Alex Muka’s Hell or Hangover marks the boisterous, exuberant return of the male gaze to those literary precincts from which it has been excluded for some time now.
Lou Kennedy, a 25-year-old half-Cuban, half-Irish, all-Jersey Hobokenite, is a trad cad and debauchee of epic proportions undergoing a crisis of faith. Despite the prodigious amount of booze and innumerable lines of coke he consumes in the week we spend with him, which he, with an engaging combination of guilt and glee, informs us, has been his M.O. since college, a sense of emptiness is fast encroaching. The highs are coming harder and the hangovers growing worse. Getting wasted has started to feel like wasted time. Presenting himself to himself and his friends as “Professor Lou,” doctor of debauchery, he has developed an entire system of ethics based on keeping the party going and avoiding commitment. Never let a woman you are dating post your pic on her Instagram. Never be the first to text. Avoid brunch at all costs. Always be sniffing. Yet his rigid code of rogues’ honor, intended to ensure his free-roaming pleasure, has become a source of constriction.
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