A short introduction & "Famous People" by Justin Kuritzkes
Might as well jump right in, I'm assuming you all have thousands of other newsletters to read!
Hello!
This is the Knibbs Review of Books (and Other Stuff Too). But guess what—there’s a twist—I’m not going to be reviewing the books as much as recommending them. (Reviewing sounds harder and I don’t want to do that.) If I read something so completely psycho that I feel I must share my hateful thoughts about it with the world, I will emphatically not recommend it on this blog as well.
I will also be recommending and discussing journalism/essays/blog posts that I like (or, again, loathe to an unhealthy degree and need to rail against).
Expect this newsletter twice a month, or perhaps slightly more or less frequently depending on what I read and how I feel about it. We’ll see! Who knows!
Famous People by Justin Kuritzkes
In general I do not respect YouTubers or their culture, but I make an exception for Justin Kuritzkes aka the “Potion Seller” video guy, because Famous People absolutely rules. The easiest way to describe this novel’s premise is, “What if Justin Bieber wrote a memoir?” Except Justin Bieber is quite obviously functionally illiterate and if he wrote a memoir it would be unreadable, whereas Kuritzkes has somehow transmitted the rancid heart of the experience of modern celebrity onto the page with wit and way more affection than I ever thought possible. His twist on Bieber has gone through some shit--his father kills himself, his mother marries a charismatic megachurch bigot, and his Selena Gomez/Ariana Grande mashup of a girlfriend undergoes a radical personal transformation after some stuff I won’t get into because you should really just read this book. He doesn’t exactly get wiser because of his travails, but the way the character lunges after meaning again and again ends up feeling poignant.
I’m normally not a huge fan of stream-of-consciousness writing, but I sat down to read this and got up a few hours later having finished it in one Big Gulp session. My preferences for novels veer towards 19th centuryish stuff—the big, meaty, mostly-linear narratives with multiple perspectives—and this is decidedly not that, and yet I loved it so much! It could have been very stupid, and instead it is wise and funny.
Also, I feel bad for Justin Bieber. He never really had a chance.