The Future Won’t Be Long

Description

“A brilliant re-creation of a disappeared New York of cheap rents, club kids and Bret Easton Ellis. . . . You can’t stop time’s passage, this absorbing novel reminds us. You can only find someone to love to help you survive it.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“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.” —The Washington Post 

“Hard not to recommend. . . . Full of delightfully cynical aphorisms. . . . At the heart of The Future Won’t Be Long is the friendship between Baby and Adeline—at once loving and destructive and convincingly drawn by Kobek.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com

A euphoric, provocative novel about friendship, sex, art, clubbing, and ambition set in 1980s and ’90s New York City, from the author of I Hate the Internet

When Adeline, a wealthy art student, chances upon a young man from the Midwest known only as Baby in a shady East Village squat, the two begin a fiery friendship that propels them through a decade of New York life. In the apartments and bars of downtown Manhattan to the infamous nightclub The Limelight, Adeline is Baby’s guardian angel, introducing him to a city not yet overrun by gentrification. They live through an era of New York punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, and Tompkins Square Park. Adeline is fiercely protective of Baby, even bringing him home with her to Los Angeles, but he soon takes over his own education. Once just a kid off the bus from Wisconsin, Baby relishes ketamine-fueled clubbing nights and acid days in LA, and he falls deep into the Club Kid twilight zone of sexual excess. 

As Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become and flees to the nascent tech scene in San Francisco, Baby faces his own desire for artistic expression and recognition. He must write his way out of clubbing life, and their friendship, an alliance that seemed nearly impenetrable, is tested and betrayed, leaving each unmoored as the world around them seems to be unraveling. Riotously funny and wise, The Future Won’t Be Long is an ecstatic, propulsive novel coursing with a rare vitality, an elegy to New York and to the relationships that have the power to change—and save—our lives.“Brilliant. . . . The chapters, alternating between the perspectives of Baby and Adeline, visit a pornographic movie house on Third Avenue; the Jones Diner, famous for its $1.50 cheeseburger deluxe; the homeless shantytown in Tompkins Square Park; the Tower Records at Broadway and Fourth Street. Baby succumbs to the underworld of nightclubs, becoming a fixture at the Limelight and the Palladium and ingesting every fashionable drug that ever made the rounds in Manhattan. Eighties ‘nihilit’ phenom Bret Easton Ellis is duly brought on for a cameo and ruthlessly mocked, as is Brooklyn Heights poohbah Norman Mailer. Writing with encyclopedic authority and striking equilibrium, Mr. Kobek punctures the glamour of these cultural signifiers by threading his narrative with grisly real-life crimes. . . . But there’s one other constant in the novel, and that’s the friendship that Baby and Adeline sustain through their succession of boyfriends and jobs and mental breakdowns. Mr. Kobek sensitively traces the convoluted paths they take toward forging their careers. . . . You can’t stop time’s passage, this absorbing novel reminds us. You can only find someone to love to help you survive it.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“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.”
—The Washington Post 

“Intensely readable: the dialogue is snappy, the barrage of opinions bracing, so that 10 years and 400 pages whizz by . . . compellingly vivid.”
—The Financial Times

“An inspired evocation of the last days of the underground empire, before the fall.”
—Chris Kraus

“Hard not to recommend. . . . Full of delightfully cynical aphorisms. . . . At the heart of The Future Won’t Be Long is the friendship between Baby and Adeline—at once loving and destructive and convincingly drawn by Kobek.” 
—Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com

“Kobek follows his brilliant 2016 book, I Hate the Internet with a hilarious novel set in the 1980s and ’90s New York City art scene. It follows Adeline (a rich art student) and Baby (a Midwest expat) over their decade of friendship. Kobek’s writing is a dryly ironic cocktail of observations about sex, tech, friendship and other absurdities of modern life. He’s not for everyone. But if he is for you, he’ll be one of your favorite authors.” 
—The Omaha World-Herald

“One of the best New York City novels I have read, a wise and funny book that captures the city from the mid-’80s to mid-’90s.”
—Largehearted Boy

“A swirling, name-dropping, drug-fueled, hypersaturated whirlwind of a novel set against the New York City of the 1980s and ’90s, Kobek’s latest is a gritty coming-of-age story with quiet heart. . . . An ode to a city—and an era—long gone.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Set primarily in Manhattan in the tumultuous decade spanning the years 1986 to 1996, the picaresque novel refracts the coming of age of its two main characters through their alternating narrative viewpoints and the events and personalities that defined the city at that time. . . . Kobek (I Hate the Internet) has a great eye for detail, and his descriptions of his characters’ peregrinations through New York’s neighborhoods and nightlife read with the authenticity of genuine experience. Punctuated with gentle humor and awash with genuine fondness for its characters, this novel breezes giddily through the disorder and shifting landscape of their lives, bearing out Baby’s contention that ‘Good or ill, there’s always change coming.’”
—Publishers Weekly

“Jarett Kobek’s writing is both groundbreaking and skyrocketing. The Future Won’t Be Long is a punky, heartbreaking and hilarious epic on America going nowhere, going crazy, going bad. Read this book. It’s brilliant.” 
—Dorthe Nors, author of the Man Booker International Prize Finalist Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
 
“Jarett Kobek’s druggy, sexy, filthy fictional tour of New York City at the twilight of the 20th century is a nostalgic prequel to his gale-force satire I Hate The Internet, one of last year’s best novels . . . this wonderful novel shows Kobek can do old-school plot without dialling down the fizzing voltage of his distinctively ranty style.”
—Metro (UK)
 
“This is New York in the late 80s and early 90s: a city of club kids, drag queens, artists and junkies; the urban laboratory where identities are being reinvented for the new millennium . . . a novel that not only dissects with consummate skill the cultural life of fin-de-siècle New York, but finds there the early symptoms of our contemporary malignancy.”
—The Observer (UK)

“The Future Won’t Be Long arrives with the lightning strike clarity that usually comes on the dance floor at 4am when the chaos of the world makes beautiful and profound sense. Kobek brilliantly gathers the best and worst of club land, the grit and grime of the East Village and the art and aspirations of its inhabitants and delivers a novel so evocative of time and place that you’ll be pretty certain you were there.”
—Ivy Pochoda, author of Visitation Street

“Aggressively unconventional in form . . . winningly camp . . . one can’t help liking Kobek for writing it; for so defiantly, brattishly, entertainingly, being a not-good novelist.”
—The Guardian

“New York, like the future, isn’t what it used to be—which is why Jarett Kobek lives in California and writes like a dream. His new novel is a marvel of wit, grit, and deep city memory—perfect for any reader in search of a Horatio Alger into toilet sex and ketamine.” 
—Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers and Moving Kings

“Ambitious. . . . Kobek crafts an electric tale, and the wilds of New York City during this intense time period provide a gritty, undeniably magnetic context.” 
—Booklist

“A festival of wit and, finally, wisdom”
—The Spectator (UK)

“The Great New York City Novel has been loudly attempted and proclaimed so many times, one is tempted to assume it simply couldn’t exist. Yet, with piercing intelligence, vitality, hilarity, and a rather startling sweetness, Jarett Kobek has done it. The Future Won’t Be Long is staggering, exhilarating, and the single best portrait of Lower Manhattan achieved since American Psycho.”
—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

Praise for Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet

“A grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. It’s a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil. . . . [An] entertaining novel of ideas . . . This book has soul as well as nerve. It suggests that, as the author writes, ‘the whole world was on a script of loss and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines.’”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“I just got an early copy of [Kobek’s] newest, I Hate the Internet, and devoured it—he’s as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don’t need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages.”
—Jonathan Lethem, The Scofield

“This is a relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire of a loop of economic mystification and the reemergence of the credibility of the notion of Original Sin in the technological utopia of the present-day Bay Area and the world being remade in its image.”
—Greil Marcus, Pitchfork Jarett Kobek is a Turkish American writer living in California. He is the author of the novella ATTA (2011) and the novel I Hate the Internet (2016), an international bestseller that has appeared, or is scheduled to appear, in seven languages.Back on 12th, the street lights weren’t working. With so many empty lots and abandoned buildings, I experienced a new sort of darkness, a city dark. A homeless guy stood near a wire trash can. He was filling it with debris that he’d gathered, shaking garbage out of a bag that he held over the can’s open mouth.

—Hey, I said to him, where’d you get that bag?

—Fuck you, he said.

—Can I buy it? I asked.

—Five bucks for you, Dracula.

I turned my back to him and counted out the bills. Adeline had walked on ahead without realizing that I’d stopped. She noticed that I wasn’t beside her and came back. She stood a few feet away. I got the five bucks together. I held them out.

—You first, I said. Don’t worry, I won’t rip you off. I’m an easy mark.

—Take it, he said.

He threw the bag at me and snatched the money.

—Where’d you find this? I asked.

—Trash can on C, he said.

None of my clothes were in the bag, but of course they weren’t. Fresh stains decorated both the outside and the interior, complimented by a pervasive scent of urine.

—What the dickens? asked Adeline. Why would you want such a thing?

—My mother gave me this bag, I said. Do you have a washing machine?

—There’s a communal one on the fourth floor, she said.

We reversed the path that I’d taken to David’s place. At Second Avenue, there was a theater on the corner. Its marquee read: HAVE I GOT A GIRL FOR YOU! THE FRANKENSTEIN MUSICAL.

—Have you seen that play? I asked Adeline.

—Why, she snorted, would I possibly see that? It’s vulgar, Baby. But do you know, a friend of a friend lives above the theater. The artist David Wojnarowicz. Are you aware of his work?

—No.

—It’s très sinister, she said.

We crossed Second Avenue. A surprising amount of women were on the next block, standing alone, wearing garish makeup and scandalous dresses. A few talked with men, creepy older guys with thick eyebrows.

—We’ve passed through the veil of a prostitution zone, Adeline said. NYU is building a dorm at
Third Avenue. The construction has displaced the hookers. They’ve trickled down, darling.

The prostitutes weren’t glamorous and many looked very sad, but this was more like the New York of my dreams. Dirty and seedy but not quite as desperate, as empty, as cruel as Alphabet City. Prostitutes! Whores! I couldn’t believe it. The shining sequins on their dresses cheered me up, putting energy back into my walk.

—Is it much farther? I asked.

—Not so very much longer, she said.

—Adeline, I asked, is there any food at your place? Should I buy some before we go in? I’m starving.

—My roommates always keep some scrap of something in the Frigidaire, she said.

We walked into Union Square. I still didn’t know its name. We cut through the park, passing beneath an equestrian statue of George Washington. The First President’s sword was missing. So was his bridle strap. His curled left hand held nothing. Black spray paint scarred the pedestal, two big bubble letters: SD.

—Can you see that building? asked Adeline. She pointed at the narrowest, tallest building on the park’s west side. Green copper ringed its roof. Each storey had three windows facing the park.

—That’s my dormitory, said Adeline. Not the whole thing. Parsons only has floors four through eight. I live on the sixth.

When we arrived at the building, I read the words carved along the length of its marble portico. BANK OF THE METROPOLIS. The address was 31 Union Square West, next door to 33, the building where Valerie Solanas fired 32-caliber slugs into Andy Warhol’s exploding plastic inevitable torso.
But I didn’t know anything about Andy. Not then.

Adeline passed through the first door, stopping in the antechamber. Behind a glass window, a tired old man sat at a makeshift desk. He didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything. Just sighed and buzzed us through the second door, waved at Adeline and returned to his black-and-white television.

The lobby was narrow, with a set of steps at the back. There were two elevators. We rode in the one on the left.

—This is my first time in an elevator, I confessed.

—How do you find it, Baby?

—It’s faster on television, I said.

The front door of her suite opened into a big, dusty space that was half living room, half kitchen. The stove was filthy, caked with the debris from years of careless frying and boiling. A small hallway led to the bathroom and two separate rooms. Every wall painted dead white.

Adeline’s room was at the front of the hallway. The second bedroom, farther back, was shared by two girls from South Korea, Sun-Yoon and Jae-Hwa. They’d both adopted American names. Jane and Sally, respectively. It fell on Jane to try and keep the suite clean, but some places are too old. Even the carpeting rotted with mold. What could one girl do against decades of urban decay?

—Welcome to 6B, said Adeline.

We went into her tiny room. The floor was bare linoleum. Adeline’d covered her walls with images and photos. Famous people, fashion photographs, cheap reproductions. A poster of Max Ernest’s The Robing of the Bride. I didn’t recognize it. Another announcing performances by Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Hollywood Palladium on June 6 and 7. A full string of Christmas lights stapled around the window, casting a soft glow.

At the room’s center stood a ladder that went up a good ten feet before disappearing into a dark oblong space. I climbed up and poked my face through the hole. The ceiling was three feet from the crown of my head. Twin mattress, sans boxspring, on either side, recessed into crude wooden containers.

People lived like this, sleeping three meters off the floor.

—Put down your bag, said Adeline. We’ll find you food.

I planted myself on a half-broken couch in the common area, watching her slap lunch meat atop some very dubious bread. I noticed her toenails, their jagged edges and chipped black polish.

Sun-Yoon came out of her room.

—Jane, said Adeline, this is my friend Baby.

—Hi, I said.

Sun-Yoon didn’t respond. The mustard bottle made a wet farting noise.

—Baby will be staying with us for some small while, until he gets his act together. He rode in tonight from Wisconsin.

—Hello, said Sun-Yoon. She closed the bathroom door behind her. She turned on the shower.

—Sun-Yoon’s food is the one sacred commodity of this suite, said Adeline. She and Jane voice frequent complaints to the head of housing about my scavenging.
Sitting on the pillows in Adeline’s room, stuffing myself, it came to me that I hadn’t eaten since I’d stepped off the bus. Adeline handed me a cup.

—What’s in it? I asked.

—It’s liquor, Baby, what else would it be?

I sucked it down like Coca-Cola, burning the back of my throat. Alcohol takes hold fast, but I never know when it’s hit. What killed me was the tiny size of her room. There wasn’t any shelving for her clothes, so Parsons had provided an upright closet. That, combined with the crummy desk, occupied half the usable space.

The upright closet made me shudder.

We talked, we talked, we talked.

Adeline told me that she was from Pasadena, a city outside of Los Angeles. I asked if her family was in the movie business. She scoffed and said, no, her dad had been a well-regarded dentist and oral surgeon. He’d invested heavily, and wisely, in real estate. He practiced on famous clients. I squealed, asking who he’d worked on, but Adeline couldn’t think of anyone other than the time when her dad put a cap on the lower left incisor of two-time Academy Award winner Jason Robards. A few days later her father fell down dead in his office, victim of a burst heart, leaving Adeline alone with her mother.

—A month ago I ran into Mr. Robards, said Adeline. He lives outside of the city, in Connecticut. He hadn’t the slightest who I was, but I told him about Daddy. He felt sorry enough that he bought me ice cream at Serendipity. It was so kitsch.

After her husband’s death, Adeline’s mother sublimated her grief by entering a wild period of excess. I pressed for details, curious about the potential decadences of a middle-aged woman, but Adeline demurred, saying it was old news. Only recently, her mother’d calmed down and settled into a period of comfortable, blurry alcoholism.

—Mother’s become a pleasant enough souse, said Adeline, very much like Myrna Loy in The Thin Man. But Mother’s so much older than Myrna was when Myrna ran with William Powell. It’s a bit pathetic.

—Why don’t you have a roommate?

—Mother and I conspired, she said. I visited Dr. Jacobs, Mother’s analyst. I told Dr. Jacobs that I’d go simply mad if I had to have a roommate. The good doctor sent along a note saying that I suffer from an unspecified mental condition and must at all costs live alone.

Ashamed that I lacked any good stories of my own, no wild periods of excess, I talked about farming. About the empty lives in the middle of this American continent. Adeline gave me the impression that she’d only ever been in California and New York, leapfrogging her way over the great nothingness of the U.S.A., never confronting the dumb, open faces of this country’s people.

Through her window, I caught my first glimpse of New York daybreak, when the sky lightens and strips the earth of its color. Adeline pulled down the cheap plastic shade, plunging us back into off-season Christmas illumination.

—Time for bed, she said.

—Adeline, I said, why did you invite me here?

—You’re a sailor without any port of call.

—But you aren’t expecting anything, are you?

—Expecting?

—You know, I said. Expecting.

She leaned forward. I stiffened, freaked out that I’d made an accidental pass. I didn’t want to be kicked out, not now, not after she’d been so nice.

—Baby, she asked, don’t you favor men?

My bag was still on the linoleum floor, beside her yellow shoes. A lot of good clothes in that bag.

—Yes, I said.

Which was the first time aloud.

—Then why should I expect anything?

—But how can you tell?

—You put up a decent front, said Adeline, but you won’t be able to hide here. This city is queerer than a three dollar bill. Take the spare bed and tomorrow we’ll cut that hair and find you some reasonable clothes.

—What’s wrong with my hair? I asked, but Adeline climbed the ladder without answering.US