Last week the folks at Simon & Schuster in the US announced that they are no longer requiring their authors to scrounge and grovel for blurb quotes from literary luminaries (AKA friends, frenemies and coerced idols). Down with nepotism and unpaid labour! Up with democratic dust jackets! Begone hyperbole! Dazzling. Luminous. Tour de force. Good riddance to you all, you florid, empty guff.
While we’re at it, I’d like to request another puffery-related moratorium: can we please, for the love of dark academia, stop comparing novels to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History? And not only for the sake of readers, who will inevitably be disappointed, but for the writers whose work is nobbled by the comparison. Tartt’s bacchanalian debut was a literary lightning bolt. Let’s just accept that it won’t strike twice.
The latest author to fall victim to the Tartt curse is Robert Lukins, whose third novel, Somebody Down There Likes Me, is set in Connecticut and includes a character called Mouse (missing, presumed dead). The Secret History was set in Vermont, and included a character called Bunny (dead, presumed missing). Here endeth the grand similarity: Wasp nests and furry nicknames. The comparison does Lukins absolutely no favours (for starters, he has not written a campus novel – surely the threshold requirement).
Somebody Down There Likes Me has also been likened to the HBO television series Succession, which is far more apt. A little too apt. Although it’s set in 1996 – a tale of analogue plutocrats – Lukins’ new book feels dispiritingly imitative. The cultural bandwagon is passing and this novel is hitching a ride.
Meet the Gulch family: a clan of blunt-force metaphors and late-capitalist tropes. There’s addle-brained Fax Gulch, the source of the family money (largely obsolete). His ruthless wife, Honey, is the brains of the operation (she knows how to catch flies). Their insufferable son, Lincoln: a “gold-plated bad boy” and proto tech-bro (“I’m a block of blunt iron but I am going to hone myself into a blade”). And their estranged daughter, Kick, who is the only one of the bunch with any kind of moral fight in her (echoes of Succession’s Shiv, if mostly in name).
The word gulch is a synonym for chasm, and also for a ravenous gulp. This is a story of both: ethical ravines and insatiable greed; a prequel for our self-satirising Trumpian present. (Fax built his fortune with $999,999 and “would become a millionaire under his own steam”.) It begins with the end in sight: Honey has received word via her pet FBI informant that the Gulch empire is about to fall. And so she gathers the family together, coaxing Kick back home for the first time in a decade, to share the news and prepare to be unified in the face of public disgrace. Or at least that’s the plan. A reckoning is brewing, as reckonings are want to do.
Have Honey and Fax cooked the books, enslaved a vast workforce of children, or vanished a whistleblower or two? We’ll never know the details of their corporate sins. “We’ve made some mistakes that are going to be judged illegal,” Fax explains to his kids, who ask no follow-up questions. What we know is that Honey does not consider them to be mistakes: “There was no useful difference between the business of a criminal and non-criminal nature,” she thinks to herself. “The two were as Good and Bad as each other, in that they were neither.”
Perhaps – like the shark in Jaws – Lukins thinks that the lurking monster is more potent than the reveal. It’s certainly not hard to fill in the gaps ourselves. We have plenty of examples: dynasty after rotten-hearted dynasty. But there’s something lazy – rather than pointed – about the vagueness in Somebody Down There Likes Me. Cultural shorthand, not cultural critique. That feeling only intensifies over the course of the Gulch family’s last interminable week together as they sneer and scheme and float in the indoor pool (in place of Chekhov’s gun, we have Gatsby’s swimming pool). Mostly they chew on the cud of their psyches like indolent, Wagyu cows, masticating on their secrets – such as the fate of missing Mouse (the girl who roared).
It’s all very Bonfizzle of the Vanities. And that’s the true mystery of this novel. Plenty of writers have been here before: Fitzgerald, Cheever, Updike, Wolfe, Yates, Ford, Roth, Easton-Ellis, Franzen (and that’s just the great American dick-swingers). Why Lukins seems so intent on joining their company – retreading this compacted ground – is hard to fathom. It’s a dispiriting swerve, for Lukins is capable of extraordinary quiet and grace (see his gorgeous 2018 debut, The Everlasting Sunday). But here is yet another trendy tale of feckless, all-American cruelty: Kieran Culkin outtakes with a soundtrack by Lana Del Rey.
If cashed-up spite is what Lukins really wants, there’s an abundance in his own back yard. Imagine if this novel was set in the red dust of iron ore country. Or aboard the champagne-tacky deck of the Australia II. Or on a dinosaur-infested golf course. Imagine what we might learn about our own national psyche if we chewed on that instead.
Somebody Down There Likes Me by Robert Lukins is published by Allen & Unwin
