Gabriel Brockwell, the narrator of DBC Pierre’s latest novel, gets to the point in the first paragraph: He’s going to kill himself.
“And who am I to die?” he asks. “A microwave chef. A writer of flyers. A product of our time. A failed student. A defective man. A bad poet. An activist on the fence.”
(Norton)
He is, also, an abuser of various substances and, at 25, someone who already has the game figured out: Life is hopeless. We are victims of nature, free will and capitalism. People are pawns of an economic system that promises satisfaction and then denies it, as every new acquisition only feeds the hunger for more.
“History’s best thinkers eventually concluded that our flaws were too powerful to trust with freedom,” he lectures us from rehab, where he’s just been deposited by his fed-up old dad. “Thus we’ve been groomed as hamsters in a wheel that benefits a laughing few. No more great works will be accomplished under the regime, because beauty is not democratic or profitable.”
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, cursed with consciousness — or just another burned-out brat? Either way, the narrator of “Lights Out in Wonderland” is not a bore. He’s as erudite as he is immature, smart as he is stupid. He’s also an elegant diagnostician of the decline of the West, complete with his own lexicon: There’s limbo, a kind of detachment from reality; the Enthusiasms, “ironic and whimsical energies” that can prove very tricky to follow; nimbus, the state of mindless bliss best achieved by constant inebriation; and whoosh, a sudden change for good or ill.
Gabriel celebrates his imminent demise by whooshing out of rehab, stealing $5,000 from a leftist political group and flying to Tokyo for a final blowout with his old cooking-school pal, Nelson. Nelson works in just the kind of ravenous environment that repels and fascinates Gabriel: a fancy restaurant catering to a wealthy clientele who indulge in forbidden pleasures like torafugu, the blowfish with a potentially lethal kickback. Gabriel quickly jinxes his friend’s career, the two of them get high, a powerful gangster turns gravely ill and Nelson winds up in jail. Nelson’s only hope is for a potential employer, Didier “Le Basque” Laxalt, to use his influence to free him.
Didier, a culinary impresario famous for staging freaky, borderline unlawful dining experiences for the super-rich, needs an appropriately decadent venue for his forthcoming gastronomical orgy. In hopes of impressing him, and saving his friend, Gabriel bluffs Didier that he can deliver just the kind of place he has in mind: an underground hall of the soon-to-be-shuttered Berlin Tempelhof Airport (which closed in 2008).
Once the jewel of Nazi Germany, Tempelhof’s mythical and mysterious subterranean network of railways, hangars and bunkers is as close to hell as any party could hope for: an “underground Cockaigne . . . the limbo of modern capitalism at its deepest, most gaseous sphere.” Welcome to Wonderland.
Gabriel is still very much on go with the suicide plan, but he has to spring Nelson first, which means gaining access to the airport, which means playing a high-stakes game of manipulating the vulnerable to appease the rapacious. “Self-destruction,” as someone says along the way, “is a team sport.”
From the start of his career, Pierre has been a flamboyant hit-or-miss comic moralist. His first novel, “Vernon God Little,” the account of a Texas youth accused of being a school shooter, is a disaster, the narrator’s verbal style every bit the match of his loose-bowel syndrome. It’s a broad parody stocked with the kind of cliches and caricatures of America that certain European intellectuals love, which may be why it won two of England’s top literary prizes, the Man Booker and the Whitbread.
Pierre’s second novel, “Ludmila’s Broken English,” an international farce about Siamese twins who become entangled in the fate of a poor East European girl, is a polished but obtuse comedy, more concerned with being smart than funny and, in the end, being not much of either.
“Lights Out in Wonderland” isn’t perfect — it builds up to an ending that doesn’t fully discharge — but it’s a terrific one-man show. Gabriel is the eloquent misanthrope Pierre has been looking for all along, good company even if you dislike him, gracefully moving from screed to story without missing a beat. He’s a man who holds a mirror up to a suicidal society and sees himself, a genuine product of his time.
Welch frequently reviews books for the Columbia, S.C., Free-Times.
LIGHTS OUT IN WONDERLAND
By DBC Pierre
Norton. 350 pp. $25.95
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