Problem Man
On the problem with men, Kyle Kouri's THE PROBLEM DRINKER, and a prophecy fulfilled
The planet keeps producing men. Or people with male bodies. I don’t know exactly why. It just keeps happening. Keeps happening in the United States too. Why? Something to do with genetics. Mendel. Chromosomes. Haven’t our tech-abetted lives optimized manhood out of existence? Maybe not even a few years ago, still not yet, but by now? By now, for sure, right?
Look, if it were me? Speaking as someone in a male body? I don’t know if I’d mind. If, say, the future of the planet were just myself and, I don’t know, three hundred women. If we were all that remained. Just us and empty grocery stores, empty libraries, ski resorts where the lifts still worked. That would be fine, right? Mostly, I’m sure, they’d ignore me. They’d go about perfecting what remained of civilization, reinventing the family unit to suit our new reality. Everybody gets three mothers now: a cool one, a big feeling one, and a wild card handy with a tool-belt. Probably some scientific methods they could use for reproduction, and genetic tinkering, to make sure of absolutely no more men. Because what a mess. What a mess we made of it all.
I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side. Hope to avoid ritual sacrifice. But then, if that were going to happen, no avoiding it, probably a few of the women would take my side, right? Maybe we could escape together, with a Mad Max scenario ensuing, my brave, ferocious rescuers driving us west in a solar-powered semi, as I sit in the back trying not to look nervously to the side mirror for the pursuing horde, fast on our tails, shaking their spears, all decked out in designer sunglasses looted from somewhere, rainbow glitter on every face.
By now, though, the story of the aggrieved man is, likewise, a cliché: They’re all out to get him! What they want is for there to be no more men, only boy-slaves! The full-on reactionary. The Respect Your Daddy, Money and the Power, I’d-sooner-destroy-the-world-than-hand-it-over, ‘let’s get more poison in the food supply and in the air cuz I just can’t stand all these feminazzies’ mentality….
The in-betweens are hard.
No Man’s Land, as the phrase goes. The blasted, unforgiving middle. Our tech platforms make it even harder, because of the panopticon effect, because the platforms are good, if for little else, at leaving no where to hide. Pick a Side. Then, Pick a Side again. Keep Picking a Side. What is actually resulting from all this public performance of picking a side? What political outcomes have we realized so far within this exciting new, boredom-shunning, online paradigm? Well…. Shut up! And Pick a Side.
At the height of the #MeToo movement it seemed that perhaps we were approaching a new paradigm for, let’s call it, the Neo-Enlightened Man: a guy blown open, with what would have been—in accordance with seemingly anachronistic models of masculinity—kept lock and key behind a buttoned-up appearance, now all out there, revealed for everybody to see. The emotional guts of the guy opened and put first. The mess all out there. Radical transparency. Vulnerability makes the dude, and so forth.
Then, the Donald happened to us all (again), and where we’re going next, if anywhere, is anyone’s guess. I don’t like it any more than you, to quote Guns ’n Roses (Use Your Illusion II, 1991) quoting Strother Martin (Cool Hand Luke, 1967, guy film classic).
With the Trump-surgence has arisen, like a colony of rats pouring out of granary (ah but they were there all along! waiting! biding their time! feeding out of sight!), men in suits, repressive men, company guys, true believers, hellbent on restoring the fallen order, with J.D. Vance, in eyeliner, at the head of the pack. Don’t question his ironies, OK? Bottle that up. That’s an order! Convert to Catholicism. Tell the Pope to Get His Act Together. The Holy Father may have all the ritual and pomp of the Vatican behind him, but does he have Peter Thiel’s financial backing? No? Then tell His Holiness to go to the back of the line. Good. Look who’s calling the shots now.
In the face of that reality (omg it’s our own 😭) arises Kyle Kouri’s The Problem Drinker. I’ll just be open, transparent here: I met the author in Baltimore during AWP in March. At a party thrown for Luke Goebel’s Kill Dick. Kyle and I quoted the film Leaving Las Vegas (1995) at one another. Seems he and author girlfriend CJ Leede were living some kind of itinerant dream life, roving around the country with their dogs, writing, taking the temperature of America during possibly the last days of the Republic. Meanwhile, Kyle, who started as a writer, is also acting in movies, some of which he wrote himself, and one in particular, as a book trailer for The Problem Drinker.
Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to hang out with him a few times. Once with Kyle and the author, lit mag editor, and improv comedy actor/writer DW Ardern. DW was going to take a photo of Kyle and myself at the bar but I said no. No, because I was planning to write about Kyle’s book. And with the photo out there, that could give the appearance of—people might think that, well…. It wasn’t a very resolute ‘no,’ however. There was something of the absurd to it. We were already a couple of rounds in and laughing.
I pointed out that a potential problem with The Problem Drinker is that many who read it will probably want to have a drink with the author. (I’m old enough to remember when seemingly an entire presidential election was decided by the question of Who You’d Rather Have a Drink With?—or really, that question just made the election close enough for the Supreme Court to force a desired outcome.)
Kyle laughed, then said, “It is a problem.”
Not the worst kind of problem to have, I suppose. Still, though.
When I first started reading the book, I thought, This book’s a mess. Nothing at all like the ornate, buttoned-up temple of words I might have imagined a literary masterpiece to be when I surrendered to MFA life after years writing fiction in the New York City canyons and labyrinths. Sort of just letting it all fly, like taking a running jump over top a chair, and the chips fall where they may, is what The Problem Drinker appeared to be doing.
Kind of has a fragmentary novelistic vibe, a little bit in the Jenny Offill, Sarah Manguso molds, a social media-conversant aesthetic, punchy, short-sectioned, gradually deepening, panoramic view of contemporary living within the arena of (male) writerly aspiration.
Then, the sneaky thing about the book started calling out to me: How open The Problem Drinker is. Like an emotional X-ray, an aspiring writer’s life in cross-section, the cart before the horse, the memoir before the magnum opus. In other words, Kyle Kouri’s debut is very much a book inflected by the #MeToo movement and subsequent sea-change in book publishing fashion, and husband-and-wife-run CLASH Books, apparently, had the foresight to pluck it from the roiling tides of drowning sailors out there. (The truth is, Sailors, you don’t need any publisher’s blessing to drown with your text: Doing so is, and perhaps always will be, free.)
The imperative being to Show Us Who You Are before a reading public can be swayed into caring about any fictions. It’s a pattern I’ve seen play out more than a few times now on our contemporary horizon: 1) fine debut novel published to limited attention, 2) splashy memoir, then 3) hyped follow-up novel by author of Acclaimed Memoir. Because of social media, I guess. Because book publishing, corporate-owned, is a ship of fools, and corporate ownership of the consolidated fleet means there is more pressure than ever for those currently holding the position of ‘Editor’ to place profitable bets. Because so many of us in the reading public feel entitled now, I guess, to click through and see what’s happening behind the screen of the Great and Powerful Oz.
Well, hey! Kyle Kouri has you covered.
Who is Kyle Kouri?
He’s a guy coming from an arts-minded family, and whose parents split, and whose biological father passed away when Kyle was a younger man. He’s a guy with siblings of more than simple gender-identification, and a fierce mother who has directed theater. He’s a guy who has had more than a few brushes with celebrity, and some of that interaction more substantive than ‘brushes.’ (He’s someone who, if you’re fortunate enough to make his acquaintance, can win you the Kevin Bacon Game for all of eternity.) As a writer, he’s prone to a little bit of good-natured trolling. He attended the Columbia MFA program in Fiction which, for him—as presumably for many others—felt like godsend when he received word via a phone call from novelist Victor LaValle that he’d been chosen, and would be able to attend workshops in pursuit of a grad degree in the city where he already lived. He could not have been more genuinely grateful for that opportunity. He shows us the hopeful that he was, living in a spare bedroom in his mother’s apartment, watching banner television headlines with her from the sofa and coping with a constant stream of booze. The sort of moments that, traditionally, the guy’s guys, the Hemingway-persona’ed wordsmiths, would rather sweep under the rug in favor of swashbuckling instantiations of gallantry or bedding pliant women (even if so many of those Hemingway imitations resulted from insufficient readings, mimetics founded more on the surface persona than the vulnerable party who emerges from that man’s prose). We see how Kyle Kouri has dealt with addiction, and how he has reined it in, and perhaps, most touchingly, how his own excesses have been mirrored more direly in the person of his sister. Or perhaps his excesses mirror hers. There it is, on the first page, a sentence whose import will only heighten over the course of the book: “Sometimes I get so close, I feel like I am you.”
He’s a guy who, in roundabout, fairly unintentional fashion—or at least not fully intentional, not at first—courted a fellow MFA’er named CJ. Then, they fell in love, and made off like bandits together, to Santa Monica, to the Pacific Palisades (immediately pre-fire), to the desert, and back across the country several times over. As far as I can tell, they are still crossing it, and hail hail, always happy to see a couple who made it out of their program in one piece, or at least a number of pieces capable of still keeping company with one another, and enjoying it.
As a guy, Kouri has developed within the shadow of counterpart Leede’s much more sizable book biz success, and that, too, he presents to his reader in cross-section, with little hiding: “I was just the wife.”
And he’s obsessed with UFOs?
I know all this from reading The Problem Drinker, and you can read it too, and I think you should, if you care about any of the above.
The book reads fast.
The book reads friendly, perhaps comically or horrifyingly, and contra, say, the work of Samuel Beckett (Pity the poor soul who means to befriend the work of Sammy B.!). Is it really possible for a book to be a friend?
But then, again, enough with skepticism. If the Care Bears could do it, then why not literature? Can’t Literature care? Reader, I think, at certain times, in certain places, maybe it can.
If you’ve grown weary of the steady procession of Woman Lipsytes emerging from the Columbia MFA in Fiction to book deals, then, here is something a little different.
In 2011, one of the first essays I ever published, “What Is Already Living: Author, Autobiography and Fiction in the Age of Social Networking,” delved into the way that social media tends to drag authors out from behind screens, and foreground the precarity of the individual inside the literary airship. Goodbye and so long to magisterial distance? And so in that sense, Kyle Kouri appears to be floating through the sky, and I applaud him, and feel a little bit, in my derangement, like a prophet, even if almost no one, or very few people (but the right people, always the right people) read my essay at the time, as I sprint along the riverbank below, in bedraggled clothes, and my long white beard that is long and white from so much prophesying, shouting at the sky, exclaiming with both arms wildly akimbo, ‘Go! Fly! Fly, damn you! Aloft! Aloft! Always aloft!’12 (Slated for release in October is Kouri’s debut novel, Graveyard.)
And someday, perhaps, if we wish hard enough, there may be No More Men.
Could be any day now, really.
Then, surely, every problem the world has ever posed will be at an end.
Or as Kouri himself puts it: “… it’s a war out there, between one version of you and another projected back at you, fragmenting any firm idea of you, it’s spreading porously, like black pancake batter in the blue steel pot, it’s lovely really, this unhinged dance, in life post-society of the spectacle.”
The Problem Drinker by Kyle Kouri
CLASH Books, pub date: 6/2/26
233 pages
“And writers of today? The not-totally-figurative-dragging out of the writer from behind a curtain parallels the direction of pop culture at large: the decade-plus turn toward reality TV, the dwindling of mystery around the lives of movie stars, an erosion courted by Hollywood’s continuously evolving publicity apparatus. Not to mention the thinning of any pretense to objectivity in the news or broad-based interest in political consensus-making. As a way forward, it can feel pretty backwards. Since everyone who wants one has some semblance of a platform—as well as many who did not wish it so—our favorite writers register as only a Google-click away, Thomas Pynchon notwithstanding. (No, wait: he’s out there, too.) The dialectic in how the Artist is perceived sways between torch-bearer in a proud tradition and freak in a cage, as in Todd Haynes’ Dylan biopic I’m Not There.”
re prophecy, they wouldn’t listen to Cassandra either.
🔥🔥😂