Book Review: The Future Won't Be Long
/The Future Won't Be Long
by Jarett KobekViking, 2017The unlikely grassroots success story of Jarett Kobek's 2016 novel I Hate the Internet – plucked from plucky obscurity and given a bright-spotlight coronation by Dwight Garner in the New York Times – should have been a certain portent of a long literary career combining laziness and insufferability. Kobek's new novel, The Future Won't Be Long, at first seems to confirm the worst, since it goes so far as to star two characters from I Hate the Internet and, much like that previous book, it spends a good deal of its energy waxing nostalgic for something that nobody actually remembers fondly – in this case the Manhattan of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the moment of the so-called “club kids,” the temporary triumph of disposable faux-art, and the advent of the AIDS epidemic.But The Future Won't Be Long is saved from being an impossible muddle of such pretensions by the same things that saved I Hate the Internet: the readability of Kobek's prose and the ease of his narrative costume-dressing. The latter is especially strong in this novel, where readers are invited into the viewpoints of passionate, dipsy art student Adeline and the mysterious Midwestern ingénue originally known only as Baby, whose “beautiful naive youth in need of both protection and despoilation” affect is the perennial fascination of the New York club crowd. There's a scene late in the book where one of Kobek's characters is trying to describe the sensation of being high on the horse tranquilizer ketamine:
Ketamine was like water, clear, like being disconnected and shut down from the senses, being forced into using the hidden senses to comprehend input of the primary five. The body imprisoned in one place, the soul in another. Glimpses flickered in and out. I'd be on the side of the club one moment. The next, I'd be on the other, with no memory of the distance between. Intermittent psychic visions flashing in my head, mindless insight into the world. I lived other people's lives, from birth to death. I saw myself in the distant future and the backwards past. I touched the whole of eternity and mingled with the infinite.
Kobek works a similar kind of magic to this: he inhabits his characters in ways so thorough and fluid that his readers inhabit them as well, which can be – and is certainly meant to be – disorienting when the characters in question have the depth and complexity of rain puddles:
I chalked Kevin's behavior up to the mysteries of human experience. I was new with knowledge. The orchestration of sexual liaisons between one's boyfriend and other men was not, perhaps, a step conducive towards building a stable relationship. What did I care, really? The city was awash with boys, and my bestest had eaten from the tree of knowledge.Back at home, Baby continued his refusal of any discussion. I poked at him with my finger, pushing into his ribs, giggling madly, until he said, “Fine, fine, I'll tell you something, but only one thing, okay?”“Pray continue, dear boy,” I said.“What really surprised me,” said Baby, “was how warm it was. It burned in my hand.”I let out a shriek, appalled and amused. “Oh my God!” I said. “Baby, you send me, you really send me! You finally did it!”
All the requisite name-checks of the 1980s are performed as rote duties in The Future Won't Be Long, and Kobek still indulges himself in the irrelevant fact-dumping digressions that were so annoying in I Hate the Internet and haven't exactly aged well. And the very pointless frenzies of his young, ardent main characters don't usually mesh well with the sotto voce moaning about gentrification that's likewise apparently required in these eighties-were-greaties New York books (“They're going to steal it from us, slowly, over time. If you think it'll end here, you're wrong. It won't be finished until every poor person is driven out of the city, until they transform all of Manhattan into something that we can't recognize”). But there's very real and very smart storytelling generosity in these pages; if this is the kind of novel we get when self-published novels are plucked from obscurity, then publishers should be searching the endless ranks of such novels far more industriously than they currently are.
