Jarett Kobek’s previous novel, “I Hate the Internet” (2016), was a scabrously funny self-published diatribe against the Bay Area’s tech culture and especially the way that culture has changed both San Francisco and San Franciscans. Smart and acerbic, it skirted the line between a conventional novel and a book-length essay as it interposed the story of Adeline, a comic-book artist, with razor-sharp commentary regarding the effect of so much tech “disruption.” Cultural-studies heavyweights such as Greil Marcus and Chris Kraus sang Kobek’s praises. The novelist Jonathan Lethem wondered whether he might be the “American Houellebecq,” as in Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French author whose work similarly blends plot and polemic.

Now, with the publication of “The Future Won’t Be Long” — a kind of prequel to “I Hate the Internet” — we see Adeline, some two decades earlier, living in New York. But retrospection is more than just a means of continuing a character’s story by looking backward. “The Future Won’t Be Long” feels a lot like a document from the period it details — from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s — and even more like one of the novels that Bret Easton Ellis or his literary Brat Pack contemporary Jay McInerney produced during the gaudy fin of the last siecle.

Have you been pining for tales of drug-fueled big-city debauchery set in the pre-digital era, when MTV was king, people still used landlines and hookups were orchestrated on dance floors instead of dating apps? Look no further. As Adeline — and Gatsby — is fond of saying whenever someone tells her that she can’t repeat the past: “Can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.”

[Dave Eggers’s ‘The Circle’ is a relentless broadside against social media overload]

The first voice we hear in “The Future Won’t Be Long” belongs to Baby, who arrives in Manhattan in 1986 — just out of high school, fresh off the farm and still in the closet. When he chivalrously punches Adeline’s cheating boyfriend only moments after meeting her, she returns the favor by giving him a place to crash in her dormitory. Thus a friendship for the ages is born. In short order, Baby and Adeline are inseparable companions and platonic soul mates: not just living together but traveling together, enduring professional and romantic crises together, and (especially) experiencing the intoxicating ferment of late-’80s Lower Manhattan nightlife together.

Author Jarett Kobek. (Courtesy of Jarett Kobek)

Sex, drugs and rock-and-roll: It’s never been a bad combination for storytelling purposes. It works here, too, but mainly because Kobek knows that milieu isn’t everything. When it inevitably occurs, Baby’s descent into the orgiastic “club kid” world is interesting, mainly as an obstacle to his creative ascent, first as a college student and later as a burgeoning science-fiction writer. With limited means and no family support, Baby needs someone in his life to spur him on and help him cultivate his talent. And Adeline is always there for him — until she isn’t.

Instead, she’s off discovering her own self and cultivating her own talent. Given that Kobek has already told us where Adeline ends up and what she does with her life, there’s not much suspense attached to her voyage. Even so, you may find yourself cheering her on as she begins to jettison the trappings of a dilettantish rich kid and morphs into a thoughtful artist. By that point in the novel, the most distinctive aspect of her character — her unusual voice, which is self-consciously old-fashioned, like something out of a 1940s movie — starts to sound less like an affect and more like a deliberately chosen means of separating herself from her cohort.

It seems unlikely that “The Future Won’t Be Long” will garner the same cultish following that its companion novel did. Its humor is biting but not lacerating; its critique of the amoral club-kid culture of the ’80s and ’90s can’t resonate in the same way that Kobek’s takedown of our current digital culture does. Oddly, for all of the squalor and degradation it depicts, this novel can’t help but elicit nostalgia for a time when our social lives weren’t entirely mediated by tiny screens, when New York felt like the center of the world, and when the prospect of someday becoming an artist or a writer seemed cooler than becoming a software developer.

Jeff Turrentine, a frequent Book World contributor, writes about politics, culture and the environment for OnEarth and other publications.

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