A Place of Great Suffering: Ben Faulkner’s The Agonies – Manuel Marrero
March 10, 2025
The last time I talked with Ben Faulkner he had just signed a book deal. It’s a book so great you don’t deserve it. Culture can’t afford to overlook it. But then again nobody really deserves anything. History simply enacts itself through certain figures. I commend all who bet on The Agonies and made it a bracing reality as hastily as possible. Brought to you by the miracle of connection. From one prime mover, shaker, and gatekeeper, or several. A chain reaction of discernment and good faith, good old-fashioned risk-taking by those empowered with resources to move shrewdly and aggressively on a recluse’s intellectual property and reward the general reading public hooked up to their feeders. The fêting begins. To whom much is granted more is given. “I can’t think of anything I care about less than money. I don’t want to make or use money, I don’t want to seek money, I don’t want to want money, it is an annoyance, a layer of things that shouldn’t exist. I want the value of all money to hollow out, I wanted to see the US dollar become an empty signifier in my lifetime, a valueless token, spiritually bereft. Not in a liberal way or a right-wing way, I just think everything is going in the wrong direction.”
It’s twenty twenty-five like it’s “Nineteen-seventy, rollin’ in sight.” No one knows where we’re headed. I’m archly optimistic. I feel like we have one shot to get the streets popping and coffers replenished before the aperture slams shut and the empire strikes back. We can’t afford to get this wrong. Wokeness is not a vanguard movement. It was created by the Ford Foundation for national security purposes. We need to make sure it can never recover. We have this combustible climate, a generational generative vacuum. Whatever your affiliations, wherever your sympathies lie, I would caution against wasting it. I would admonish. A girlfriend told me psychosis is always good and beautiful, a lucid and exhilarating state of grace. Maybe she didn’t say grace. Paraphrastically, while history is enacted through, say, a writer, it is “rejecting the mongrelized” “society” to “reject the regimes and its strictures” and be “the antithesis of the pseudo-politics of activists.” This is Ben’s book but it’s my review. You know I gotta shred. Because ultimate truths, axiomatic, are porous. And because sometimes decorum dictates impolitic. So don’t blow it. You can’t contain this. Use it wisely. Buy the flip and realign yourself. This is beyond politics and ideology, but consubstantial with culture. Organic and synthetic. Like morality is a failure of the state, a Goodreads style review won’t do. It fails transcendence.
This is an important book. An urgent one. Its most ardent pushers probably think it will sell a million copies and win the Nobel, and they should. Unlike all too many contemporary classics, there’s no wallflowery pretense of euphemism or self-effacement here. The Agonies aims for your head, makes you reflexively hold your breath only to strangle you while you breathe it in. It pledges danger and pathology in no uncertain terms, and it wants to make a killing. A call to arms for artistic ethos, a cri de coeur for the failure of the American family (it will never recover), an ethereal paean to cozy domesticity, a sincere and, even better, a successful engagement with the novelistic form, an olive branch for an age that accessorizes books more than reads them. (I don’t think I can function in this world of blurbs and publicists. I don’t think Ben cares for it either.) A slim one-two hitter quitter I don’t want to quote as heavily as I dog-eared it, because you’ll want to hit it first and hit it again. You could easily finish it in one or two sittings if you try. I didn’t try. I just couldn’t put it down. Its engine is fascination that works on the same part of the brain which possesses you to take an unhealthy interest in internet rabbit holes and fixate insomniacally. The power of being unable to look away. This may seem real heavy but it’s also poppy and buoyant, in a lurid but flat and blunt conversational voice, pithy and hard, modulated between a reptile brained dissociative audacity and tremulous emotional intensity. This isn’t one of those vignette novels though. Not a whiff of Thought Catalog or Rembrandt. The fact that it’s composed of short, more or less self-contained chapters which add up to something remarkably cohesive is testament to the author’s ability to tell a story in the most effective way, not really consecution but collage, not really sentence-level construction and sentences banging against each other but asymmetrical and elliptical chapters in annular structure gentle on your precarious focus, violent knowing it has your attention. His editing and curation for the long defunct but never forgotten Fluland and Surfaces published embryonic stuff that would later be developed into novels still forthcoming from today’s leading lights, but it’s his aesthetic vision that’s most memorable. The Agonies is faithful to that same aesthetic vision. It breathes in a way that’s futuristic, like an iron lung in a crystal palace of sighs. It has a found, concrete quality to it.
It drops a poem in the middle of it. It has a psychotic break. It is a poetics of home invasions, coarsened cruel, a construct of organized thoughts, as American as apple pie, American meaning one of us, close encounters with things you weren’t meant to see and can’t unsee, against a spiritually creased circumscribed life with facets in place. Where everything feels scripted, palms sweating from ecstasy and dread, immanent in unison, and we are orphans always returning home, the savior already come and been crucified, and this be the year. The final level. “It’s like death, no one spends a ton of time thinking about it, but it’s really the only story that counts.”
We pass along things that are irreplaceable because so much is easily replaced. The way an AI hallucinates is palimpsestic. A malady to derail imperatives.
“Please tell me that this notion isn’t true, and we’re not all trapped in an “economy” rather than a mystic text.” The mask cracks quietly to break your heart sometimes in a disarming tenor. “When people are gone, they’re really gone. They never stop by for visits anymore. Life is so sad it should make us all insane.”
“I think my fate and the fate of the world are all tied up together, and that this period and your death has been designed to move me through a sequence of events that I think will influence the future. I believe that everything in the world is tied together.”
To deliver schizophrenia’s religious dimension, sometimes God sends messages through a 160+ IQ. Even if you do everything right, it happens. Usually after not sleeping for two to several consecutive nights. It takes the trappings of an ordinary life and inverts them by warping belief into a sense of enlightenment. A “psychedelic hell,” rendered here realistically and vividly with an eerie hollow sadness and profound solemnity of cosmic origin, and a coy irreverence.
He was interested in cultivating synergy to boost the sphere. A folkloric pillar, Ben is not one of these zero sum types. For as long as I’ve known him our priorities have aligned. We both wanted to get everyone involved and start a new mainstream. Like him, I have an affinity for the misunderstood. Unlike him, I’ve been an effective rough trade publisher through sheer bullish perseverance and fanatical self-belief. For my inner circle and many downstream of it, Ben Faulkner is a known quantity. If you know you know.
This is his first novel. You need it like your body needs electricity. It is victory and vindication for outsiders.
I’m loath to compare it to anything, but such a shame it would be were this not widely read and studied that I will go there with you. Let’s have every organic market tapped. Leave no stone unturned. Women are the largest reading demographic. If you spent hours reading the journals of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris as a young girl, or the Unabomber Manifesto, or watching true crime, or you enjoyed August Underground, this is for you weird girls. It romanticizes the collector, the disdainful misanthrope, the alienated school shooter archetype as a hot culturally literate bad boy, wock-addled enfant terrible into research chemicals, or soulful YouTuber, niche hobbyist, Twitch streamer, SoundCloud rapper (same vibe). It’s a schizotypal deconstruction of a James Dean Travis Bickle Holden Caulfield type sympathetic crank. “More than anything, it’s just not enjoyable to talk to other people. Making friends is stupid. People who travel around to hang out make me sick. I don’t want to see myself in others. I’ve never met anyone I found impressive or even interesting.”
If you’re male and you like to read about depravity, this is like Kinski Uncut if it were real (same energy). With its rapturous delusions and affectless psychotic grandeur, it’s concerned with “all this banality and pointlessness that adds up to horror when stacked high enough.”
Where does that leave us? The prestige set. The comparisons on the back are accurate. Camus. Bernhard. Dazai.
I’m trying to figure out why I haven’t heard anyone talk about this book. I’d like to think it says something about the author’s integrity, that he doesn’t want to be captured or something (“Let this cup pass from me”). That it isn’t performative self-sabotage but we can never really know. “Despite seeming like one, I dislike artist types. They project pride in a way that repulses me. Dressing up their stupid indulgences for public consumption. Only partly self-aware as they drag the most lamentable tendencies of adolescents—clubby in-group fixation, self-aggrandizement, gratuitous socialization, naive humanism—into adulthood. Being creative in public is ugly decadence. It should be one’s private practice. It is like shitting or masturbation. Part of life but secret. Unless you’re really, really good, which almost no one is.” Given to irregularity and aberrance, misshapen at the mercy of an abusive muse’s whims where the limelights don’t shine. I’d like to think he’s found somewhere the stinging bright can’t find or reach him.
Not since The Catcher in the Rye has disaffection been handled and treated so movingly and painfully, tragically and hopefully. This perfect storm has shifted the paradigm and altered the landscape and here we are now at last, better late than never.
Literally nothing else you’re reading matters until you’ve taken the roughly two hours it takes to read this. There’s a timeline jump where this becomes as principle an entry into contemporary literature as anything else and a conversation piece that infects the world. A measurable effect on the world awaits should Ben Faulkner become a household name. Wake up. You owe him and you don’t even know it if you don’t know him. The one with a legitimate claim to the American throne.
“Someone said, I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet. In my family, the cycle has been completed. What comes next? A cliff’s edge, or the return of the warrior?”