Only Americans Burn in Hell Read online

  “In this ingenious mess of a novel, with all the bullshit paranormal characters that a superhero-habituated modern audience requires, Jarett Kobek clearly and calmly explains our genocidally idiotic mess of a culture as it plunges enthusiastically into a genuine, non-fictional damnation that Batman isn’t going to rescue it from. Brilliantly funny and sociologically terrifying, Only Americans Burn in Hell is the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last. Read it while you’re still neurologically capable.” Alan Moore

  “This time Kobek has called all of his own craziest bluffs and rocketed straight over the ionosphere, into sheer blue sky and beyond—this book breathes in outer space. One wishes the phrase ‘takes no prisoners’ had been saved for when we’d need it. If you don’t find yourself busting a gut laughing, then you’re probably still in denial of how deeply you feel implicated.” Jonathan Lethem

  “Jarett Kobek’s books are an attempt to explode what the novel could still be, as radical as Samuel Richardson or Laurence Sterne’s attempts to define what it was in the first place. Only Americans Burn in Hell is a fantasy work about mythic Amazons time-travelling to modern America of the type currently clogging multiplexes—but one infected by anxieties about sexual politics, the ethics of the digital world and the horrorshow of the Trump administration. Kobek makes you laugh and think at the same time, engaging both the head and the gut.” Stewart Lee

  “Only Americans Burn in Hell is a smoking hot and hilarious dissection of why the world is in such a mess right now. While you watch Jarett Kobek pour gasoline on everything—international politics, Internet culture, the book business, American presidents, Christianity, capitalism, the fantasy genre—you will be so mesmerised and laugh so much that your faith in humanity will be restored by the time he lights the match. Jarett Kobek is one of our most groundbreaking writers.” Dorthe Nors

  “There’s a chance that when the dust settles on the cultural and political insanity of the early twenty-first century, only one writer will remain relevant: Jarett Kobek. With scathing wit, shocking insight and brutal honesty Kobek demolishes social media and the publishing industry, introduces us to a Saudi Prince hopped up on DMT, and conjures perhaps the most important and hilarious fairy story ever written.” Ivy Pochoda

  “To think of Jarett Kobek as merely (‘merely!’) an American Houellebecq would be sorely to miss the point. His energy, intellect, wit, sensibility, erudition, tenderness, and—yes—obnoxiousness add up to something wholly original, and absolutely necessary. Only Americans Burn in Hell extends the vibrant, reckless critiques offered by I Hate the Internet into our present moment, and perhaps a little bit beyond: one reads it with a sense of elation, gratitude and relief that someone is saying these things out loud. So far as that goes, Kobek may be the only contemporary American novelist who matters.” Matthew Specktor

  Only Americans

  Burn in Hell

  ALSO BY JARETT KOBEK

  ATTA

  I Hate the Internet

  The Future Won’t Be Long

  Do Every Thing Wrong! XXXTentacion Against the World

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Jarett Kobek

  Cover Design: Peter Dyer

  Cover Photograph: iStock

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788162203

  eISBN 9781782835349

  Contents

  Introduction: Thank You for Your Honesty

  Chapter One: Certain Facts about Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land

  Chapter Two: Some Facts about Fern

  Chapter Three: How Fairy Land Escaped the Clutches of Global Capitalism

  Chapter Four: Child, Be Strange

  Chapter Five: Wonder Women

  Chapter Six: Willkommen im Dschungel

  Chapter Seven: The House on the Hill

  Chapter Eight: Gentlemen Prefer Blood

  Chapter Nine: Cleaning up the Mess

  Chapter Ten: On the Streets of Los Angeles, There the Wild Beast Slumbers

  Chapter Eleven: Let Slip the Dogs of War

  Chapter Twelve: hello from sex drenched hollywood

  Chapter Thirteen: Routine Humiliations

  Chapter Fourteen: When Y Meets X

  Chapter Fifteen: Until the Wheels Fall Off and Burn

  Chapter Sixteen: Drink of Me, Eat of Me

  Chapter Seventeen: How It All Went Down

  Chapter Eighteen: Bleak House

  Chapter Nineteen: Exeunt Rusticano

  Chapter Twenty: What Rusticano Didn’t Say

  Chapter Twenty-One: καταδυσόμεθ᾽ εἰς Ἀΐδαο δόμους

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Literary Fiction

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Full Throat of Christian Virtue

  Chapter Twenty-Four: The Man Who Said Bo! to a Goose

  Only Americans

  Burn in Hell

  JARETT KOBEK

  Introduction

  Thank You for Your Honesty

  The last time anyone thanked me for my honesty was in an email sent by the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at New York University, an institution of higher learning centered in New York City’s Greenwich Village.

  NYU has three distinguishing characteristics.

  The first is that it’s my alma mater.

  I graduated in 2002 AD, after giving the university an absurd amount of money for an undergraduate degree.

  This is why the school begs me for money.

  It’s like a junkie who can’t stop.

  NYU’s second distinction is its inhuman cost.

  In 2017 AD, the tuition was $46,170 for a year. Throw in campus housing and administrative fees, and the total was $63,472.

  To put this in context: as of 2016 AD, the American median income was $57,617 per person.

  You can’t charge $63,472 and expect much more than a mixture of the rich and the gullible.

  The gullible emerge from NYU in a state of financial ruin, indebted for a substandard education that they could’ve received for about 1/8th of the price at a state-run university.

  Welcome to adulthood!

  Time to pay back $253,888!

  With compounding interest!

  The rich kids come out fine.

  The rich kids are always fine.

  The third thing that distinguishes NYU is its Abu Dhabi campus, which opened in 2014 AD.

  The idea behind the Abu Dhabi campus was to construct a mirror-world NYU that bestowed the same substandard education, and thus conferred the same substandard degree, as the Greenwich Village campus.

  The only difference was that the mirror-world campus would be located on Happiness Island in the United Arab Emirates, an absolute monarchy funded by the world’s seventh-largest oil reserve.

  Nothing says academic freedom like petrol feudalism!

  Before the Happiness Island campus had its grand opening, an article appeared in the New York Times which detailed the nature of NYU’s new venture.

  The school’s administration had arranged a de
al with the government of the United Arab Emirates, in which the oil monarchy would cover the whole expense, and construction, of the mirror-world campus.

  Picture this: a repressive regime renowned for its human rights abuses makes a deal with a bunch of very naïve and very greedy American bureaucrats.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  The oil monarchy sent labor recruiters around the Indian subcontinent.

  The recruiters told people that they could make big money if they came to Abu Dhabi and helped build the mirror-world campus on Happiness Island.

  When people of the Indian subcontinent arrived in Abu Dhabi, happiness proved elusive.

  The workers were stuck in subhuman housing and paid dirt-poor wages.

  When they tried to strike for the money they were promised, they had the shit beat out of them by the police.

  And the workers couldn’t leave Happiness Island.

  Their passports had been confiscated.

  They were slaves.

  And although putting people into human bondage and making them build college campuses was a time-honored tradition, it’d been a very long while since any American institution of higher learning had involved itself in this sort of disgrace.

  On August 30th, 2017 AD, I received an email from NYU’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations.

  The email was from a Senior Annual Giving Officer named Corey, and it informed me that Corey was coming to Los Angeles.

  I live in Los Angeles.

  Corey wanted to have lunch or get coffee.

  For years, I’d received emails from NYU. All of the emails begged for money.

  But none of them had extended a personal invitation of food or caffeine.

  Corey’s email made me wonder if NYU employed a clipping service to search for media mentions of prominent alumni.

  In the sixteen months prior to Corey’s email, I’d lived as a minor literary sensation off the strength of my novel I Hate the Internet. Some of the news stories about my book’s unlikely success had mentioned that I was an alumnus.

  Whenever someone thanks you for your honesty, what they mean is shut the fuck up.

  Being thanked for your honesty is like someone tattooing the word SEXY on their upper arm.

  If it has to be said aloud, its opposite is sure to be true.

  “Your face is very stupid!”

  “Thank you for your honesty.”

  “Madame, everyone in this room knows that your wife is a living grotesque!”

  “Thank you for your honesty.”

  “Never invade Russia in the winter!”

  “Thank you for your honesty.”

  “Your prolonged substance abuse is destroying your body, your employment prospects, and the mental health of your family members!”

  “Thank you for your honesty.”

  I wrote back to Corey.

  This is what I wrote:

  Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 1:26 AM

  From: Jarett Kobek

  To: Corey

  Subject: RE: Meeting with NYU in LA?

  Dear Corey,

  Thanks for the offer, but I’ve long disconnected myself from NYU.

  It’s impossible to imagine supporting an institution that allowed slave labor to build an entire campus in Abu Dhabi and has failed, completely, to redress the situation in any meaningful fashion.

  Thanks,

  Jarett

  On the surface, my email would appear to be motivated by a principled stance.

  A principled stance is the euphemism that people like myself, who are hopelessly mired in the Looney Left, use to describe those moments when they say or do something that ruins a party by taking exception to a harmless comment or action.

  I suppose that it was a principled stance.

  It’s appalling that I attended an institution which placed a fig leaf atop global evil.

  And it’s repulsive that the fig leaf was built by slaves.

  And, really, I’m sorry how mixed I made that fig-leaf metaphor.

  But only a mixed metaphor can contain the existential horror of NYU.

  Also: I’m a terrible writer.

  But, really, this was why I sent my note to Corey: I just wanted NYU to stop asking for money.

  You can’t imagine how much email starts coming in after you’ve been a minor literary sensation.

  In the same month that Corey extended his invitation for food or caffeine, a major American publisher issued my follow-up to I Hate the Internet. It was a novel that ended up with the title The Future Won’t Be Long.

  It was a massive commercial failure.

  Less than 300 copies sold in its first six months!

  I Hate the Internet sold 300 copies in its first two weeks!

  Reader, this was shocking.

  If for no other reason than the simple fact that The Future Won’t Be Long was published by Penguin Random House.

  Penguin Random House is the biggest publishing conglomerate in the world. It’s a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation owned by another multibillion-dollar multinational corporation called Bertelsmann, which spent much of World War Two producing Nazi propaganda and using Jewish slaves to work in its factories.

  My book was backed by Nazi money!

  And it still failed!

  So what happened?

  For decades, everyone who had any pretense to High Culture wasted fathomless hours talking about theorists like Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard.

  These people with pretenses to High Culture had advanced the idea that reading incomprehensible French books gave them special insight into the way the world works.

  Sometimes they expressed this pretense in unreadable texts called master’s theses and doctoral dissertations.

  One of Baudrillard’s ideas was very popular. He’d theorized that there would be a moment when reality collapsed into fiction, at which point it would then be impossible to distinguish the fake from the actual.

  He called this the Hyperreal.

  But what neither Baudrillard nor his readers could ever locate was the exact moment when the Hyperreal would replace the real.

  It was a mystery, floating-point arithmetic without any definitive beginning.

  But then it happened.

  On November 8/9th, 2016 AD, while I was asleep in London’s Little Venice, passed out in someone’s former childhood bedroom above Blomfield Road, the real became Hyperreal.

  Donald J. Trump, the world’s best approximation of living fiction, whose body appears to be constituted of media coverage stitched together with plastic surgery, was elected to the Presidency of the United States of America.

  When this happened at around 6AM Greenwich Mean Time, a film crew was on Blomfield Road. They were shooting footage for a film called Paddington 2.

  The film was about a very fussy bear with a posh accent, its cartoon body generated by computers. The bear goes to prison and makes friends with inmates whose bodies were generated by loveless sexual reproduction.

  My smartphone started vibrating.

  People were sending me text messages of shock and awe.

  They were freaked the fuck out.

  What just happened? they asked.

  It turned out that the people who were the least prepared for the Hyperreal were the same people who’d spent decades talking about the Hyperreal.

  They had no special insight into anything!

  A fog descended upon them.

  Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.

  These people are my friends.

  And, holy shit, these people did not see this thing coming.

  And, double holy shit, did it ever make them annoying.

  Only two people have ever thanked Donald J. Trump for his honesty. The Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni and David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Great company!

  No one else has ever thanked Donald J. Trump for his honesty.

  And with good reason.

  Th
e President could not be honest.

  This was not because the President went out of his way to exist in a state of perpetual falsehood.

  The President could not be honest because he existed in a moral universe where there was no truth and there are no lies.

  He was hopelessly insane.

  He lived in the Hyperreal.

  Ideas floated into his head, ideas floated out.

  And the whole world jumped at their utterance.

  If the country was bombarded, every day, by a morass of awful noise that displayed at best a partial relationship to the truth, and if the citizens of that country were expected to run around like chickens with their heads cut off in response to this awful noise, then why not empower someone to make a different kind of noise?

  Why not get someone who would make noise in a different direction?

  To steal a joke from the comedian Stewart Lee: it was like being given a room in a fleabag motel, and, in protest at its unsatisfactory conditions, shitting in the room’s bed before realizing that you had nowhere else to sleep.

  But people did it anyway.

  They shit the bed.

  They voted for Donald J. Trump.

  A fictitious being with, at best, a tenuous connection to reality ended up at the head of the world’s most powerful military and the world’s biggest economy.

  He was from the fourth branch of American governance: the Celebrity.

  And he had taken over the first branch: the Executive.

  Reality collapsed into fiction.

  And you would think, reader, that the best time to be backed by Nazi money was after a living caricature had inaugurated the Hyperreal.

  But you’d be wrong.

  Here was the implicit sales pitch behind my book: The country is collapsing, reality has gone mad, and a White Supremacist just murdered a woman by driving his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of protestors. So please buy my book about drug parties in the 1980s AD!

  No one wanted to read that shit.

  And all the Nazi loot in the world couldn’t make it otherwise.

  This book that you are reading was going to be a cracked attempt at the sorry bullshit that people in the Hyperreal actually want to read, which are mindless tales about supranatural creatures.