'Nipsey Russell,' A Novel

by Richard Yates

This is my book.

This is the book I am writing.

This is a book about me, Peter.

I am an ambivalent twentysomething who is nostalgic for my childhood and still grappling with what it means to be an adult in these times.

I spend a lot of time on gchat with my friends.

Here is a conversation:

I fucked this girl and I don’t know how I feel about it.

Dude was she hot?

I guess she was hot in the way that you think girls should be hot but then after you’re empty and you don’t know if hotness is enough.

Hotness is something though.

But what?

Well, whatever, give me her number.

I have weird feelings about rape, even though I think rape is wrong.

I’ll see you at the n+1 thing later, okay?

Okay.

That was me and my friend Hans Christian Andersen. He is dating a girl named Nick Denton, although they have a troubled relationship.

I am also dating a girl named Nick Denton, although she is no relation to my friend Hans Christian Andersen’s girlfriend Nick Denton. She is also not the pretty girl I spoke of earlier, who is named Zoe Lofgren. Nick Denton and I also have a troubled relationship, although our troubles are very different than those between Hans Christian Andersen and his Nick Denton. Still, in many ways they are the same.

I wonder a lot about modern life.

Imagine a gratuitous, dryly written sex scene here that does not really try very hard but makes a point of its lack of effort as some kind of definition of anomie and expressionlessness. Insert that here. In your mind.

Things will change for me, or they might not.

I don’t learn lessons, because that is not the way things happen.

My Nick Denton is a unicorn. This is not a metaphor. She is a horse with a horn in the center of her head. She also suffers from the disease of consumerism. Sometimes I shop for things without much reason as well, but I am not as diseased by consumerism as unicorn Nick Denton, my girlfriend. But maybe I am and just don’t know.

“There are things that happen and we think about them and feel them but they don’t really sink in,” says unicorn Nick Denton, my girlfriend. I think I know what she means.

This is my book. Thank you for reading it. My name was Peter. I had concerns. I probably still do. They may be in another book. My new girlfriend Warren Christopher is calling me now. We’re going to freebase Axe bodyspray and have boring sex. This is my book. Please do not comment on the frame of the narrative, although it is deliberately without affect. It would make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable.

My book is over. I think we are both a little changed and yet the same from it. This was my book.

The End

The End

The End End End End End

My book this was.

End, The.

End.

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