NIETZSCHE AND THE BURBS

By Lars Iyer

A clique of misfit teenagers in suburban England sit on adulthood’s cusp, lamenting their middle-class lives and fretting for their futures. Enter a new boy, a stranger booted from a posh academy, who scrawls “NIHILISM” on the cover of his notebook and elevates the group’s ennui into something more profound. They call him Nietzsche, as in Friedrich. We never learn his real name.

Not much happens in “Nietzsche and the Burbs,” a peculiar new novel by Lars Iyer. The final 10 weeks of high school go by. There are house parties and bicycle rides and exams. Only one member of the group, Chandra, serves as narrator, but the novel’s voice is a collective one: an angsty adolescent Greek chorus. “Who are we supposed to be?” it asks. “What are we supposed to want? Are we any different from the people we hate? Won’t we have to become like them in the end?”

It goes on like this. Nietzsche keeps a sad blog about the suburbs (“Nothing will happen, not today”). The group watches “Melancholia” and reads Dostoyevsky. Drugs are taken, and sex, very occasionally, is had. “Why are we so tired, at the peak of our lives?” the narrator asks. “Why are we falling asleep, at the peak of our lives?” Think “On the Genealogy of Morality” meets “The Breakfast Club.”

You may be unsurprised to learn that Iyer is a longtime lecturer in philosophy (he currently teaches creative writing at Newcastle University). His last novel, “Wittgenstein Jr.,” is a funhouse version of this one; it fictionalized the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein as a modern-day Cambridge professor, as seen through the eyes of his students. “Nietzsche and the Burbs” sticks to the same formula, illuminating and gently mocking the ideas of its title subject.