The Will to Posture
An affectionate satire on a life of grand philosophical thinking
Lars Iyer’s Nietzsche and the Burbs is the story of a suburban sixth-former so enthralled by proto-existentialist philosophy, and by “nihilism” in particular, that it consumes his life: he doesn’t do chit-chat or gossip; only the biggest talk will do (“So what should we do? Art asks. What should we want?”). He blogs (“Suburban events: eternally larval, eternally on the brink of happening. Suburban time deepens”). The local gang of outsidery, intellectualish teenagers take him on as their leader and spiritual guide (and lead singer of their band), nicknaming him Nietzsche and quickly coming around to the nihilist lifestyle themselves. Very markedly its premiss recalls that of Iyer’s previous novel, Wittgenstein Jr (2014), the story of a Cambridge professor of logic and the students who call him “Wittgenstein”.
This young Nietzsche’s life tracks that of the real Friedrich so closely that he starts to seem like a kind of Nietzschean reincarnation (perhaps just one of his eternal returns). Nietzsche struggles with his mental health, loathes his overbearing sister, falls for a girl called Lou (Salomé?), competing for her affections with a friend called Paula (Rée?), and eventually collapses into madness, to be cared for by his sister, delighted to find him under her control. (One wonders, though, why our hero, well versed in the real Nietzsche’s work, isn’t a bit more alarmed by all the weird similarities in his own life.)
The novel covers ten weeks in the lives of these sixth-formers, as they attempt to forge their identities, figure out romance, pass their exams and gaze into the endless post-school summer that will bridge their pasts and futures, conveyed in lyrical and often moving passages. And at the same time, it is an affectionate satire on intellectual life and a certain sort of grand philosophical thinking. With a kind of Nietzschean flair, Iyer illuminates the ways in which strongly held beliefs are often the product not of a “cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic” (as Nietzsche wrote) but (as he continued) of a “desire of the heart sifted and made abstract”; and so the philosophical speculation that Iyer’s young protagonist expounds is born from his descent into misery, and that of his friends springs from their desire to feel superior to their fellow suburbanites.
Iyer’s prose is immersive, dominated by dialogue, and his plot is recursively repetitious (in the way that schooldays and revision are). The almost formless story is given order by precise time markers: the novel is broken down into weeks, each broken into days. Individual passages, read in isolation – with the friends’ meandering yet pugnacious ruminations, interspersed with bursts of sweary rudeness – form sharp, witty vignettes of bright teenagers grasping for meaning:
I like his death-to-the-world stuff, not his God stuff, Art says.
You can’t have one without the other, Paula says. Why do we have to believe in anything? I ask. Why can’t we just accept the world as it is?
Look around you, doofus, Art says. The world’s a shithole.
We don’t believe in the world: that’s the problem, Paula says. We don’t believe in anything.
So we’ve got to become religious again? I ask.
But with paragraph after paragraph of this stuff, chapter after chapter, it starts to feel relentless. Whole sections are dedicated to the friends’ opinions on their new, radical approach to music:
Music as open as the sky. Like the sea beneath the sky. Music mirroring the sky … This is what it means to Order. We’re continuing the Creation … We’re furthering the Creation … A controlled explosion. Energy, cascading. Energy, shaped.
At times it shifts from the merely tedious to the almost insufferable. What a relief when a character outside the core “nihilist” group gets a line: “Nietzsche – is that what you call him? Tana asks. Jesus. He’s a philosopher, I say. A philosopher of the suburbs. You guys are full of shit, Tana says”.