Dogma, reviewed at The Answer is Probably No (2012)

More or less a repurposing of 2011’s Spurious, and equally hilarious. As previously, Lars faithfully notates W.’s endless catalogue of taunts and dyspeptic rants on his failing career, capitalism, religion, the end times and the surely imminent apocalypse. We learn more biographical details about Lars – his Hindu beliefs and the rat infestation in his flat – and W. moves in with his girlfriend Sal. Iyer sends the pair on a farcical speaking tour of the Deep South of America, as well as to Liverpool and to an ATP-esque festival to see Josh T Pearson. They also attempt to start a would-be philosophical movement (Dogma), whose tenets are blatantly lifted from Dogme, the mid-90s Danish manifesto for cinema; it’s a predictably short-lived failure. Lars and W. are given several new cultural referents to obsess over and feel inferior to: Walser, Celan, Mandelstam, Leibniz, Krasznahorkai. And we discover that Lars is, ludicrously, a devoted fan of Jandek, one of whose best lines (“I don’t care about philosophy / Even if it’s right”) gets quoted, and all of whose albums are loathed by Sal and mercilessly derided by W., inspiring him to some of his finest insults. Much of the novel’s appeal lies in this combination of high learning and low banter, exchanged by two stupid men who happen to have very high IQs – and are so crippled by their accumulated learning they’ve convinced themselves they’re too stupid to understand the true extent of their idiocy. Iyer’s breezy prose, smoothly organised into concise chunks, ventilates the dialogue, conveying the relationship as a mixture of mutual dependency and inverted bromance.