Toby Sharpe's Twisted World

 

As an undergraduate at one of America’s mediocre universities in the Midwest, I naively used to try to find secluded places on campus to study, unaware that these also tended to be spots for homosexual cruising. Deep in the bowels of the subterranean stacks of the university’s main library had seemed like the perfect reading retreat, even if there were gross graffiti on the desks like drawings of dicks and instructions to the effect of “tap foot three times for blowjob”. I finally had to give up on these isolated recesses of the library, however, after a pudgy, grubby-looking flutterer in gym shorts had done a walk-by a couple of times and given me an unsavory smile. Then I tried an alcove of the student union building, deserted on a Saturday night. I remember having the area to myself, with James Joyce’s Ulysses, the Harry Blamires guide The New Bloomsday Book, and probably a dictionary spread out on a table, trying to do some serious work, when I became aware of another person behind me. An older, balding man entered the alcove and sat at the table directly behind me. It made me uncomfortable, but I was doing my utmost to block out my surroundings and concentrate on the challenging text in front of me. Gradually, however, I noticed the man’s heavy breathing, which turned to grunting and finally unzipping, at which point I panicked and hastily stuffed my books back into my bag and vacated the premises as quickly as possible. Not long thereafter, I thought I saw this same man on a sidewalk, bringing his hand to his face as if in shame as he passed me. Dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase, he looked like he was probably a professor. My memories of these events, indicative of a seedy underside to university life, returned to me recently as I was reading Matthew Pegas’s 2021 novel Dragon Day.  

Pegas, a frequent collaborator of Stark Truth podcaster Robert Stark, has written a structurally complex debut novel, utilizing a pseudo-semi-omniscient narrator to tell the story of Toby Sharpe, a socially inept undergraduate studying literature at Lockden University, a fictitious institution inspired by Pegas’s alma mater Cornell. Toby, a character with a whiff of Elliot Rodger about him, hopes to be accepted into Lockden’s intellectually oriented and left-activist society Yellow House to be close to Zoe, the blonde beauty he believes he deserves. Telling Toby’s story and creatively probing his thoughts while “working with […] scattered impressions” is Charles, a homosexual Yellow House resident and assistant to charismatic English professor Thomas Wallingford. Much of the book is concerned with uncertainty: Toby’s uncertainty as to whether Wallingford, a mysterious figure who both attracts and repels him, is the man who assaulted him in a gym; students’ suspicions that highly respected scholars are actually full of shit; and, ultimately, the reader’s questions as to how reliable or fanciful Charles’s narrative is. Early in the novel, Toby’s acquaintance Shiv wonders aloud, “I don’t understand why people bother eating lettuce […] There’s literally like nothing in lettuce.” Toby counters with one of his vegan mother’s factoids about the valuable protein content of lettuce, but privately ponders along these lines: “The truth about whether it was worth eating lettuce was out there, but for the moment, he didn’t know who to trust: his well-researched mother or his gym-built suitemate, each of whom seemed as serious about their body as the other.” This episode presents an innocuous expression of the fog of information war that spreads and intensifies at Lockden as radical students become more strident and Alt-Right ideas begin to haunt the collective imagination of the campus.

Pegas’s characterization of homonormie student Charles discovering the Alt-Right online in the period just before Donald Trump’s ascendancy is amusing, with the seeker unironically consulting SPLC resources but also becoming fascinated by the variety of taboo micro-ideologies, like Homonational Bolshevism, that have sprung into being to contend for young intellectuals’ loyalty. Toby, whose seduction by a hodgepodge of ideas drawn from Nietzsche, Crowley, and possibly also Jack Donovan, is motivated largely by resentment over sexual rejection. Reviewer T.R. Hudson has dubbed Dragon Day “the Incel’s Bildungsroman”, and nationalist readers may take umbrage at what is arguably Pegas’s conflation of the dissident right with sexual aberration. The racial component of Toby’s alienation is understated, however, and comes across as an afterthought. The author is much more interested in Toby’s social awkwardness, and scenes of his painful and off-putting interactions with peers are nicely drawn. The antihero’s encounters with Zoe and with sexual rival Ronnie, an academically and socially successful wigger with buck teeth, are generally lively, and I wish there had been much more of this material in the book, along with further exploration of Toby’s distaste for foreigners. What prevents Dragon Day from truly being “the Incel’s Bildungsroman” – a label more appropriately applied to Stark’s The Journey to Vapor Island – is the puzzling lack of background information on Toby. I would expect a Toby to harbor a hellish reservoir of resentments and traumas from high school or childhood humiliations, but Charles’s version of Toby’s villain origin story is oddly abrupt and only seems to begin with the character’s arrival at Lockden. Nearing the end of Dragon Day, I found myself wishing that Toby’s mother or Toby himself had left a record of his life story to complement Charles’s abbreviated account, which feels somewhat like reading one third of a novel. Dragon Day, as it stands, is a promising debut fiction to tickle the scrotum with unease, but I wanted there to be more of the protein-packed lettuce portions of it that I enjoyed.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.