Benji DeMott reflects on My Weil as part of his rich account of the Annual Anti-Gentrification Street Festival in New York at First of the Month: a Website of the Radical Imagination. There's a lot here, but here is an extract:
My friend’s wife’s sojourn on the block—they came to last year’s party too—brought to mind one of my favorite figures in My Weil—the comic novel by Lars Iyer I rushed through during the run-up to the Festival. Iyer puts a subcontinental twist on his deft meld of Lucky Jim and 24-Hour Party People—including a posh Indian beauty in his fictional crew of rad Brit grad students who are failing to do PhD’s under the aegis of the “Disaster Studies” Department at a beat-down Uni in Manchester. Gita rolls with her mates’ punky mockery of “Prof. Bullocks,” “art-wank,” Business Studies students, to-the-tenure-born types at a tonier school, yet she also repeatedly busts their high trifling. She serves as a grounded, desirous contra to her cohorts’ other exemplar—the student invoked in the novel’s title who tries to walk like Simone Weil (“nun-shoes” and all). I was tickled to find Gita facing off with a character acting Weily (even if the would-be saint wasn’t up to the real Rosa) at the very moment when my brother’s name was going up on a sign a half-block away from the Riverside Drive plaque memorializing Weil’s season in exile in NYC.
My Weil leans on its Mancunian black sun setting. Iyer’s anti-heroes still get thrills from sounds of their city’s greatest depressives—Joy Division, Happy Mondays, Morrissey, New Order. There’s wilding in the streets and faux-lumpen scuffling about in overgrown commons at the city’s edge. Iyer’s students of low life seem to be on to something when they connect shattered urban street people with changing climes. A walker in my city now can’t help but become a Master of Disaster Studies. (I seem to run into someone broken every time I do my nightly constitutional on the UWS.) “There is a natural alliance,” the real Weil wrote, “between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.” The screamers I pass by (more frequently than ever?) aren’t mute, but they may as well be since their shouts in the street are overwritten by blankest generation hopelessness. My Weil’s wiseasses do no-futurism with a comic vengeance. Yet author Iyer, with help from his Gita, isn’t afraid to take the piss out of their lumpen-identification (without dumping on their compassion). My Weil sallies past fashionable leftism of psychosis. Near the end of the novel, Iyer plays with the history of cinema (the beach scene in Malick’s Tree of Life) and pop lore (raves at The Hacienda) to conger up restorative places: “Where we’ve retired the words eschatology and Gnosticism. Where the word apocalypse never passes our lips.” My instinct says Iyer would’ve been at home in our hood last Saturday. An affirmation in one of his scripts for a peace beyond negative dialectics—”What we Want (with a capital W):…Not to have lived for nothing. Not just to have fallen.”—seems on point when I think of my late brother’s life and gaze at this festive photo.
I heard an echo from My Weil’s muse as I pored over more post-Festival pics of our public happiness. (Maybe I was under the influence of one grinning hombre who was wearing a t-shirt that read BENDICIÓN.) The saint of outsiders once recalled an instance when she felt Jesus’s presence (as she tried to soothe a migraine by reading George Herbert’s sonnet “Love” (III).): “…in this sudden hold Christ had on me, neither my imagination nor my senses played any part; I simply felt, across the pain, the presence of love, similar to that which one can read on the smile of a loved face…”