Review of Rob Doyle’s Cameo – Literary Celebrity Fiction in the Age of Culture War | imaginary

ROp Doyle’s previous novel, Threshold, took the form of a darkly comic travelogue narrated by an Irish writer called Rob. In one episode before Rob becomes an author, we see a sexually repressed teacher on the outside, masturbating to an essay he’s grading. That this scene echoes a scene in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomized (which Doyle once called the best book of the last forty years) does not make us any less disturbed, and it is hard not to feel that our anxiety is precisely the point. “Frankly, a great deal of my life has been a disaster,” he once told an interviewer—which may not have been as self-deprecating as it sounds, since Doyle also argued that “great literature” is born of “abasement” rather than “glory.”

The game of self-imagination continues in his new novel Cameo, but instead of a humiliating display of self, we get a playful send-up of the book world of the culture war era, dramatizing the rise and fall of creative life. It takes the form of a rotating hall of mirrors centered around the multi-million-selling Dublin novelist Ren Duca, famous for a long novel cycle drawn from his own life, the summaries of which make up the bulk of the book we read. Duca’s work is not a Knausgaard-style autofiction: he is hardly at his desk, never under the yoke of domesticity, he lives a precarious life, mingling with drug dealers, terrorists, and spies, eventually serving time for tax evasion before developing an addiction habit, a penchant for threesomes in Paris, and perhaps a return to his long-abandoned Catholicism.

Writer’s inanity is a constant source of comedy: after his kidnapping in Iraq (long story), Duca found himself recording propaganda for the Islamic State, in which he had the presence of mind to denounce his “literary rivals, including writers who were barely known outside Dublin publishing circles.” The action is interspersed with freewheeling monologues from voices that evoke their connection to Duca, including an actor embittered that he no longer plays him on screen, a bawdy novelist who looks like Virginie Despentes, and, of course, Rob Doyle. There are also excerpts from the diary of an unnamed author who recalls his childhood accomplishment of writing a story in the voice of a predator (“I never thought I could enter the sensor chamber of an extraterrestrial psychopath”); Plus – to top it all off – excerpts from a near-future novel about a European wartime taxi driver, alien sightings and “cartel leaders in Mexico worship a new artificial intelligence.”

Beyond our expectations of how these threads fit together, Cameo’s energy lies largely in these kind of vague details, recounted in a profitably deadpan register stuck between bewilderment and tedium. The realistic present-tense narration, livened with hyperbolic capacitors (he’s particularly fond of the “satanic”), generates brilliant momentum and the satire is wicked. At one point, Duca—reinventing himself as an anti-woke comedian—became in demand as a right-wing spokesman: “Whenever an interviewer, always commanding facts and statistics, seems ready to beat him to the punch, Ren accuses them of racism. If he feels he’s in a particularly tight corner, he accuses them of pedophilia… Two months after his stand-up tour ends, he writes an article in the New Statesman entitled ‘I’m Sorry.’

Although I often lost track of whether I was reading the life of fictional author Rin Doka or the story of what his fictional avatar does in the novels he wrote, you might take that as a sign of immersion resulting from Kamio’s vanity. It’s not all laughs either. There is a kernel of emotion when Rob Doyle calls his sister, on the verge of a drug-induced breakdown in Berlin, for help – but she is still unhappy because of her portrayal in an earlier book, and the call ends disastrously when he is oblivious to her plight, deep in his own.

Generally, though, such moments are rarer than in Threshold and Doyle’s 2022 memoir, as if he wanted a break from hanging himself out to dry as the bad guy. But that makes this game of slippery soul difficult to define. Is Duca’s unlikely story—the writer as action hero, the fantasy of a literary celebrity—a comic response to the accusation that autofiction looks no further than its navel? Whatever it is, I suspect some readers will hate it, but Doyle also wouldn’t want it any other way.