Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe review – nerve, verve and hardly any verbs

Modern mores and a certain type of twentysomething male energy clash colourfully in the vibrant voice of this debut novel

Lately, the prospects for young, straight, male American novelists of unruly talent who aspire to more than underground recognition haven’t looked particularly bright. Stateside culture war partisanship has narrowed the bandwidth of permissible literary expression, with the heterosexual white male regarded as inherently suspect. To get along under the new order, ambitious young Americans might be tempted to walk on eggshells while presenting themselves as paragons of virtue – and dissent could spell career suicide. (If the general point seems exaggerated, recall that Americans elected Donald Trump as their president, then ask yourself how many pro-Trump literary novelists you can name.)

Into this vexed monoculture steps Sean Thor Conroe, with his winningly titled first novel, Fuccboi. The challenge he confronts is a real pickle: how to update the tradition of the American male autobiographical novelist, writing about the concerns of a twentysomething on the make (which naturally include wrong-think and that notoriously problematic condition, lust) without censoring himself into insipidity. To pull it off and remain credible, he may have to play both sides: writing neither as simpering literary beta-cuck, nor as obtuse and toxic reactionary. Magas to the left of me, wokists to the right!

Set between late 2017 and summer 2019, Fuccboi is an autobiographical picaresque that follows its narrator, Sean, as he attempts to become a published writer, endures an alarming skin condition, cycles around Philly in his job with a food delivery company, hustles on a book podcast and deals with the fallout from his sex life (“ex bae”, “side bae” and “editor bae” are his love interests, while male friends go by single initials: Z, C, V). Back in 2014, he tried and failed to walk across the US, then wrote a novel about it which he is now trying to sell with the help of editor bae, a woke feminist starting out in New York publishing (their working relationship is complicated by our hero having slept with her). History simmers just out of shot – “After navigating past two police blockades for an anti-Proud Boys march, I finally found a sign to lock my bike to.”

This isn’t a plot novel, nor even much of a story novel. Conroe bets most of his chips on voice and by and large his writing has enough charm and freshness to keep him solvent. Americans have always been at the vanguard of minimalist prose, from Hemingway to Tao Lin. Conroe’s punchy variant includes rap slang and internet speak, bc that’s how it is now, bruh.

He also fucks with those one-line paras.

Quick blunt insights, stacked up n shit.

It’s kinda fun.

Often funny!

No verbs needed in this dude’s bars.

Word.

What book people have lately started calling autofiction has a clear parallel in rap – a lingual art form in which practitioners exploit their life stories in intimate first-person reports, inviting the listener to both thrill at the personal disclosure and identify with the rapper’s struggles and triumphs. The egotism is franker (rappers are less embarrassed to drop a sex boast) but the narrative strategy is basically the same – a crossover was only a matter of time. Sean is a SoundCloud rapper and along with his digressive hot takes on poetry and books (Knausgaard, Sheila Heti) are reflections on rappers such as XXXTentacion and Lil B.

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, demanding moral and doctrinal purity. A reader of Nietzsche and Houellebecq, Sean cultivates a “hatred of neoliberal feminism” and rankles at “woke kids” and the “puritanical, ultimately fascistically western roots of their apparently woke language-censoring” (his spleen fuels such tin-eared, adverb-clogged phrasing). Elsewhere, though, the internalised contradictions of his dementing culture manifest in amusing ways. Unable to get an erection while in bed with “side bae” and offering her medical advice instead, Sean feels intoxicated and “almost turned on” by his “wokeness”. In another scene, he is thrilled to move in with a female housemate because doing so “immediately established me as non-predatory. Like Fuck outta here – I live with a woman!” Those who fear that US writers now come to us filtered through a de facto system of censorship will not be reassured by a scene in which Sean’s unpublished novel is subjected to an edit that erases “every savage, ugly, testosterone-fuelled, shameful thing it had been most difficult to write”.

By this meandering novel’s final third, I was no longer sure what the story was meant to be about, beyond the narrator’s ongoing presence on the page. The auto-novelist’s liberation from plot comes at the cost of submergence in life’s essential formlessness. Nevertheless, 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.

• Rob Doyle’s most recent book is Autobibliography

• Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe is published by Wildfire (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply