Russell Smith’s Self Care puts incel behaviour and performative wokeness under the microscope | Canada Voices

• Title: Self Care
• Author: Russell Smith
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Pages: 224

A Russell Smith novel tends to come with the promise of sex and satire; familiar readers arrive prepared for quips and digs at the myriad lunacies of the young and status-obsessed in the glittering city. His latest, Self Care, takes caustic aim at aggrieved incels and performative sex-positive liberals.

Smith’s protagonist, Gloria, is a freelance journalist in Toronto. Well, that’s what she might call herself – in reality she is hard at work in the content mines, a precarious independent contractor at the mercy of an editor who wants her to write sexy, mostly apolitical content that gets megaclicks.

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Gloria considers herself mostly a good person, even though she is callous to her clingy, deeply depressed roommate and frequently fabricates sources for her loosely “reported” stories. Her milieu, mostly recent graduates from an unnamed university modelled on the University of Toronto, consider themselves arbiters of taste and ethics despite being disconnected and frequently unkind. Most of them are also on SSRIs or stimulants to treat various mental illnesses.

Smith paints her circle with a fairly broad cloth – her best friend, Isabel, is a classically beautiful manic pixie with a history of suicidal ideation and age-gap relationships; her regular lover, Florian, is a bartender who lives in Parkdale and, despite being a chill feminist dude, only ever texts back when he wants to hook up at 3 a.m. The characters are, for the most part, caricatures drawn with a cruel pen in a slightly outdated fashion.

Self Care is set in the post-COVID-19, post-2018 Toronto incel-motivated van attack present, but the twentysomethings text like boomers and are written from an ironic distance that feels more from the Bret Easton Ellis era than the time of Elon Musk.

But the lack of veracity to the way people talk and act this deep into the 21st century, to borrow some Gen-X apathy, doesn’t matter. The novel’s main strength is in Smith’s gleefully bleak point of view, and the moments where he lets his narrowly defined characters chafe against the values they want other people to think they hold.

The main tension arrives as Gloria walks through an alt-right demonstration put on by men who loudly hate women. Daryn, one of the terminally online, red-pilled incel demonstrators wearing a sad-face pin, catches her attention as she makes her way from her an interview for her precarious content-creator role. She calls him “cute” – half mocking, half seriously – and watches some kind of spasm, perhaps of desire, run through his body; it feels like she has power.

Gloria goes home and googles the sad-face insignia, landing herself in various alt-right forums. She convinces herself Daryn would make a great interview subject and proceeds to meet up with him in a public place, and, despite her reservations, invite him back to her house and sexually dominates him. Smith’s deft touch with sex as a site of conflict and power makes what might be titillating into a commentary on the conflicting desires embedded into an ironized world.

Gloria becomes enraptured with feeling a man – even a possible incel terrorist – might want to love her in some of the ways chill feminist dudes like Florian would never. Daryn, for one thing, never tries to choke her during sex, a porn-coded act which is fairly de rigueur for men in Gloria’s artsy circle.

From the archive: The alt-right vs. the avant-garde, written by Russell Smith

Gloria and Daryn become lovers crossed not by stars but by a vastly deteriorated social fabric where polar extremes born online increasingly define reality. It’s no spoiler to say that both sides, it turns out, have a hunger and a loneliness so expansive that it will never quite be crossed.

Smith’s bleak, horny comedy holds up a funhouse mirror to an aspect of the human condition that feels unique but has always endured: What do we owe others, and why is there something so funny in the tragedy of our constant failure to connect?

While there are no satisfying answers provided in Smith’s novel (nor in any novel), there is an undeniably stylish brutality to his portrait of desperately lonely urbanites; when it hits you, you just might laugh.