The Book of Outcasts by Matt Nagin

The Book of Outcasts is published by Strange Rebel Press.

I read some of Matt Nagin’s poetry a long time ago – back in 2018, probably the best year of my life (so far!) – and though I don’t remember having strong feelings either for or against it, the blog post I wrote about reading it is (unhelpfully) mostly a manifesto slash advert for my own (then) forthcoming poetry collection.

That 2018 blog post does, however, describe Nagin’s poetry as ultimately too “macho” for my taste, and noted a possible whiff of right-aligned political ideologies in the text as a whole…

There’s something about macho poetics that always leads to disappointment (or drunkenness or death ([insert reference to your own favourite self-medicating, suicidal male poet (mine is Malcom Lowry)])… because what has been repressed escapes when one writes softly… and poetry cannot be built with a sledgehammer…

Prose, though…

Prose you can write while smashing your balls against a keyboard.

Prose you can write by throwing monkeys at a wall.

Prose can be written with one hand on the wheel and one hand on someone else’s girlfriend and one hand on a bottle and one hand on a guitar and one hand on a-

Yes.

And though the whiff of what was once alt-right (and is now mainstream right (whoops)) politics persists sliiiiiightly (i.e. in one piece the (otherwise) villain-coded character is a filmmaker who produces documentaries critical of Trump, which is framed narratorially as a bad/suspicious/weird/sinister thing to do), it is a whiff and not a stench (i.e. this isn’t propaganda, nor outwardly celebratory of repressive ideologies), but the subjects and the characters who are featured here are those who the right would see as people: (white) men with good educations and/or military service and/or family money.

Not everything can be about everything. It isn’t inherently hateful or sexist or invalid to write stories that are only about men. And, actually, I think Nagin is definitely due praise for having written a collection of stories here where the demographics and trajectories of the protagonists are all similar, yet the stories do feel sufficiently and satisfactorily different.

So, no, this isn’t a collection of stories trying to dramatise every different life or lifestyle of the contemporary world, it isn’t fiction trying to reinvent the wheel… The Book of Outcasts isn’t trying to right wrongs or raise issues or provoke strong political reactions. It’s a collection of stories about men just on the outside of the main bit of the mainstream, flailing in the whirlpools of their own bad decisions and ((sometimes) or) their own bad luck.

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writing blunt pieces about the failures of contemporary masculinity-slash-masculinities works in prose

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These are violent and cruel pieces, cruel to the characters who appear in them and cruel to a reader who cares for the characters and cruel (perhaps) about the world (ours?) that is depicted…

It is a set of stories about – almost every single time – privileged, highly educated, white men who choose to forego predictable, steady success and/or comfort and instead withdraw to squalor or violence or addiction.

Sometimes these men are the near-sole writer of their own misfortune, sometimes they are victims of circumstance, and sometimes they are unlucky.

Some pieces are real-feeling bitter tragedies of debt and isolation and loneliness, while others take these elements and themes and push a little beyond reality (i.e. a secondhand (seemingly real) alien abduction; the existence of a pawn shop trading in human babies (maybe that one is real); a former drug smuggler who ran off with the product ends up hiding inside the dead body of a crocodile in a Costa Rican river and cuts a hole out of the corpse’s torso using a key to escape before the corpse is gunned into smithereens by the drug dealers he stole from)…

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This is a generally enjoyable collection of short stories about men making terrible decisions or being forced to terrible actions, though usually due to terrible decisions they’ve previously made…

These are stories about gambling, addiction, and substance abuse…

These are stories about infidelity and about corruption…

The Book of Outcasts presents people – in particular men – as fundamentally avaricious, horny, selfish and unprincipled, and depicts a world where conformity is difficult and unfulfilling, yet also simultaneously the only thing that one could and should do, if one wants material and social comfort…

The outcasts featured in these mostly USA-set stories aren’t outcasts due to anything outside of their control, and many of them have storied academic careers behind them, though you could argue that someone mentioning how well they did at university in their 30s, 40s and beyond is less a sign of youthful success than a sign of middle-aged failure…

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Some of these pieces are funny, and many of them are very dark…

This is noir-y type picaresque fiction, with violence, with sex and with drugs and with gambling and all the other fun, intoxicating, story elements hovering on the edges throughout…

Is there anything deeply cathartic or literarily life changing to be found here? No, I don’t think so, but I don’t think that the intention of these pieces is to make meaningful philosophical or political statements.

These are engaging, exciting, stories that are well-plotted miniature tragedies…

Even though all of the pieces feature similar people going through similar experiences, The Book of Outcasts doesn’t feel repetitive – this doesn’t feel like the same story told 10 times in 10 different ways, it does feel like 10 different stories.

It is not the same man with a different name and age and the location of his mistakes and regrets changed… Matt Nagin has created a selection of different men on the outs, all with complex personal and professional lives fleshed out behind them.

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Is it all flawless? No.

…One story is set during a pandemic and is about someone creating a TV quiz show Ponzi scheme while pretending to be from a different race (this one’s probably the messiest in the book and – I felt – seemed to be primarily seeking to shock, but wasn’t quite scandalous enough to distract from the looser than elsewhere plotting…)

…One piece is set in a realistic-feeling near-future where everyone is required to have an AI-enabled, internet-connected microchip inserted into their brain in order to be able to function within society, which is almost where we are already with phones, online banking digital footprints etc… The story is about someone refusing to get the implant as their life falls apart without it… This one is interesting and well put together, and as no one really exists off the grid anymore, it’s not a nightmare future but rather a grim reality… Regardless of whether or not one’s data is being harvested from within the skull or from a device held in the palm, none of us are truly free already… (Though I did worry slightly at one point that rather than this being a straightforward story about phone use and data theft/harvesting and big tech controlling people’s lives, it was possibly meant to be an allegory for, like, vaccination mandates, but even considering that as a possibility got me so angry I nearly threw excrement at a duck, so I’m going to go ahead and presume that was just me overhearing anti-vaxxers as I walked my dog by the duckpond just after reading that story and extrapolating. (Vaccination is one of the few universal good things humanity has invented. (It’s basically vaccines and drum machines at this point. (Maybe some of the better breeds of dog.)))

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I like a bit of literary hyper-violence and pulp and picaresque and noir from time to time, so The Book of Outcasts was a great opportunity to indulge some of the darker literary pleasures.

And all of these stories are well-plotted, description is vivid and engaging and, sure, this isn’t a book that’s going to change the world, but every piece here is an engaging and exciting and upsetting (when it’s aiming to be) way to spend 15-20 minutes.

It’s a solid collection of stories.

Enjoyable stuff, but not for the faint-hearted.

Note: this is the kind of male-centred fiction that the right wing press would tell you is impossible to find. It’s not. This is butch, this is macho, this is masculine prose, and it’s about dumb, cum-crazed madmen crumbling their lives up into lines at the 24-hour casino. If that’s what you want, come to Nagin and get it!

These stories know what they’re trying to be, and they’re doing it well.

For more details, visit the writer’s website