Sometimes I’m in an airport security line facing down a jumbo-screened jewel advertisement featuring Jennifer Lawrence emerging semi-dry from a swimming pool, or reading about Bella Hadid kissing CGI influencer Lil Miquela on the mouth, or watching a Vogue’s “73 Questions” with a supermodel who attributes her skin texture to positive thinking, and I ask myself: Mustn’t it be soul-sucking to sell insecurity, inequality, and plain old self-interest, perhaps for the sake of making some art but mostly to be famous? Isn’t it exhausting? Pop stars may be the ultimate corrective to this consumer angst, since their lives tend to be packaged into a single narrative arc: the thrilling discovery, the beautiful youth, the fall from grace, the redemption. With the entirety of their persona hellbent on the production of transcendence and joy they achieve what Emily Ratajkowski cannot: help us cry about something other than capitalism.
Theirs is a story that explains why the public should remain fascinated by fame, and continue to buy into it, which Hollywood is writing at a particularly manic pace. In the past few months I’ve watched A Star Is Born, Her Smell, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Vox Lux, movies about the pitfalls of pop music glory that were all released in the last year. In accordance with genre mythology, none of the characters undergo vital transformations except for the stars themselves. All the managers, ex-husbands, brothers, best friends, and bandmates want is for their pop sensations to be sober, productive, and pleasant to be around; to cheat death the way they all did, by adopting stable personalities that don’t register as performance. They themselves, however, are totally fine. This dynamic is most literally demonstrated in Vox Lux, where a time lapse of a decade-and-a-half is represented by the teen pop star Celeste’s transformation into Natalie Portman while every other character is played by the same actor, including Celeste’s slightly older sister (Stacy Martin), who symbolically grows out her bangs.
Justin Kuritzkes’s debut novel Famous People (out July 9 from Henry Holt) abides by the inverse formula: the pop star narrator observes unexpected changes in others, but his own trajectory remains frustratingly fixed. He doesn’t have a name, and his age is ambiguous — a household name since he was 12, now roughly 20-something. The story begins like Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, with the rock-star narrator’s assertion that he belongs to a class of truly Famous People whose persona is indestructible because it belongs to the world and vice versa. DeLillo’s novel was similarly fascinated by escape from and into fame, and the flatness and non-responsiveness of celebrities — in his case the “hero of rock ‘n’ roll” Bucky Wunderlick who spends the interminable pages hiding out from his fans, sighing and snarking his way to oblivion. Wunderlick’s refrain from the very first is that “the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.”
Famous People’s first-person narrator, on the other hand, practices poptimism. Throughout Kuritzkes’s novel, which is structured as a journal self-conscious of the fact that it will one day become the first draft of the star’s memoirs, the narrator proclaims that his stratospheric success has expanded and freed his mind. “I think one of the things that normal people just absolutely can’t understand about someone like me is that I just don’t have the same framework for the world that they do,” the narrator writes. “Even intellectuals or whatever, like, even really smart people, I mean, they may be people of the world, you know, but they’re still essentially tied down to certain traditions.” This mindset allows him to function as a perfect pop commodity. Acclimated to the inert seasons of corporate global citizenry, he mistakes his guileless chill for a meteorological event.
Though the protagonist is a bit of a pastiche, there isn’t anyone quite like him on Earth except for Justin Bieber. Certain biographical markers are there — small-town origins, initial viral fame, a relationship with a female counterpart who like Selena Gomez has a “sad girl” quality, ink spilled about his every move and applied painstakingly to every inch of his body — but the voice is an invention: an earnest, uninterrupted attempt at clarification punctured by dozens of deflating LOLs. In interviews, Bieber tends to be is both polished and withholding. This reads like a defense built up over half a lifetime of journalists plying him with irony in the hopes they might successfully roast him for being so young, influential, and desired. When his disciplined fuckboy image glitches — as it did recently when he publicly chastised Taylor Swift for openly sparring with his manager Scooter Braun — he seems to possess little wisdom, even for a 25-year-old.
In Famous People, it turns out that the unedited version of a story meant to appeal to everyone flatters very little. The narrator isn’t totally unsympathetic but he makes one cowardly assertion after the next: that climate change can be eradicated by a single genius, that it’s cool if he promotes public bigots and maintain tour dates in countries committing human rights abuses. Actually, more than an editor, he’ll need a publicist to tell him what he can’t say. The most popular word in the novel is “next-level.” It modifies talent, garlic chicken, and death by global warming.
With this memoir, our narrator has a chance to refashion his story, but he becomes obsessed with the weight and solidity of his legend instead. This much we’re told: He was born in St. James, Minnesota to a dental assistant mom and a sound engineer dad. His dad, a practitioner and devoted fan of music himself, devised the narrator’s breakthrough and managed his early career until the two had a falling out. Everything the narrator touched turned to gold, even as he reinvented his sound again and again. A few years into superstardom, tragedy: his dad killed himself. The latest tour went off the rails and the public is watching his every move. This chain of events establishes his infamy more than any chart-topping music, and for his fourth “album” he plans to release a video game based on his life, in which players can make the choices he didn’t.
Meanwhile, the narrator’s hit-making ex-girlfriend, Mandy, decides to quit showbiz and go back to school. His mom grows bold and starts a jewelry line. His #1 fan Oddvar, a trivia contest winner whom the pop star comes to admire for his scientific approach to celebrity and uncomplicated generosity, gives up on environmentalist pursuits to move to Los Angeles. His late dad is depicted as basically Jackson Maine without the soft lighting. Chris Jeffries, an ex-rocker who the narrator’s father once idolized, comes out of his self-sworn permanent retirement and sobriety to go on tour with the pop star, only to become ensnared in substance abuse once more. Ironically, the star’s spiritual advisor, Bob, doesn’t develop much. He lightly resembles Pastor Carl, a neck-muscly guy in Terry Richardson cosplay who reportedly baptized Bieber in a private swimming pool on the Upper West Side. Blessed with a self-help back catalogue and the disproportionate ambitions of a man who will one day pitch a reality TV show about himself, Bob at least marries the narrator’s mom.
Some books seem to rearrange each time you pick them up; their best lines might get stuck in your head for days, maybe forever, but the experience of that first encounter fails to repeat, and the novel remains irresistibly strange. This is not such a book. It has neon themes, sophomoric cosmic-brain language (“I want every tattoo to mean something to me on at least two or three levels. Ideally, four.”), and a plot that cannot eschew destiny no matter which way it swerves, like that woman who chugged wine from a Pringles cup while joyriding about a Walmart parking lot on an electric scooter.
But then, at the end, the novel takes a surprising, humanizing, and necessary turn that saves it from being just good satire. Mandy’s decision to redirect her life away from fame confronts the narrator with his own complacency. “You think that it’ll feel like dying,” she tells him, “But it won’t. Once you do it, it’s as easy as taking off a pair of headphones.” In the meantime, she reminds him, “You are an advertisement for a fake world. You think you’re the CEO, but you're not even on the board.” This moment provokes a sprawling reflection on the future— Mandy’s, his music’s, the world’s, his own — less tethered to the everyday benchmarks that have become all he sees. “I hadn’t really spent any time thinking about the person I was going to be,” he says. “Was there some part of me that didn’t think I was going to make it that far, or that the world wasn’t going to make it that far?”
Without setting out to do so, I’ve wound up writing about celebrities for a living, at least for the past few years. This is what happens when you generate prose for the Internet without a clear beat. In doing so, you figure out very quickly, if you hadn’t before, that the fame of politicians, brand ambassadors, and the world’s most popular artists is mainly what’s keeping the industry of written words scotch-taped together. For media companies that rely on clicks there’s no better value than paying a writer $50 to grind out 250 unedited words on a Kardashian-Jenner in 45 minutes flat. At this rate, professional life can begin to feel preordained, and one comes depressingly close to identifying with the pop star, locked in the moment. It stands to reason that the way out cannot merely be through reproduction of one’s talent.
I bet Kurizkes is familiar with this phenomenon, too. He’s best known for posting hilarious face-morph-filtered monologues to his YouTube channel, particularly the viral “Potion Seller” video that launched it to notoriety in 2011 (my little brother knows all the words to it by heart). His 2016 pop-style album Songs About My Wife predated the “wife guy”— proud Internet meme, husband, and additional dude announcing his candidacy for President of the United States — by nearly three years. In one of his most recent videos, uploaded a few weeks ago, Kuritzkes begs his followers in some amalgamation of Eastern European accents to buy his celebrity opus so that, after years of putting out free viral videos, he can at last be rich. “I have a wife,” he says, “and I haven’t been able to give her anything for many years.”
What would it take for pop stars to just quit? Probably what it would take any of us to: loss of income and status, fear at night instead of in the morning, an unearned sense of shame. Maybe it would involve a commitment to ways of living that don’t involve constantly “killing it,” or conducting oneself in less authorized ways, or seeking out people who already seem to be doing that, I don’t know. I am but a blogger and, to paraphrase Justin Bieber, I think I’ll make it if I just stay humble.
