This post is most profitably read as an addendum to Naomi Kanakia’s impressively comprehensive report on the influence of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard on contemporary fiction. Although I have not read all of Bernhard’s books or all of the novels of his most prominent inheritors—as Kanakia did—I’ve long been interested in why Bernhard’s style seems so particularly appealing to contemporary Anglophone writers and readers. I include “readers” here as a reference first of all to myself. I’ve enjoyed the books I’ve read that are written self-consciously in Bernhard’s style, like Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love, and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist and Muscle Man. More than enjoying them, I’ve found in them a voice that seems like it is sincerely channeling a significant contemporary mood. Especially during the long 2010s, these novels that were imitating the prose of a European who wrote in a different language and died the same year as the Berlin Wall fell seemed to be echoing the voice in my own head—and doing so more faithfully than the vast majority of other novels published alongside them. Presumably, this resonance is also what recommended Bernhard to the writers in question. But what accounts for it? Kanakia does explore this question in her own post, but there is one further theory I would like to add to hers.
My own reading experience with Bernhard started sometime in the late 2000s, when n+1 began publishing translated excerpts from his novels. I was immediately drawn to his style, which I might have described as high misanthropic satire for intellectuals. As Kanakia recounts, Bernhard’s books consist of long sentences and paragraphs—sometimes they consist of just one paragraph—and they are almost always written from the point of view of a single narrator. Often, although not always, this narrator has some connection to the Austrian intelligentsia. Always, he is angry and resentful, disgusted not only with every person in his social world, but with himself for being part of that social world. “While everyone was waiting for the actor,” begins The Woodcutters, the book that inspired Happiness and Love, “I observed the Augsbergers carefully from the very same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation.” And later: “For decades, I thought as I sat in the wing chair, these people have annihilated everything with their mimic muscle-power.”
The Nazi past lay in the not-very-distant background of Bernhard’s novels, and this surely accounted, in part, for the severity of his attitude toward his contemporaries. Yet it is hardly necessary to know anything about the Austrian elite’s embrace of Nazism to recognize the forms of pretension and fraudulence—the “mimic muscle-power”—of the characters in his novels, which transcend their time and place. That is why it is so easy for Dubno to transpose them all to the lower east side of 21st century Manhattan. Part of Bernhard’s genius is in his ear for the specific conventions and ways of speaking that characterize the set of people who invariably make up the artistic-intellectual “scene” of modern, Western societies. At the same time, as Kanakia also points out, Benhard’s fame was predicated on the appetite these same people had for reveling in their own castigation: in that sense, he was not so dissimilar to Ibsen, and many other modern artists who have become famous for attacking the mores of their most likely readers and audiences. And it was the same kind of audience—that is, writers, intellectuals, magazine editors—who would embrace his fiction in 21st century New York.
My favorite of Bernhard’s novels is The Loser, which is about a triumvirate of piano players who lived and studied piano together with their teacher, Horowitz, in Salzburg, Austria, in their youth. All of them had pretensions to greatness, but only one of them, Glenn Gould, was truly great. The other two pianists, one of whom was named Wertheimer, and one of whom is the narrator, had been just talented enough to understand that they would never be as talented as Glenn Gould. “Once our course with Horowitz was over,” the narrator recalls, “it was clear that Glenn was already a better piano player than Horowitz himself, and from that moment on Glenn was the most important piano virtuoso in the world for me.”
When I read The Loser, I was living in the Lower East Side with four roommates who all wanted to be actors or filmmakers. I wanted to be a fiction writer. We were all failing, or felt like we were failing, and becoming increasingly desperate about it. We talked a lot about people who had already been successful by our age (we were 24, then 25), and thought a lot about the people in our own generation and social circles who seemed to be more talented than us. I remember listening to the chorus of the Strokes song “Ask Me Anything,” where Julian Casablancas howls “I’ve got nothing to say” over and over again, convinced that this was a song about me. (The irony being that of course Casablancas had plenty to say and was already a famous artist because of it.) I thus identified with the way that Wertheimer and the narrator obsess over Gould’s talent, and even wish that they had never encountered it. “Yes, if only we hadn’t run into Glenn,” Wertheimer tells the narrator, “If only the name Horowitz had meant nothing to us. If only we had never gone to Salzburg! … Of course we were better than all the others who studied with Horowitz, but Glenn was better than Horowitz himself, Wertheimer said, I can still hear him, I thought.”
Yet my identification with the novel only went so far. The narrator recalls how Glenn Gould eventually dies and then Wertheimer commits suicide—in part, we are meant to think, because of the gap he knew he could never close between Glenn Gould and himself. Wertheimer is the “loser” of the book’s title, and this is a name that the narrator and Glenn Gould both agree fits him. The cruelty and extremity of this kind of thing always pointed, for me, to a distance between Bernhard’s world and my own. Although I was competitive with other people in my generation, it was hard for me to imagine being consumed by this feeling in the way Wertheimer and the narrator are in The Loser, to the extent that it defines their whole life. Likewise, although I certainly enjoyed pointing out the pretensions of the young strivers who were all around me in New York, I did not, in the end, believe they were merely pretentious and egotistical in the way that Bernhard portrayed his own cohort in novels like The Woodcutters. Perhaps this again had to do with differences in our historical situation or temperament, and certainly I was open to the idea it meant Bernhard was a true artist whereas I myself was an aspirational poser. But it also seemed likely to me that it had something to do with Bernhard’s facility for what I’ve sometimes described to my writing students as hyperbolic dramatization. Bernhard seemed to me to be a master of taking emotions and thoughts that many of us might have in passing in the course of a day—either alone or in social situations—and turning them over and over for dozens or even hundreds of pages. The underlying emotion or thought was relatable, but these passages depended for their success, at least in part, on the strategic exclusion of all the other thoughts and emotions such a character would be likely to have in the course of that day, as well as on a temperament that was committed to unfolding the thought or emotion in an obsessive and even a pathological manner.
I would have called Bernhard’s writing back then authentic, but not sincere. I believed that Bernhard’s style allowed him to access some buried truths in our social and artistic lives but not that he accurately represented—or was trying to accurately represent—his own or anyone else’s day-to-day emotional experience of the world. His novels allowed their readers to burrow down and see what they only felt in short bursts or echoes as they went about their days. In so doing, though, they also elided much else that played a significant role in their lives, including the positive emotions and experiences that almost all of us have, much of the time, with other people.
In the years that have followed, hyperbolic dramatization would characterize many of our best works of autofiction. Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard all employ the technique masterfully. In all of their books, moments that cause them or their characters shame, envy and anger are extended indefinitely at the same time as they are subjected to obsessive waves of analysis. But this alone does not make these writers Bernhardian. (Perhaps it makes them Proustian, which is the most common comparison for Knausgaard.) The novels that Kanakia rightly counts as inheriting Bernhard have another thing in common, which is that they are relentlessly focused on the shallowness and stupidity of their contemporaries. Dubno’s novel, patterned explicitly on The Woodcutters, takes place at a party filled with the narrator’s former artist-acquaintances, whom the artist now has nothing but contempt for. But I also agree with Kanakia that the novel that most effectively and creatively inherits Bernhard is not Happiness and Love but Jordan Castro’s The Novelist.
The Novelist is so effective in part because it does not take place at a party or social gathering, as Happiness and Love and The Woodcutters do, but rather in a writer’s apartment, where the writer sits alone and tries to write his novel. As he does so, he is repeatedly distracted, sometimes by his bodily needs (he gets up to take a shit, or to make a smoothie), and more often by the various “tools” that live on the same computer where he writes his novel: that is, by social media. The genius of Castro’s inheritance of Bernhard lies in its recognition of two differences between Bernhard’s era (and even the era in which I began reading Bernhard), and our own. The first is that “social life” now takes place predominantly online, rather than in person. The second, which flows from the first, is that this online experience has familiarized us all with the perennially resentful and castigating voice of Bernhard’s seemingly eccentric narrators, as well as with their (once seemingly extreme) habit of judging everything their contemporaries say, even when it purports to be an analysis of a work of art or a meditation on their lives, as an act of competitive posturing.
This concept is explored in several ways in The Novelist, not least by the repeated invocations of an online figure named “Jordan Castro” whom the writer finds deeply annoying. My favorite example, however, is a disquisition that comes about halfway through, about “Eric.” Eric is an occasional acquaintance of the would-be novelist’s, also a writer, and very active online. While once again distracting himself from writing his novel, the narrator comes across a picture of text that Eric has posted on Instagram. The text reads:
“Some of my friends have kids and i support them and love them so much, but i wanted to take this opportunity to say that if any of my friends have kids from now on i will not support them and we will stop being friends. i just want to be clear. Again i love all the already existing kids, there just shouldn’t be anymore from now on. I love kids so much, this is a perfect number of kids.”
For the next 27 pages of The Novelist, the narrator reflects continuously, and increasingly angrily, on everything he finds objectionable about this Instagram post. In particular, the narrator turns over in his mind the phrase “this is a perfect number of kids.” His hatred of Eric’s post is, in its way, generative. It spirals outward into a more generalized disdain for the whole of the literary world, and then into a series of sociological observations about the “type” Eric represents. Here is a representative sample, quoted at some length to give a sense of the Bernhardian rhythm:
I thought of Eric’s novel, distantly desiring to work on my own novel, and felt a pang of disdain toward Eric’s novel, then my own novel—then projected my disdain outward toward the literary world, at least the part of it that I could see online. Eric’s novel’s protagonist, based on himself, meandered through his life in New York City; he went from place to place, had this or that thought, was in this or that mood. It was a fundamentally lifeless book. Critics had celebrated the novel’s critique of privilege, the way it showed the emptiness of privilege; one reviewer even referenced the “dunce-like quality” of “a privileged life” as portrayed by Eric’s novel. This was what the literary world did now, I’d reminded myself, they celebrated stupid novels for stupid reasons. Every novel, like Eric’s novel, failed as a novel, but since no one wanted to read novels, no one noticed, and instead of despairing over the failed state of our literary culture, they rejoiced, like madmen delirious from bashing their heads into the wall. Eric’s novel was one such wall. […]
I looked at Eric’s post again. Eric, I thought dismissively, feeling my heart rate increase, scanning the words on the screen: “this is the perfect number of kids.” What an incomprehensible sentiment, an utterly incomprehensible sentiment. I imagined Eric twitching and mumbling, “perfect number of kids,” and came to a simple conclusion—Eric is a moron. I’d heard these kinds of confused, frankly moronic sentiments from Eric before, and there was a time in my life … when I would have agreed with them; but now, I considered, sitting at my kitchen table, I felt disturbed by Eric’s nonsensical moronism.
I scrolled down a little, quickly passed pictures I didn’t quite see, then scrolled up to Eric’s post. The reasons Eric was against having children were all, ironically, childish, I thought. They were childish pseudo-environmentalist, pseudo-humanitarian, pseudo-egalitarian reasons for not having children—for everything really—and Eric’s child aversion was some soupy combination of all three. Of course, it was really just nihilism; everything with people like Eric was nihilism; and as a result of this nihilism Eric was unable to see, or understand, the value of life enough to want to perpetuate it. The perfect number of kids … I thought. Since when did Eric stop being a novelist and become the perfect-number-of-kids decider?
The narrator’s rant even inspires the narrator to begin writing—not the novel he had been working on but a new novel, about Eric, or people like him. As he does this he thinks, “I could write a novel where I just talked shit about Eric; I could write my own version of Woodcutters.” At the end of the rant, however, the narrator’s resentment begins to burrow inwards, and he is “overcome with sudden lethargy, and a general negative feeling” toward what he had been writing and thinking about Eric. “I wondered whether I was not projecting more onto Eric’s post than was there.” Soon he abandons the “novel” about Eric and goes back to his previous idea—or rather, he goes back to being distracted from that idea by emailing and scrolling.
The Novelist came out in 2022, around the same time that many were talking about “internet novels,” like Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This. These novels, which were formally organized, often in discontinuous fragments, to reproduce aspects of scrolling online, had their virtues. But as a reader I sometimes wondered what the point was: If I wanted to feel what it was like to be online, I would go online (something I already did much more often than I wished to do). The Novelist, although it also addresses the experience of being online, was doing something different. On the formal level, with its Bernhardian prose, The Novelist produces a reading experience that is the opposite of fragmentary. At the same time the novel explores the emotional and intellectual experience of being online in a way that is, to my mind, more penetrating and, yes, sincere than what I found in Lockwood or Oyler. Above all, Castro details the degree to which this experience is one, internally, not of ironic detachment but rather of relentless resentment, anxiety and hatred—including self-hatred. In this sense, his 21st century writer sitting in his apartment is quite similar to Bernhard’s twentieth-century writers sitting in their wing chairs at a party with other artists. The conduit is social media. What was once a rarefied set of emotions afflicting intellectual obsessives has now come for us all.
Castro wrote of a period when social life did not take place entirely, or even mainly, in society as we had previously understood it, and therefore the most resonant “social novels” of this period would not necessarily privilege the kind of face-to-face encounters that occur at a party. Indeed, a social novel from this period that did not deal with the time we were spending alone on our laptops, on social media, would be incomplete. Our social life is shot through with the experiences of social media, even if it is not reducible to it. And this has an effect on what it means to engage in social life at all.
In The Novelist, Castro’s narrator comes across a random comment which, before social media, would never have made its way to him, and then spends the next hour ruminating over it, with an escalating level of annoyance and pique. More than that: he imagines that the comment is representative of vast swathes of his social and cultural world, pushing out all of the positive or enriching experiences he might (though we can only imagine this) have previously found there. This is an experience I can identify with, unfortunately. And this is so even though I am now in my forties and, unlike in my mid-twenties, do not spend most of my time comparing my achievements to those of my contemporaries. Nevertheless, at a time when I have nothing to be resentful for in my actual life, a stray tweet or a viral article that spreads online can still convince me, at least for a short time, that whole groups of people and social constellations are irredeemably corrupt or, to use Castro’s word, moronic. I can be mindlessly scrolling on a beautiful Sunday, just back from picking blueberries or whatever with my children, and then I’ll come across some moronic post by some “intellectual” with ten thousand likes, and I will not be able to stop my mind from immediately condemning not only the poster but all who had supported and encouraged such a moronic, idiotic sentiment, and then from condemning the fetid artistic/academic/intellectual cultural soil that was capable of producing such people in the first place, people who were taken for “thinkers” and yet who can do nothing but mimic (with their “mimic muscle-power”) what they mistakenly believe it means to think. I do not like thinking this about any large group of people or even of many individuals and, in my more considered moments, do not think it. Still, this voice is not at all unfamiliar to me, as I would guess it is not unfamiliar to most of the people reading this. Castro shows why. And in so doing he also shows why the Bernhardian consciousness and voice, which might once have struck us as hyperbolically reductive—even if also brilliant and generative—has become the ubiquitous and even banal inner monologue of our cultural life.
Or at least it was the inner monologue of our cultural life, for going on a decade. Today, as text-based social media wanes in influence and generative AI gains ground, it may be that novelists will be drawn to different voices than Bernhard’s. In fact, reading Happiness and Love, as well as Castro’s second novel, Muscle Man, over this past year, I sometimes had the feeling that both were slightly out of date. I still enjoyed their Bernhardian cadences, and prefer these two novels to most other contemporary fiction I’ve read recently. And there is still, of course, plenty of resentment to go around. But the style and tone of it is changing. And I wonder what kind of writer might be useful or inspiring to young authors in the next generation in the way that Bernhard was for younger millennials. As we are herded into the age of AI, I even find myself feeling some nostalgia for the very recent past, when we were all under the sway of the embittered Bernhardian monologue, with its sincere hatreds and creative resentments. Bernhard was a poet of those old, inadvisable and therefore unoptimizable passions—things no machine would ever wish to emulate, even if it could.
Autobiography of Influence by Jordan Castro (issue 32, 2024)
The Loser by Daniel Felsenthal (issue 18, 2019)
Alt Lit by Sam Kriss (issue 34, 2025)
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.