Book Review : Alex Kazemi - New Millennium Boyz (2023)
"Listen, Satan is not something you believe in; Satan is not something that exists outside of you. Satan is something you create within yourself." (p.194-195)
The first time I heard about Alex Kazemi, I wasn't sure whether I was being scammed or not. To be completely transparent, I'm still not 100% sure today. It seemed insane to me that a debut novelist was this plugged-in and celebrated before his novel would ever come out. But New Millennium Boyz is not exactly a new novel. The first published iterations of this project came out on Tumblr of all places ,in 2013. Alex Kazemi was eighteen years old then and he's been percolating through pop culture like narcotics even since.
New Millennium Boyz is finally out after a decade of waiting and it was mostly fine and interesting, like everything that happened in 2013 seems to be in 2023.
The novel tells the story of Brad Sela, a privileged teenager living a quietly disconnected life like all teenagers did in 1999 until Shane and Lusif (it took me way longer than I should've to get the reference) walk into his life and usher him on a path to self-destruction. The latter seems morally enlightened to Brad, who feels different from the other kids like most kids feel when they’re learning to assert their identity. Not much happens from there, except what happened to to most smart, bored suburban boys in 1999.
The Nostalgia Novel That Hates Nostalgia
If you thought the presentation of Alex Kazemi's novel is off-putting, I'm here to tell you its stance on nostalgia is even more off-putting. If anything, I think it makes fun of this collective nostalgia boner everyone on the internet seems to have because none of Kazemi's depiction of late twentieth culture feel real. There's too many of them crammed every single page to explore the meaning of any of them. At some point, it was so telegraphic and suffocating, I started wondering whether they were written-in with ChatGPT.
I turned eighteen on November of 2000 myself and I remember it wasn’t anywhere near what New Millennium Boyz reminisces. Skateboarding kids in Marilyn Manson shirts were not playing Pokemon and owning Tamagotchis in 7-11s. You were one of these things. Not all of them. Alex Kazemi was 5 years old on January 1st, 2000 and he recalls 1999 in that fragmented hodgepodge way any internet kid who experienced this era through collective nostalgia does. But you know what? I believe it’s by design and it’s….cool?
I mean, kind of. New Millennium Boyz is not concerned with reminding you how simple and fun the nineties were. It's more interested in claiming that 1999 was the beginning of the end of the world in a way and it makes a decent case for it. These seemingly clumsy throwback references (the sheer number and disposability of them inevitably is) serves an apparent purpose: showing how our relationship to popular culture was a form of mass-confusion that turned a generation into self-centered assholes.
Do I agree with this? Kind of. Not all the way through. Morons needed Gods to worship long before there was MTV and Taco Bell. I do agree it was not the period of blessed technological idiocy we remember it to be, though.
New Millennium $hitb0yz
One thing I believe New Millennium Boyz is doing well is representing how awful young boys were together back in these days. The novel takes the vantage point of rich, privileged kids, but we were all exactly like that. I was raised in a working class town and every kid who wasn't a fucking drone was a savage and bloodthirsty ghoul like Brad and Lusif are. They’re not exceptional, they’re normal kids raised by burnout, disconnected parents who had children before even asking themselves if it was a good idea.
That portrait of the violent adrenaline junkies of the proto-internet age is really what cements Alex Kazemi's that it isn't an era to be nostalgic about. Brad is a great protagonist to carry this idea because he's not actually a soullless ghoul. He's trying to assert his identity as a growing teenage boy in the dog-eat-dog schoolyard where bored suburbs kids try to one up each other’s self-destructive ways. Does that make him a good kid? Absolutely fucking not. But that makes him more interesting than the others.
This difference between Brad, the psychologically dominant Lusif and the tormented Shane shines through the letters he sends to his summer camp sweetheart Aurora. These letters are a space where Brad can compose himself and project and image of his choosing, which is not something he could do anywhere else then. Brad shows a more nuanced side of himself to Aurora and while you never know how authentic it is, it reveals that who he is with Shane and Lusif isn't quite authentic either.
*
So, is this good? A lot of people are going to tell you it’s a great, revolutionary novel. Alex Kazemi has really stepped up and taken responsibility for his own promotion (and he should serve as an example), but I think the cultural train has passed on New Millennium Boyz. It’s alright, but it would’ve been much more of a decadent, provocative internet object were it published prior to a whole decade of decadent, provocative internet things. It does have an earnest, fearless anger that I enjoyed, though.
