Noughties by Ben Masters

Published by Hogarth on October 9, 2012

Eliot, the narrator of Noughties, is a soon-to-graduate English lit student at Oxford. Noughties reads as if it were written by an English lit student, one whose knowledge of the world is confined to classrooms and college bars. The story, to the extent one can be found, is common: boy meets girl, boy goes to college while girl stays home, boy tries to change girl, boy loses girl, boy wants girl back. While Eliot has mastered the young person's art of creating unnecessary drama on the way to maturity, he hasn't hit upon any insights more worthwhile than "Ah, mate": the standard greeting for a fellow student who is clueless about relationships.

The noughties are Jack, Scott, Sanjay, and Eliot, four pub mates in their final year as Oxford students, "quotidian calamities" who, according to Eliot, are "lugging twentieth-century regret on our backs." If you are turned off by phrases like those I've just quoted, you probably won't like this book -- it's loaded with them.

"The noughties" is also a name given to the first decade of the twenty-first century (the one following "the nineties"). While the title suggests that Ben Masters wishes to use the novel to give the decade an identity, Eliot makes clear early on that the task is impossible: "We have no foreseeable narrative, untaggable as we are. Ours is a lost period ... spiraling off in referential chaos." Eliot sees life in the noughties as a performance; the play's the thing. Eliot exhibits the hubris of youth when, recognizing that "the performance of self is nothing new," he claims it has never before been "so vital, so fundamental." Maybe he means that no generation has been so fully self-absorbed as his own, but I doubt that's true. The MTV-driven Eighties wasn't about self-absorbed performance?

The story unfolds during a pub crawl -- more particularly, a pub to bar to club crawl, each drinking establishment representing a section of the narrative. As Eliot moves through the last drinking night of his university career, he mopes about Lucy (the girl he met, tried to change, and lost) and recalls the significant landmarks in their relationship, of which there are few. He also mopes about Ella, a fellow Oxford student who (unlike Lucy) reads the right books, listens to the right music, and is conveniently available when she's not with Jack. Frequently he indulges in "referential chaos" as he quotes, alludes to, or mimics the authors and poets he has studied (or those that Masters admires).

There are bits of Noughties I liked. Not the constant drinking and vomiting (dull). Not the quasi-love triangle (trite). Not the attempts at profound philosophical observation (shallow). I enjoyed Eliot's amusing description of his Oxford interview, some of the bar chat, and the way Eliot's mind wanders during tutorials, causing him to miss the questions he's asked. I liked Lucy's spot-on analysis of Eliot's faults as a boyfriend. Eliot's insecurity with regard to Lucy during his first year at Oxford, his worry that she doesn't fit in with the crowd, is convincing. His jealous behavior, while obnoxious, seems genuine. A riff on men who are still zipping their flies as they exit the men's room is funny. Sadly, those bright moments are overshadowed by all the empty rhetoric.

Eliot thinks Dickens is "all about the primacy of style," an apt description of Masters' writing. Whatever merit is to be found in Noughties lies chiefly in the cleverness of its prose. The blurb for Noughties compares Masters to Martin Amis, a writer I regard with indifference, and I think the comparison is apt. Like Martin Amis, Masters has nothing much to say, but he says it very well. Sometimes he's quite funny -- describing a drunken encounter with a girl in a bathroom, Eliot recalls his hand wedged inside her tight jeans, fumbling about like "a man rummaging for loose change." Had Masters kept to the humor and not worked so hard (and with so little success) to produce something serious, this might have been a better novel. 

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