Thick with humor wry and pointed, this Guide to Surviving Modern Society from the pseudonymous Cheque serves as an amusing, accessible guide to the basic tenets and facets of a nihilist view of contemporary life, a world that Cheque—surveying everyday milieus like the subway, the workplace, the grocery store, and get-togethers with friends—portrays as obsessed with the vapid, self-glorifying, and deeply unsatisfying, a place where the “zombie apocalypse” has already come, powered by the “addictive quality of the digital neurotoxin affecting the masses.” Rather than simply denounce that world, though, Cheque studs this travelogue with playful pointers for surviving as a nihilist (“If you can’t seem to find the auto-amuse feature in your living, breathing self, probe your navel and try harder.”)

At the novel’s heart is philosopher and nihilistic ideal protagonist Rectum Leviticus (R.L.), a Brooklynite who reads fervently, maintains important relationships with the people and geckos around him, and considers the world with a humorous, detached, and largely (if not universally) nonjudgmental perspective, even in the face of “Pinterest-Instagram-Facebook drivel” and media “content” with “little or no nutritive value.” Cheque has created a sympathetic if highly unusual “everyman,” displaying for readers how amusing and freeing life can be when we don’t get “distracted by the trivial b.s.” A tonic of cultural criticism, this Guide often reads less like Nietzche than Douglas Adams, though more rooted in the day-to-day American mundane.

For all its outrage, including R.L.’s thoughts of coprophagia whenever he speaks to his boss, Cheque’s narrative celebrates connection with life and community and observing the world around you. It will please fellow travelers who favor philosophical inquiry, a grand sense of humor, a bit of companionship in living an offbeat life—and who are not put off by books that may send them to the dictionary from time to time. This thoughtful novel is indeed seriously silly, befitting the author’s matriculation from the esteemed Flaneur University.

Takeaway: Outraged, funny, inviting novel of facing American meaninglessness.

Comparable Titles: Kurt Vonnegut; Wendy Syfret’s The Sunny Nihilist.

Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: B+