THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG

NEVER LET IT STOP is a novel told from the ping-ponging perspective of two friends in New York City—Baby, a gay corn poke from Podunk, Wisconsin, and his guardian angel, Adilene, exile from the moneyed class of Los Angeles, and fierce protector of her new charge.

They initially bond over (what else?) a place to spend the night, but almost immediately their friendship takes on the urgency of an alliance, forged in the intensity of downtown NYC on the tail end of the Bad Old Days. Adilene introduces Baby to the city (and his first lover), but Baby soon takes over his own education, finally finding himself in the Club Kid twilight zone of Ketamine and late-capitalistic sexual excess. And Michael Alig. And AIDS. And the sudden exposure of his betrayal of Adilene which will sever the last tether he had left to the real world. Their friendship propels this novel through a decade of New York City punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat, Wojnarowicz, and Tompkins Square Park. It’s a novel of real life fronted by two characters hanging on to each other for dear life as the world around them gets chopped up and dissolved in a bath tub. It’s also very funny. Kobek’s voice carries the bruising wit of Fred Exley and Lionel Shriver into the epic mode. This is a big literary novel, one that modulates the cri de coeur of I Hate the Internet: as if Michel Houellebecq was interested in topography of friendship; or if Shiela Heti wrote about epochal calamity. Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California.