Review from the Sunday Times, 5th January 2020: A rock-...

Review from the Sunday Times, 5th January 2020: 

A rock-music caper loaded with adolescent yearning.

Houman Barekat

Lars Iyer is not one for changing the record. Between 2011 and 2014 he published three short, satirical novels inspired by his time as a philosophy lecturer. The Spurious trilogy affectionately skewered the pretensions and anxieties of over-earnest intellectuals; a fourth nove, 2016's Wittgenstein Jr, ploughed a similar furrow. The theme is reprised in Nietzsche and the Burbs, albeit this time by focusing not on cloistered scholars but a gang of sixth-formers at a comprehensive in a Thames Valley suburb.

The narrator, Chandra, and his pals, Art, Merv and Paula, are united by a hatred of all things mainstream. When they're not tormenting their teachers with precocious backshat or sabotaging the annual cross-country ('Sure, we could have run. But we chose not to, like gods'), they enjoy knotty discussions about madness, suicide and the climate apocalypse. 

They befriend an engimatic new boy, whom they nickname Nietzsche on account of his brooding demeanour and love of philosophy, and invite him to join their dodgy band as lead singer. The group, rechristened Nietzsche and the Burbs, is plagued by creative differences: ringleader Art - who regards potato chips as 'false consciousness'because they keep the masses happy' - wants them to play 'tantric dub metal'; Paula denounces this as 'aural wanking' and would rather make music people can dance to. 

Iyer's co-protagonists don't entirely convince as a depiction of contemporary youth: when Chandra declares that 'No one will ever have been more bored than we are. More purely bored', he sounds more like a 1970s punk-rocker than a 21st-century digital native. Their cud-chewing - on the redemptive power of art, the yearning to transcend the banality of modern existence and so on - grows wearisome. 

But Iyer does a good line in pithy dialogue, and the landscape of late adolescence is evocatively rendered, encompassing everything from the 'Hieronymus Bosch grotesquerie of the PE changing rooms' to the thrill of anticipation of nights out: 'Why not secede, sit life out, bury ourselves in our bedrooms? Because of possibility. Because of what might happen'.