Fraternity by Ben Nugent
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Fraternity: Stories
By Benjamin Nugent
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
Any chance that readers of Benjamin Nugent’s fiction debut Fraternity, about the brothers at the Delta Zeta Chi fraternity house, will find themselves in a world of sentimentality is firmly dispelled by the casual pornography of the book’s first story, “God” - what we’re going to get in these pages clearly won’t be a postmodern version of Stover at Yale but rather a pretentious version of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.
Fraternity’s eight stories look at Delta Zeta Chi from eight different angles, but the essentials remain the same throughout: the bro-life nicknames like Borat or Oprah or Nutella or Dracula, the deployment of the starched minimalism that has become a staple of contemporary Yaddo/MacDowell fiction, the carefully code-worded misogyny, and, unfortunately, the serial mistaking of poor, jumbled prose for cool-cat idiosyncrasy, like this passage from “Ollie the Owl” in Fraternity:
Now, when I look up and focus on nothing in particular and the geese are over the library tower, I can hear things. Like the feral cats that gnaw the pizza boxes that we lean against the house on recycling day are asking for help. Even like, when I look at something like the shitty houses with the brown lawns by Route 9, all the powerless things are asking for me, like there are these tiny fingers everywhere reaching out.
Nugent’s book is only one workshopped story north of 100 pages, and yet it absolutely brims with the anomie and nihilism that gives so much modern fiction the affect of a muttering Goth teenager. His young characters do crappy things to each other for crappy reasons that are only ever transactionally assessed by either the characters or the author. It’s a gray landscape and an inherently uninteresting one, since it’s exclusively inhabited by vacuous, self-obsessed idiots. And since if the characters were to grow or change or improve in any way that would imply that the author is a simp, a cuck, an uncritical tool of cultural propaganda, the characters never grow or change or improve.
In Fraternity’s final story, “Safe Spaces,” for instance, readers follow a young cokehead named Claire who can’t hold a job and has no address (when couch-surfing with an increasingly attenuated list of hosts, she has to force herself to be quiet on the sofa all night rather than shuffle around and break things). At first it seems like a thematic departure of a small kind, but no: she eventually shows up at the frat house hoping to sell some cocaine. The brothers don’t reject the idea, of course, and they don’t turn her away, of course; instead, they send her in the direction of a video game-playing brother named Kyle (nickname: Wagon Wheel … “because he was good at singing ‘Wagon Wheel’”). He remains absorbed in his gameplay while she tries to sell him some drugs. “Are you a pusher?” he asks her. “I thought that was something that only existed in movies.”
“I sell it,” she said. “I don’t push it on anybody.” Coke was more fun than Adderall, she explained. A gram would be well worth his while, an investment. Anytime he wanted to offer people just a little bit and get the party started, he could. A hundred bucks was a reasonable price. It was not a lot of money for trying something that could be a good drug for him, a fun drug but also a study drug for when his prescription wasn’t enough.
Eventually, she takes the controller from him, proves herself a stellar expert at the game, hands off the controller, stretches out on the floor of this random room surrounded by strangers, and goes to sleep. Resounding stuff.
—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.