Sean Thor Conroe

the manufactured controversy is really burying the completely boring lead here: this is a profoundly uninteresting (formally and otherwise) work of realism which little brown is using to run a viral marketing campaign on like post-woke twitter. Michael Pietsch could have just tried to court logo daedalus instead or try to like pay carles to write a fucking book but unfortunately he's a midwit. Sad!

the big question: did Federline here rip off sam pink? probably! is sam pink getting paid off to participate in some elaborate rollout event? i hope so for his sake! but consider: 1.) i don't care about alt lit scene politics because literally who the fuck has time for that 2.) i think the best writing i've seen from sam pink was where he made fun of sean (which is not in this style) 3.) sam pink has an absurd bent that sean doesn't and that's like 60% of what makes sam pink's work distinctive (notice i didn't say "good" because it's not) and 4.) if you read this and think that were sean to have some legitimate claim to this style it would be something of merit you're profoundly wrong. i don't really understand what's so attractive about hostility to craft as an ethos -- that's ultimately the ugliest aspect of all of this.

when he's not ripping off sam pink (yawn), the narrator sort of breaks through to the other side in the later chapters seemingly writing in his "authentic" style which is just completely nondescript undergrad workshop stuff. like, there is absolutely nothing formally interesting or distinctive about the way this guy writes, he's completely incapable of working with image, he's completely incapable of working with sound -- all of his skin is falling off and i simply don't care because the nothingness of this style lets my eyes just gloss over so much of this shit. characters are basically nonentities. infinite jest changed the narrator's life and he wants to talk about his wittgenstein class in undergrad. good market research: women who have a stake in post-woke twitter love to have sex with guys like this because they feel superior to them -- sort of a "black widow" thing. secondary characters are basically featureless except the narrator's parents and the coma guy who are the most direct reflection of the narrator??? amazing that someone had the gall to finally take on generational narcissism, however lazily.

let's talk about Le Epic Ambiguities: i have no interest in interrogating the extent to which this is autofictional because it doesn't matter whether sean understands himself as being or commenting on the narrator, there is nothing of substance here. it says nothing about fame that's at all distinctive or interesting, it says nothing about gig work that's at all distinctive or interesting, it says nothing about identity that's at all distinctive or interesting. it's just a bored collection of vaguely anti-woke and vaguely identitarian platitudes that are like not at all at odds with each other. why don't you just read something that was published before world war ii instead? it'll be better for you.… (más)