The will to posture

An affectionate satire on a life of grand philosophical thinking

By Andrew Irwin

Lars Iyer’s Nietzsche and the Burbs is the story of a suburban sixth-former so enthralled by proto-existentialist philosophy, and by “nihilism” in particular, that it consumes his life: he doesn’t do chit-chat or gossip; only the biggest talk will do (“So what should we do? Art asks. What should we want?”). He blogs (“Suburban events: eternally larval, eternally on the brink of happening. Suburban time deepens”). The local gang of outsidery, intellectualish teenagers take him on as their leader and spiritual guide (and lead singer of their band), nicknaming him Nietzsche and quickly coming around to the nihilist lifestyle themselves. Very markedly its premiss recalls that of Iyer’s previous novel, Wittgenstein Jr (2014), the story of a Cambridge professor of logic and the students who call him “Wittgenstein”.

This young Nietzsche’s life tracks that of the real Friedrich so closely that he starts to seem like a kind of Nietzschean reincarnation (perhaps just one of his eternal returns). Nietzsche struggles with his mental health, loathes his overbearing sister, falls for a girl called Lou (Salomé?), competing for her affections with a friend called Paula (Rée?), and eventually collapses into madness, to be cared for by his sister, delighted to find him under her control. (One wonders, though, why our hero, well versed in the real Nietzsche’s work, isn’t a bit more alarmed by all the weird similarities in his own life.)

The novel covers ten weeks in the lives of these sixth-formers, as they attempt to forge their identities, figure out romance, pass their exams and gaze into the endless post-school summer that will bridge their pasts and futures, conveyed in lyrical and often moving passages. And at the same time, it is an affectionate satire on intellectual life and a certain sort of grand philosophical thinking. With a kind of Nietzschean flair, Iyer illuminates the ways in which strongly held beliefs are often the product not of a “cold, pure, divinely unperturbed dialectic” (as Nietzsche wrote) but (as he continued) of a “desire of the heart sifted and made abstract”; and so the philosophical speculation that Iyer’s young protagonist expounds is born from his descent into misery, and that of his…

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