The Silent Scream of Lonely Young Men

We’ve come a long way since Jay McInerney’s bestselling Bright Lights, Big City hit the shelves — 40 years chronologically, although solving for the digital revolution’s impact on the human psyche, it might as well have been centuries ago. Even so, with regard to character arcs, ARX-Han, in his self-published and increasingly popular novel Incel, picks up right where McInerney’s famously second-person, nameless narrator left off. Just as McInerney, with his deadpan wit, eased us from skepticism into cynicism, ARX-Han’s Incel antihero, anon, continues the downward trajectory with mordant self-parody, sliding past nihilism into despair. Nothing new under the Black Hole Sun, so to speak. And while Incel’s content is compelling in its own right, what makes the novel truly interesting — maybe even important — is its innovative structure and style, which engage us on one level while illuminating the technological and generational divide on another.