Sam Downing

Exit Through the Wound is about nothing, and I don’t mean that in the same sense that Keeping up with the Kardashians is about nothing¹. More like it’s about nothing in the same way Seinfeld was: something happens, and maybe it briefly seems important or meaningful, but ultimately the stakes are super-low compared against the scale of the entire world – and that’s the point.

But Seinfeld focused on the amusing quibbles of nihilism, and ignored its dark and depressing side. Exit Through the Wound is consumed by the dark and depressing. It’s a blackly, laugh-out-loud funny book, one of my favourites of the year, I think, but parts of it made me want to stand on the edge of a building and go completely limp in the hope that I’d fall to my death without having to go to the actual effort of jumping off. (This is a very appropriate suicidal response to this book.)

Our hero is Maine Hudson, which is not his real name. Maine was raised in Greece but abandoned his home country and culture for the bleak streets of London,where a business consultancy pays him to email his co-workers and reorganise his desk. On weekends – and most weeknights – he consumes heavy quantities of pharmaceuticals.

Maine is not a likeable character, at least not in the I’d-want-to-spend-much-time-around-him way (which is fine, because if he were real he probably wouldn’t care to hang around himself either): he’s entitled, surly, morose. But jeez, you feel for this guy. His grim resignation to the unfairness of life – not in the sense that it’s unfair people suffer and die, but more how unfair that it’s all so mundane and pointless and godless – is palpable.

If that’s not a feeling you relate to, then: 1) You’re blessed or ignorant or both, and 2) Wound is probably not a book you’ll enjoy much.

The novel unfolds in 40 short chapters – almost like a string of short stories, really, in which Maine blankly endures his existence. Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness or dumped by the love or your life is equally important, or minor, as having a stranger yell at you on the tube.  Like Seinfeld, Maine is obsessed by apparent trivialities, “apparent” because these unimportant moment fill the bulk of our lives, and his observations of society’s absurd characters – office gossips, creepy gym-goers, vapid acquantainces – are sharp and hilarious. (If you too have been forced to attend corporate-style training courses alongside suspiciously enthusiastic personality voids, you will laugh.) The story spans roughly a year, and the first chapter in the book is the last chronologically – so you know from the start Maine won’t ride into the sunset after discovering true happiness. There is no such thing, maybe.

If you’ve followed North Morgan’s blog London Preppy for a while you’ll recognise Wound‘s style (and, like me, you’ll probably hope  that for the sake of Morgan’s physical and mental health the adventures of his fictional alter egos aren’t too autobiographical). And maybe Morgan started out as a blogger who gained a following posting shirtless photos of himself – let’s none of us embarrass ourselves pretending that’s not why we started reading him – but he’s evolved into a powerful writer, one who gets that miserable sense of “So what?” that pervades adulthood, but also the strange detached amusement it can arouse. I am not a heavily sedated, depressive business consultant living in London, but some parts of Maine’s story felt true:

Going to the gym is part of my daily, obsessive routine that creates this wonderful sense of consistency, a consistency that I need to have because I’m so weak that I can’t deal with change. This is unfortunately offset by the parallel feeling that I’m trapped in a recurring nightmare, a lifestyle I never chose and can’t escape.

Right?

1. Like I once watched three minutes of that show and was later diagnosed with bruising on my brain. [↩]

This is probably the greatest scene to emerge from nine seasons of Seinfeld:

However, every time I watch this episode – and it airs on pay TV frequently – I get anxious. Because it’s never made clear whether Elaine has made copies of the Soup Nazi’s recipes; if he was to snatch the recipes back from her, her gloriously delivered revenge would collapse. And even though I’ve seen the ep enough times to know he doesn’t snatch the recipes back, the dread always lingers in the back of my mind.

Solution: travel in time to 1995, request that Jerry Seinfeld and  writing team insert awkward line into the scene along lines of, “Hello Soup Nazi: I, Elaine Benes, have already duplicated your recipes, thus rendering your attempts to snatch them back from me ineffective. Next!” Sparkling dialogue!

I watch a lot of television, the bulk of it reruns of classic American sitcoms on pay TV. I’m noticing a pattern here: pretty much every American sitcom character is a jerk.

And I’m not just talking about Seinfeld, where the lead foursome are acknowledged as jerks and you love them for it anyway. I’m referring specifically to Friends (though there’s plenty of other examples out there. See: pretty much every other sitcom ever to come out of the US), which on the surface is often held up as a shining example of the closeness that every modern clique should aspire to.

But even a cursory examination of the show (which I’m generally a fan of, by the way, lest you think I’m just dumping on it here) reveals that Monica, Ross, Chandler, Rachel, Joey and Phoebe are pretty much huge jerks. Like, no wonder they don’t have any friends outside their immediate social circle.

In the episode that inspired this post, Rachel steals Phoebe’s answers when they go to a book club together, Joey shoves Ross (who flies off the handle because of a vile-sounding sandwich) in Central Perk, and Chandler makes disparaging comments throughout.

So if the characters are such jerks, why was Friends so phenomenally successful?

TV Tropes (which, by the way, is one of the greatest sites on the internet¹) offers one answer: the Friends get away with being jerks because they’re funny. They are. The scripts are snappy. The cast has fantastic chemistry. So you forgive the characters their jerkiness.

I propose another answer: the Friends are, as already shown, jerks. Yet they remain friends for 10 years. And isn’t that everyone’s fantasy? To have people in your life you can constantly snark at and speak down to, yet still remain close to?

1. Warning: you will end up spending more time than you have to spare browsing TV Tropes [↩]

Elaine (aka the greatest female sitcom character OF ALL TIME) flirts with third-person aficionado The Jimmy

You know what strikes me as weird? That referring to yourself in the third person is generally considered douchey, yet Facebook statuses force you to write this way. (At least, traditionally formatted Facebook statuses do.) Facebook: making d-bags of us all since 2004.

My Book is written almost exclusively in the third person – sometimes omniscient, sometimes dipping into my MC‘s POV (wow, bit of AO there¹) – with a bit of second-person stuff thrown in when I feel like giving you a more intimate perspective on what’s going on. (See what I did there?) Most of my fiction is written like this – I enjoy first-person, but if the Flying Spaghetti Monster descended from heaven and demanded that I choose only one narrative mode to use for the rest of my life, I’d pick third.

Most of what I read is third person too. A trend emerges!

Not sure why I prefer third, though it’s probably because it offers a bit more freedom – it allows me to duck out of a character’s perspective and insert broader information about the world I’m writing in.

1. That’s Acronym Overload, natch [↩]

First up, two unrelated things: coffee is so good; Vegemite on toast is so good.

The Rejectionist held a contest recently to write the most amazing form rejection letter in the history of the universe, and the winner is a truly astounding cavalcade of LOLs. A sampling:

Please don’t be offended. Your query’s horrendous.
We can’t understand why you’d bother to send us
a missive so deeply in need of an edit
we wanted to vomit as soon as we read it.
Its hook was insipid, its grammar revolting,
its font microscopic, its manner insulting,
its lies unconvincing, its structure confusing,
its efforts at comedy less than amusing.
We think that on average the writing is better
in comments on YouTube than inside your letter.

That’s gold, Jerry! The complete opus is here. I reckon most writers would be pretty chuffed with a rejection like this.

If you aren’t already subscribed to Subnormality, the weekly internet comic featuring “a variety of thinly-veiled misanthropic tirades”, go and do so right now. I dare you not to read the entire archive in one go.

Evidence of genius: