Before Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre, who was the last writer on the cover of Der Spiegel? Salman Rushdie? Stuckrad-Barre’s new novel has taken him a long way, maybe even the literature – but certainly the literature marketing: no review copies in advance, as is usually only the case with new records by Beyoncé or Rammstein. Okay, of course, “Zeit”, “Spiegel”, “FAZ” and “Süddeutsche Zeitung” got the book before everyone else, so that the leading media reviews were online in time for the premiere. Because in three weeks nobody cares anymore.
Really now? Think: yes. “Still awake?” tells a story of megalomania, male associations and abuse of power that has validity beyond the hype. It is the story of the friendship between two men, the first-person narrator and the head of a television station, which is broken by two events, by two people who disrupt this intimate relationship. On the one hand there is the station’s new editor-in-chief, a wide-legged ultra who enjoys and abuses his power, who molests and humiliates young employees. And on the other hand one of the young employees who confides in the narrator. Her name is Sophia. The three men remain nameless.
“If they confide in you, don’t be an asshole”
The first four chapters are bomb. The novel begins with a woman telling you, in the first person, what it’s like when your boss hits on you and soaps you up, but when you don’t abuse yourself, but feel seen through sayings at an intermediate “bachelor’s” level. That is great recorded and shivers as if ice crystals had formed on the liquorice. In sharp contrast, the change of location from you to me, from Berlin to Los Angeles. The Gatsby-like hustle and bustle of the guests at the celebrity hotel Chateau Marmont (of “Panicheart” fame), where friends named Brandon and out of senseless boredom throw typewriters into the swimming pool or fight to get a Gucci billboard, has a sun-drenched flow until one spoilsport appears. Because under the lemon tree in the Garden of Paradise also lies actress Rose McGowan, who has her hair shaved short and is considered “exhausting”, and who will start the Weinstein case and #MeToo. She initiates the first-person narrator with a message scrawled into a Monica Lewinsky biography: “If they confide in you, don’t be an asshole”.
Hollywood Babylon will fall, Berlin Babylon is waiting. So cut into the shell of a new German TV station, which looks like a concrete promise of salvation from Silicon Valley. Inspection of the construction site with the station boss, the close friend of the first-person narrator, who here only understands the train station, or “New York” instead of “New Work”, as the future external working conditions of the employees (no desks, but with showers on the roof) from the be titled “Feelgood Manager”. In the previous chapter, the station bigheads had actually sped through California in sports cars and SUVs to a workshop, leaving a dozen executives in Silicon Valley at a loss. Now the future is getting buzzwords: transformative, condensed, inclusive; and from the outside, the LED headlines of the broadcaster’s own news show penetrate the light-flooded atrium: “Now it’s getting dirtier and dirtier!”
We know Stuckrad’s exact view and linguistic accuracy from all his works, they make the grotesque scenes appear more real than reality; he paints a hysterical portrait of morals that no one else could have painted.
Also, he has a sense of humor like a razor.
What emerges on the first few pages and then becomes the core of the narrative is the love story between the hero of the novel and the station boss: a male friendship that is torpedoed by a rival, the station’s editor-in-chief, who acts like a mega-villain from the Marvel Universe – the total antithesis to the art-loving TV boss dancing through hotel rooms to soulful EDM. Stuckrad-Barre describes the first-person narrator’s friend with a cold look, and the ambivalent relationship between the two in precise dialogues. But the nature of this friendship remains a mystery. What do they find in themselves, where does the intensity come from? First enthusiastic affection, then tsunami-like anger, and always eccentricity, megalomania, some smugness, often tender intimacy. A reunion of the friends, secretly, in the middle of the fighting, ends in tears: “I sank into his jacket, wept cream on his shirt”.
This friendship breaks up at breakneck speed, the nameless first-person narrator turns from a dandy into a moralist, a “miscast”, as he himself believes, into a fighter for the abused victims of his obtuse rival. Three men approaching high noon. And a dozen women who, in a grandiose scene, are connected in a video conference with the involuntary hero of the novel and tell their stories, which he is constantly writing down. They tell of late-night text message pick-ups, of being flattered, courted, promoted, and dumped. Sophia is one of them and the real heroine of the novel who had sex with the boss and got dumped. Who acts ambivalently, who wants to see the abuser punished, but has sex with him again in a kind of reverse demonstration of power. She lives through fear, shame and disgust and becomes a fighter. The way Stuckrad-Barre hits her sound, her language, is masterly.
This story has no winners
Laconicism and comedy evaporate as the story comes to a head. Everything has to be said: an epic angry speech at the cocky editor-in-chief, at his world view and the mechanisms of abuse, a meticulous and almost grim judicial crime constellation in which the main character and her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend face each other more and more irreconcilably, while more and more victims reveal themselves . But (Warning, spoilers!) no happy ending. Rather (Warning, spoilers!) the hero’s failure as the abuse of power eventually spills over into his California paradise. This story has no winners.
“I’m just ashamed. For … I don’t know, for me, for all men, I don’t know,” says Stuckrad’s first-person narrator at one point.
Can one be reminded of the real figures Stuckrad-Barre, Döpfner, Reichelt? Clear. But Stuckrad’s book can do more.
At the end there is a recapitulation of the opening lyrics: Don’t be an asshole. As simple as that.
Transparency Note: Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre was an editor and writer for Rolling Stone.