Not much happens in “Nietzsche and the Burbs,” a peculiar new novel by Lars Iyer. The final 10 weeks of high school go by. There are house parties and bicycle rides and exams. Only one member of the group, Chandra, serves as narrator, but the novel’s voice is a collective one: an angsty adolescent Greek chorus. “Who are we supposed to be?” it asks. “What are we supposed to want? Are we any different from the people we hate? Won’t we have to become like them in the end?”
It goes on like this. Nietzsche keeps a sad blog about the suburbs (“Nothing will happen, not today”). The group watches “Melancholia” and reads Dostoyevsky. Drugs are taken, and sex, very occasionally, is had. “Why are we so tired, at the peak of our lives?” the narrator asks. “Why are we falling asleep, at the peak of our lives?” Think “On the Genealogy of Morality” meets “The Breakfast Club.”
You may be unsurprised to learn that Iyer is a longtime lecturer in philosophy (he currently teaches creative writing at Newcastle University). His last novel, “Wittgenstein Jr.,” is a funhouse version of this one; it fictionalized the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a modern-day Cambridge professor, as seen through the eyes of his students. “Nietzsche and the Burbs” sticks to the same formula, illuminating and gently mocking the ideas of its title subject.
There is humor here. Iyer’s teenagers are recognizable, painfully so: They worry about modern plagues like school shootings, natural disasters and the rot of late capitalism. (No wonder they’ve gone nihilist.) Such melodrama will be familiar to anyone who has suffered through the affliction that is being 18. Iyer, who has a gift for capturing the cadence of the young, charts the overlap between the philosophers he reveres and the juveniles he teaches. “All adolescents are philosophers,” Chandra observes, “and all philosophers are adolescents at heart.”
At 345 pages, “Nietzsche and the Burbs,” like any well-meaning professor, can belabor its point. The novel idles for long stretches, and there’s too much space between memorable sentences, like the one that compares an erection to a “narwhal’s tusk.” Characters blur together; only one, Paula, a jaded lesbian who falls in and out of love, stands out. The Nietzsche character remains a cipher until the end.
Scholarly readers — or those with access to the Wikipedia page for Continental philosophy — will find that in-jokes abound. Like Friedrich, Iyer’s Nietzsche has an overbearing sister, a father who died young and a crush on a girl named Lou. (The real Nietzsche pined for the writer Lou Salomé.) One imagines the faculty club guffaws when a character wonders, “Does being clever always make people miserable?”
But Iyer’s talent is best deployed in scenes that plumb the poignancy of finishing high school and leaving home — a moment when one’s world can be at once filled with kaleidoscopic possibility while also disintegrating. As he watches classmates frolic in an end-of-term field day, Chandra identifies the odd feeling of nostalgia for the present day: “A valedictory air. A last-of-the-last-days air. There’s not much school left. There’s not long to go. Days ringing out in the infinite. As though they will never pass. … As though these last, languorous days will last forever.”
This is a near-perfect evocation of childhood’s elegiac end. And it proves Iyer’s literary talents can occasionally match his philosophical ones.
Michael M. Grynbaum writes about media and politics for The Times.
NIETZSCHE AND THE BURBS
By Lars Iyer
345 pp. Melville House. Paper, $16.99.
By Lars Iyer
345 pp. Melville House. Paper, $16.99.
A version of this article appears in print on , Page 13 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Too Cool for School. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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