The Future Won't Be Long

The Future Won’t Be Long is a self-aware version of 80s and 90s New York novels that follows two friends over ten years of saving each other and striving for something resembling success in a disillusioned America. Baby is a gay guy fresh in New York from Wisconsin, where he meets Adeline, a rich kid art student with space for him to crash. They end up best friends and navigate a world filled with friends, disappointment, drugs, art, and East Village gentrification as America moves from the late eighties into the nineties.

The novel is fuelled by references to Warhol, Wojnarowicz, and Basquiat, Bret Easton Ellis, The Great Gatsby and Marvel vs DC. Though clearly similar to books by Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, by including them as minor characters and taking a modern perspective on the period (the narratorial voice, which alternates between Baby and Adeline, makes mention of 9/11) Kobek makes The Future Won’t Be Long feel like a novel of that period and a comment upon them. The characters engage with politics on race, gender, and sexuality, using the twenty years distance between the end of the novel and the modern day to give space for reflection. The main characters are flawed and their friendship serves as a reminder that books can be centred around a friendship and its ups and downs whilst engaging with the culture surrounding them.

At times it does feel a little too clearly another New York epic about art, drugs, and friendship, but it makes a good companion to other books of the year like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (for the art and AIDS background) and has an enjoyable self-awareness about the popularity of the straight white American male author even in the alternative culture of the 90s. The narrative style is fast-paced and fairly jumpy, likely to appeal to people who like books by the authors referenced within the narrative like Easton Ellis. Sometimes almost metafictional, Kobek combines 80s and 90s gay New York life, the literary world of that time, comic books as art (including being female in that world), and general American life and disillusionment to create an enjoyable and interesting novel about a period there seemed to be too many books about already.

The star of the book is New York City and its gritty, sprawling, drugged-out, insane pop culture between 1986 and 1996. Kobek charts the changes in the city in that 10 years through the eyes of two of its incoming residents, Baby, a young, gay former farmhand from Wisconsin, and Adeline, a wealthy student from LA.

I really enjoyed this book – Kobek’s New York is the dark underbelly I fantasised about as a teenager listening to Lou Reed albums, though no doubt if I’d ever actually managed to get there I would have been murdered on principal at the airport, having about as much nous as a day-old kitten.

The novel opens with Baby coming to New York after the death of his parents, hoping to stay with an acquaintance from high school, which plan falls apart when he is robbed at the junkie-infested squat his friend lives in, and he latches gratefully on to Adeline instead. The stories of the two protagonists aren’t by themselves very compelling – there’s too much luck and coincidence in their lives, which removes any tension, and they’re just a bit too Art Student to connect with, pontificating at affected length on the meaning and direction of everything from the movies they watch to the comics they read, whilst the life of the city rolls on oblivious.

But Baby and Adeline are just our guides to the main feature, the club land of the city and the disparate junkies who thrive in it. Every aspect of the confusing, technicolour lives of NYC’s inhabitants is touched on – sex, drugs, bands, books, artists, hedonism, chaos, privilege, poverty, the club scene, satanic pot dealers, university, gay culture, the tragedy of AIDS, are all laid bare and explored, along with many, often drug-and-psychosis-fuelled, (real-life) murders.

Although the book is firmly in fictional novel territory, many of the events and people in it are real, and Googling them throws up any number of fascinating news stories, Wiki articles, conspiracy theories and odd little ancient forum threads. Kobek puts all of these together in a gonzo-journalistic mix that makes a strange and wonderful moment-in-time history book.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher