1.
Scenebux by
is the funniest of the eight (?) Substack novels I’ve read and yes it might be svelte at 200 pages but we’ll call it a novel, and treat it that way, cuz it’s freighted with enough material that the brevity feels earned; heavier in substance than paper.It’s also kinda frivolous, deliberately so, in a way you either enjoy or don’t. There’s skill and cleverness and flashes of heart throughout the book, and by the end it has kinda matured into something richer than it was at the start, but if the first chapter bothers you I’d say take that feeling as prophecy.
Scenebux is a satire of millennial/zillennial brainrot, or an exaggerated monologue showing what life is like when your cyber- and meatspaces have become one. But it’s disguised as a globetrotting thriller. It has maybe 100 characters, takes place on at least three continents, and juggles a few booklength subplots — but it’s not laborious reading and he knows where to lay his emphasis.
Riffing about the phenomenon of bar fights, in one of his early novels, Cormac McCarthy mentions “the little knives that come from nowhere” and Smith has the literary equivalent of that in his narrative repertoire. The book is farce farce farce and then something’ll happen that freezes it. Gives a quick and sobering sense of stillness in which something appears to’ve attained moral gravity — and then it relents.
A guy slips off a rock and splits his head open and goes from being naked, irreverent, frolicksome to suddenly being dead.
We’re numb for half a page, and then the chapter breaks, and we’re gliding back to the comedy zone without the author pretending we didn’t just see that.
It’s always surprising when Smith pulls it off: both cuz it’s jarring and, to be frank, more courageous than I thought the book would be until that stuff started. This book satirizes messy modern lives, brainrot, the inability of Smith’s young generation to connect; meanwhile it’s got this obvious heartbeat, somewhere under the fake mustaches and colorful hats, that it seems pretty hellbent on concealing.
2.
Almost every major character in this book is devoted to or obsessively concerned with something, and teased about it, either in the text, or the tone; in other words, they’re teased by the characters and the author that created them.
The book itself, however, is a very accomplished product of devotion/obsessive concern.
3.
Like most other Substack novels, this one is heavily influenced by Bret Easton Ellis; unlike most other Substack novels, that influence is Glamorama.
Ellis described his 1999 novel as a “deconstruction” of the spy novel (the John le Carre or Robert Ludlum type), a genre he clearly enjoys, and knows quite well, but in his 30s he seemed to either (A) have a hard time taking them seriously or (B) doesn’t want you to think he takes them seriously; either way, it’s literary malpractice to write a half-thousand page novel dressed in the trappings of a particular genre and the whole thing turns out to be a lark.
Glamorama is a comic masterpiece for 212 pages, after which it becomes an incredibly cerebral book about an imbecile. That’s when the joke begins to sour. Ellis spends hundreds of pages making us look at, and think about, a cast of characters whose moral flaw, he tells us, is their narcissism; their insistence that everybody look at them, and think about them. He seems, inadvertently, to’ve bought into the culture he’s condemning.
But this one’s only 198 pages.
4.
Scenebux is filled with smarts but a little confused, I think. The thing it’s trying hardest (and most successfully) to do is to be an enjoyable book, but humor requires a chilly emotional distance, whereas the distinct joy of a novel (at least this is my take) comes from the earnest/vulnerable exposure of consciousness, unspoken, through language. Sort of a “close your eyes and look at me.”
Polonius says brevity is the soul of wit. George Saunders says the essence of comedy is telling the truth in fewer words than people expect. That’s probably why Scenebux is so swift and brief, written with constant attention toward momentum, variety, moving from one setting to the next, flipping its emphasis from one thing to another.
But it’s still a novel. And novels are consumed slowly.
5.
The Substack novel it most resembles is The Wayback Machine by Daniel Falatko: Scenebux is a niche cultural satire that absorbs the parlance, the drama, the nuance of some distinctly online group, and also skewers that group. Part of its cleverness is reading a paragraph that’s both distinctly internet, in its language, (slangy, allusive, harmlessly pejorative) but rendered with novelistic attention to pacing and cadence and syntax.
Wayback Machine does something similar with the music scene of Williamsburg in 2010 – but there’s a difference between these two books that I’m reluctant to call maturity, cuz I think Falatko’d be offended, but it certainly is a byproduct of watching time pass, and getting older (I think the authors are twelvish years apart?). They’re both satirizing the niche cultural milieus of their 20s, both of them scathing and lurid, both of them using a kind of absurdist monologue — the big difference is that, in Scenebux, Cairo Smith is satirizing the world of his twenties while it’s still here, thriving, observable; when he mocks it, you can look around and recognize what he’s talking about.
Falatko’s, on the other hand, is gone. The Wayback Machine is scathing, it’s irreverent, it’s absurd and playful and voicey like Smith’s — but it’s also a eulogy. The kind that you’ll hear at the funeral of a very funny but hopelessly self-destructive person, where the air is mournful but a little bit resigned. Everybody knew this would happen.
6.
So grief is one difference; another one, more abstract, is acutely noisy for satirists: moral accountability; i.e., the judicious occupation of glass enclosures; meaning that the author, while demonstrating their own deep personal immersion in this morally-corrossive and/or brain-rotting milieu, is also demonstrating their complicity with that scene. To some extent.
The narrative here is digressive, and distractable, but in a deliberate/measured way; the implication being that this is an exaggerated portrait of how a brainrotted mind perceives the world. But there’s also the implicit claim of being separate from that; more specifically, above it.
The narrator gives these disquisitions on geopolitical issues and sciencey things that reflect an intellectual rigor that no rotted brain could apply.
7.
Here’s a summary of Scenebux and then the problem with summarizing it: the hero is a 25-year-old named Ben Extina. He writes erotica for a living. He’s extremely online. He’s detoxing from a porn addiction. No cell phone. No social media. One day he gets into a tussle with some bikers. It’s amusing as it happens, and remarkably the situation gets funnier in retrospect, as we move past it, and as the repercussions of this argument (which is basically two men saying “no you get your finger outta my face”) expand from an alleyway in San Francisco to a paramilitary gunfight in Laos.
It’s irreverent throughout. The narrator raises sex as an issue of comedically obsessive interest, and then makes sex look like an absurd fixation by contrasting it against some perilous geopolitical issue going on at the same time (“I half-assed play with myself in the dark while we talk about the end of the West”); the seriousness of those geopolitical issues, in turn, are discussed and then made to look silly when somebody turns the subject toward sex.
Says one character: “It’s not about left or right…It’s about humanity versus the emergence of the gnostic machine god.” Says another: “Ah, the camming is more of just a hobby for me.”
What’s noticeable in these back-and-forths, where the narrator vacillates between worldly things and fleshy things, is that the geopolitical stuff is written with a brainy excess that the sex stuff is not. Consider:
“Only after staring at [the famously unsolvable internet puzzle, Cicada 3301,] in NyQuil haze for a day do I realize they missed the pattern. It’s identical plaintext encrypted three times with the weak exponent e = 3. The moduli are pairwise coprime, which means I can use the Chinese Remainder Theorem, at least I think.”
And yes that’s a joke and we’re not supposed to take it seriously — but it seems weird that the protagonist/narrator would say this kinda thing when he doesn’t have a background in any of the pertinent fields; and yes I know that this ostensible “weirdness” is also a joke (don’t take it seriously!) and something we encounter all the time now, among millennials and zillennials, is that we’ll meet someone at a party, their life is a mess and they’re on six different meds and don’t seem to read very well, but they’re encyclopedically well-versed on the War of 1812 or cryptids or Scrabble.
But looking at it within the logic of the story: what Ben has a background in is porn, erotica, sex, masturbation.
And yet, when he has sex with someone or thinks about it, it’s never graphic.
Imagine you’re writing a piece of entertainment. It’s a satire with some actiony bits. It goes back and forth between themes of sex and science(s), but your editor says you can only give extra-descriptive passages to one of those two themes — which would you choose?
Probably sex.
So why, in Scenebux, does that extra attention get lavished on sciences instead (be they political, social, mathematical…)?
My instinctive guess is because riffing about science signals that the author knows his shit; which, in fiction, is better signaled in subtler ways than talking over the reader’s head.
It’s riskier to try and write something verbose and interesting about the mechanics of sex (and potentially revealing something about yourself in the process) than to say something extremely technical or smart-sounding, something that’ll go over the reader’s head; and yes they know that it’s part of the satire, they’re supposed to laugh at it, but they’re simultaneously getting the impression that the author does know what this stuff means…and the brainrotted reader can’t exactly verify the sense of what he’s saying (though we can take a leap and say that our young author did not in fact solve Cicada 3301), and so, therefore, maybe the whole show is a lot more cerebral and nuanced than it would first appear…
Again: the joke is that it’s going to be incoherent to the reader. I know. But it’s a coded incoherence; it’s smart-coded. If, over and over, the narrative is covertly suggesting, to the reader, that its author knows about geopolitical hijinks and machinations and there are spontaneous passages of very convincing-sounding science, offhand reference to every kind of political group, the rhetoric of revolution and rebellion, it makes the reader think that something is going over their head.
The shortcut to persuasion is just to convince the other person you know something they don’t – even if the thing you’re persuading them to do is laugh.
8.
And maybe something is going over our heads! I wouldn’t put it past Smith to’ve stretched a very careful platform for theory and ideas here. But it didn’t seem to signal anything to me except how smart the author is. If it’s supposed to be an absurdist reminder that the narrator, Ben, is actually kind of aloof, a bit of an idiot, we could be reminded of this in a way that the reader feels included in the joke: Ben misunderstands something that the reader does understand, rather than saying something the reader doesn’t understand, indicating he’s cartoonishly and laughably intelligent here, signaling a contrast with out understanding of his general silliness.
The joke gets pretty circuitous,
And maybe the rebuttal to that little nitpick is, “Well, it’s a fuckin satire, it’s all a joke, a romp, you’re not supposed to take it seriously and that’s the point.” OK well then why am I 100 pages, three hours, and two publicist emails deep into something I’m not supposed to take seriously?
The easy, sincere, readily-marketable answer is that Scenebux is entertaining and reflects great craftsmanship. Great dialogue, voice, cleverness and inventiveness abound. He’s honing his already-formidable skills at storytelling.
My hope for Smith’s next one is he applies his skills toward defibrillating that heartbeat, just faintly audible, between the gags.