There’s no one quite like the Post-Modern White Male Artist.
I am in the process of moving to Brooklyn and recently was hit with overwhelming dread about the amount of people there who take themselves very seriously when it comes to art. I maintained a similar wariness during the first few chapters of Matthew Binder’s Pure Cosmos Club but ended up heartwarmingly surprised.
Paul, an odd, newly single artist in Brooklyn stumbles bewildered through a Quixotic melange of exhibitions, parties, and cults with the same gummy smile as a newborn. Chaperoned by his dog Blanche, a quiche-obsessed incarnation of the feminine subconscious, Paul is an Allbirds-donning red flag. After quitting his 9-5 to dedicate his time fully to art, his girlfriend leaves him and his life begins to deteriorate. This was why I feared the book would descend into the lit fic equivalent of The 48 Laws of Power, a kind of New Age warning about the dangers of succumbing to the seductive bosom of bohemian life. Paul then meets a beautiful mathematician who is married to the Musk-like leader of the Pure Cosmos Club, a cult with a similar slogan to Equinox about ‘transcending human experience’. Paul ultimately sacrifices the entirety of his soul to the club, all while earnestly chirping motivational phrases:
“The mind is never ready for seismic events. We must listen to our heart!”
“You were able to remake yourself using your jealousy as a strength!”
“From here on out, I vow to make every decision in life with the utmost care!”
However, Paul’s complexity surprised me. While on the surface smooth and sheep-like, his interior reveals a rotten blastocyst. Usually, the reader is able to relatively predict what decisions the protagonist will make depending on their moral compass, but the beauty of Paul is that he is void of any compass at all. Even his art lacks interrelatedness. Paul is an exquisite investigation into the unpredictable mind of the Dunce. He is the one who stops to accept the free sample of snake oil serum; the one to remain on the line of a spam call from China; the one to despise Trump and worship Biden. He embodies the ridiculousness of the cultish nature of the art world itself, and the delicate ingenuity of the modern confederacy of dunces that renders you speechless and unsure whether to laugh or weep. PCC is a subtly ingenious and hilarious narrative about the insidiousness of the sheep mentality.