Fuccboi
On sale
25th January 2022
Price: £12.99
‘Got under my skin in the way the best writing can’ SHEILA HETI
A fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism, from an electrifying new voice
Set in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves — cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer — he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery — being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes — that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery?
Written in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man.
‘Terse and intense and new and sort of fucked up but knowingly so. I loved it’ TOMMY ORANGE, author of THERE THERE
‘Sean Conroe isn’t one of the writers there’s a hundred of . . . He writes what’s his own, his own way’ NICO WALKER, author of CHERRY
‘Like Knausgaard, Conroe has a knack for making the mundane enthralling’ CHRIS POWER, author of A LONELY MAN
‘How brilliant to finally have a novel that examines contemporary masculinity with such candour, with such humour and style as to immediately read like amodern classic’ BARRY PIERCE, IRISH TIMES
A fearless and savagely funny examination of masculinity under late capitalism, from an electrifying new voice
Set in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves — cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer — he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat. Unable to accept that his ex has dropped him, yet still engaged in all the same fuckery — being coy and spineless, dodging decisions, maintaining a rotation of baes — that led to her leaving in the first place. But now Sean has begun to wonder, how sustainable is this mode? How much fuckery is too much fuckery?
Written in a riotous, utterly original idiom, and slyly undercutting both the hypocrisy of our era and that of Sean himself, Fuccboi is an unvarnished, playful, and searching examination of what it means to be a man.
‘Terse and intense and new and sort of fucked up but knowingly so. I loved it’ TOMMY ORANGE, author of THERE THERE
‘Sean Conroe isn’t one of the writers there’s a hundred of . . . He writes what’s his own, his own way’ NICO WALKER, author of CHERRY
‘Like Knausgaard, Conroe has a knack for making the mundane enthralling’ CHRIS POWER, author of A LONELY MAN
‘How brilliant to finally have a novel that examines contemporary masculinity with such candour, with such humour and style as to immediately read like amodern classic’ BARRY PIERCE, IRISH TIMES
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Reviews
[Conroe's protagonist's] crisis of masculinity is also modern America's crisis of masculinity. If men are still choking on the toxicity of historical conventions of gender, then literature should be a welcoming space for exploring, questioning and airing the "savage, ugly, testosterone-fuelled, shameful" things that we would all rather repress - regardless of gender
A blistering debut
Admirably fresh . . . [Conroe is] thoughtful, insecure and questing. And he has a distinctive, compelling voice that strikes me as utterly of its moment, of this moment . . . A genuine attempt to speak to some of those who don't normally give a shit about books, or at least, those who don't read The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books -- while also being worth the attention of those who do.
Conroe's writing percolates with savage humour and wry observations on human complexity . . . Conroe works with a really rare audacity and slyness
Fresh prose, colloquial and poetic
Je suis Fuccboi . . . So much of the novel's success lay in its ability to invoke a feeling of often disquieting recognition . . . [Conroe] creates a bridge, a conversation, and I see my own feelings reflected in his, despite the differences in how our respective feelings have emerged. If a gender divide indeed exists, finally it feels surmountable.
Mesmerizing . . . Our narrator's slangy bravado may be a little cringey and his hypermasculinity just a bit sus, but he is also endlessly charming, particularly in his willingness to mock his own swaggering persona
Modern mores and a certain type of twentysomething male energy clash colourfully in the vibrant voice of this debut novel
One of literature's most exciting new voices . . . explosive. Fuccboi has crawled up people's backsides in a way only the best fiction does, especially when it holds a mirror up to the cultural zeitgeist.
Terse and intense and new and sort of fucked up but knowingly so. I loved it
The novel is about something more interesting than sex. It's an account of a highly specific crack-up, and a largely self-inflicted one, though a few of the usual suspects, among them capitalism and the American healthcare system, share some of the blame.
The novel is about something more interesting than sex. It's an account of a highly specific crack-up, and a largely self-inflicted one, though a few of the usual suspects, among them capitalism and the American healthcare system, share some of the blame.
Fuccboi's main claim to newness lies in the narrator's middle-way attitude to the ball-aching social justice religion that clogs the air of American cultural life . . . The internalized contradictions of his dementing culture manifest in amusing ways . . . I enjoyed being led through the vagaries of Sean's 'sus hetero bro' existence and appreciated his attempt to do what in 2020s America is tricky verging on taboo: to write like a man, not an ideal.
A book to argue and laugh with; be appalled and impressed by. Fuccboi wrestles with big questions about masculinity and modernity, but best of all are its intimate and domestic moments: like Knausgaard, Conroe has a knack for making the mundane enthralling
A completely unique voice . . . sounds like no one I know
A debut coming-of-age (but probably not in the traditional sense!) novel about hypocrisy and self-awareness
Blazes a sonic trail through the tangles of experience. A contemporary künstleroman - a coming of age of an artist. So much about the struggle to find a nourishing and communally beneficial but still honest and not self-suppressing way to be a man
Conroe confronts the anxieties at the Fuccboi's core, with verve, humour and empathy. It's essentially a bildungsroman for a generation of disaffected men
Got under my skin in the way the best writing can
Sean Conroe isn't one of the writers there's a hundred of. We won't tell somebody 'Sean Conroe' when we meant to say the name of another writer we got confused with Sean Conroe. He writes what's his own, his own way
The infectious vigour of Conroe's show-stealing voice means Fuccboi lands like a grenade in the ecosystem of better-mannered literary fiction
It's hard to give a sense of how funny, clever and infectious Conroe's writing can be: how supple an instrument this voice is, how rhythmically and cumulatively rewarding when it feeds off its own energy. For internal riffs we could be in the absurd, side-shuffling mind of one of George Saunders's characters.
In an age of quick intolerance and polarised positions, Fuccboi delivers a nuanced account of the darker, more desperate attitudes of the young hetero-male today; those flagrant tendencies not excusable, but which might be understood as rooted in, say, insecurity and poverty (of the financial-social-educational-emotional kinds)