Lars Iyer’s follow-up to the celebrated Wittgenstein Jr is another attempt to treat his erstwhile academic specialism, European philosophy, as the basis for deadpan observational comedy. The more specific aim this time around is to examine the meaning of existence through the indulgent chatter, curricular and otherwise, of smart-aleck sixth-formers at a present- day comprehensive school in Wokingham, Berkshire. Topics include free will, the end of history, Gaia, wellbeing, the concept of “basic needs”, Beckett’s play Endgame and the virtues of nothingness. The result is certainly creditable – vivid, tickling and spry. It’s also remarkably unkempt.
The narrator, Chandra, is firmly ensconced in a gang of four when he befriends the “new kid”, a former private-school boy who physically resembles Friedrich Nietzsche (minus the moustache) and promotes a familiar nihilist agenda. Before long, Chandra and co have started a Dostoevsky book club and are on the hunt for an idiot’s guide to The Idiot and wondering how you pronounce the name of the Romanian-born essayist and Nietzsche-worshipper Cioran.
Iyer is eager to exploit the rich opportunities for comic juxtaposition. When it is discovered that the Beckett archives are held in nearby Reading, it’s taken as proof positive that there isn’t a God: Reading, the gang decide, is the “opposite of Paris”, antimatter to Endgame’s matter. When Nietzsche – the new kid is never known by any other name – gets a part-time job at the local Asda, Chandra wonders how the best mind of his generation has ended up scooping peanut satay into tubs. And when the gang start a band that shares its name with the novel’s title, someone asks if they will really have performed the gig if no one is present to hear it.
But Iyer also sees past putative incongruities to something continuous or mutually illuminating – Berkshire as a cousin if not to Paris then perhaps to Nietzsche’s Basel, the suburbs not as an enemy of rumination but a breeding ground. Nietzsche’s blog is full of his responses to the spaces around him. “Nothing can happen here,” he writes. “Unless the nothing-is-happening is itself an event.” He even goes so far as to suggest that only in the suburbs is “nihilism to be truly encountered”, though it might be said that neither tack – philosophy and mundanity as foes or as allies – is by this point exactly original.
Nietzsche and the Burbs isn’t really a philosophical novel: ideas are discussed and even dramatised, but not embodied. Questions about the elusiveness of reality or truth, embraced by the cast within the fictional world, have had no discernible impact on the way that world has been constructed. Despite the characters’ continental appetites, the tradition in which their creator is working proves to be sensible, chipper and English, and the writer that Nietzsche and the Burbs brings to mind isn’t Beckett or Maurice Blanchot, about whom Iyer has written two books, but Julian Barnes – in particular the early pages of his 2011 Booker winner The Sense of an Ending, another tale of sixth-formers dabbling in existential nihilism, which begins with a new boy joining the narrator’s gang.
It’s hard to avoid noting that Nietzsche and the Burbs, though less ambitious and portentous than that novel, is easily twice as long. That’s due partly to the routine-bound structure, with virtually every school day of exam term chronicled, and partly a product of rhetorical excess. If the set-up – insolent know-it-alls saying “sir” a lot – recalls Barnes, the language is derived more directly, and perhaps less coincidentally, from Martin Amis: the italics, the hyperbole, the acts of near-synonymous rephrasing, the endless lists …
As in Amis’s work, a strange process occurs whereby something that looks like shorthand – a bit of thumbnail scene-setting – soon gives way to obsessive completism. The threat of prose-poetry often hovers and doesn’t always dissipate. (“There was no dignity in the PE changing rooms. There were no human rights, in the PE changing rooms. The Geneva convention didn’t hold in the PE changing rooms.” And so on.) Iyer’s attempts at sadsack sentiment read like Amis on an off-day: “Everyone’s fucking everyone and no one’s fucking us.” “The worst thing about Wokingham is that it smiles back at your despair. Wokingham hopes that you’ll have a nice day in your despair.”
What’s frustrating about these local tendencies is that the novel is also distinguished by genuine conceptual compactness. Iyer makes light work of exploring the ways in which a 19th-century German philosopher, or his present-day descendant and doppelganger, would and wouldn’t feel right at home in the home counties. But his tendency to make the reader live that reality, in all its blog-friendly and italics-worthy drabness, seems less like a crucial part of the project – intentional immersiveness, perhaps, or self-conscious garrulity – than a straightforward failure of craft.
• Nietzsche and the Burbs by Lars Iyer is published by Melville House (£10.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.
