Boys Loud (and Proud)

Karl Wenclas starts 2025 with a bold and engaging tale of right wing extremists, underground journalists, a mobbed up city and a narrative for our times.

The Middlebrow often laments that the kids don’t go nuts for Saul Bellow anymore, following up with the admonition that “they should, damn it. We should seize this day like any other!” Karl Wenclas, writer, entrepreneur and the editor of New Pop Lit will sometimes take me to task for this, arguing that its the job of today’s writers to tell relevant stories in forms and language that can appeal to the readers we have left (and those we want to recruit) in 2025.

As I rounded out this morning’s essay, an item in Adam Tooze’s essential Chartbook newsletter caught my eye: citing The Financial Times, Tooze asks if we have entered a post-literate society. The multinational Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development assessed the skills of 160,000 adults in 31 countries and found reading skills on the decline in the United States, Korea, Lithuania, New Zealand and Poland. People are only better readers now in Finland and Denmark and that’s probably because Donald Trump’s claims on Greenland have Danish readers looking up “Fortinbras” in a hurry. Seriously, one observer cited by the FT remarked that a surprising number of people you encounter have trouble reading as well as a Western-educated 10-year-old.

One theory of the post-literate society is that we are losing our reading skills because they are no longer essential to modern life. We can watch, we can listen, we can use AI. If nobody wants to read your villanelle, why learn how to write one? Our telegraph skills are probably on the wane, too and confusion about how to use a rotary dial phone doesn’t make you stupid.

Wenclas has another answer — people don’t read because the writing doesn’t grab them. It doesn’t, in the words of a favorite editor I used to work with, make the reader smarter, richer or happier. Contemporary writing doesn’t demand to be read the way a popular song needs to be endlessly streamed. Why not try to write in a way that will grab people?

Wenclas started 2025 with the release of his novella, The Loud Boys, which aims to do just that, and I think he’s onto something. The story is ripped right from the headlines and could be happening in any American city, right now. It’s political, satirical and serious all at once. It’s a great story for people who see value in reading the news but not fiction because it’s about the world as it is now. The reader doesn’t have to leap decades or centuries to find some universal truths of human nature.

The language is contemporary and funny, unencumbered by literary funny business that modern readers view skeptically, if they don’t skip right over. The novella length is just right, as The Loud Boys can be equally enjoyed in a sitting or over a couple of days.

Wenclas calls his technique “hyper-op” and also “multidimensional writing.” It is meant to break with literary modernism and experimental post-modernism. If you’ve ever been told a novel is great but found it boring or impenetrable, The Loud Boys was meant for you.

Check it out on Amazon or Kobo! Print on demand may be coming soon.

The story is a political thriller, a crime caper and a social commentary, told energetically and economically. Van Heckler is the leader of a far right extremist group called “The Loud Boys” and, banned from major online platforms, is a dark web celebrity. His leadership of a group of thugs who could easily tear him apart is maintained only because, “He didn’t think smarter than other gang members, only faster.” He’s in constant peril of being swallowed by his own creation and has to lead his crew into increasingly bolder actions just to stay ahead of the game. They are also amateur criminals in a city run by a real criminal underground (with upper crust connections) run by walking devil named Fake Face. What the Fake Face mafia and the Loud Boys have in common is an enemy in Dara Defiant, a provocateur journalist hired to resurrect the dwindling city newspaper.

It’s a set-up that would work for writers from Graham Greene to Raymond Chandler to Thomas Pynchon, Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. By grounding his story in a recognizable world, Wenclas actually looks back to the 19th century — the episodically constructed mammoth novels of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky relied heavily on news accounts. This was especially true for Dostoevsky, whose gambling debts made writer’s block an existential proposition.

Also like the 19th century writers and also more contemporary authors like Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis, Wenclas switches points of view throughout the story. This is not to mimic the “jump cuts” of media, but to humanize all of the characters, good and bad, without drawing equivalences between the heroes and villains. Wenclas uses this nicely to illuminate the flaws even in the characters we’re supposed to admire, as when Dara’s class snobbery is revealed when she encounters the Loud Boys in person.

It’s tough to find new books in the attention economy. Newspaper reviews are not as influential or reliable as they once were. A lot of contemporary fiction seems like it just wasn’t written for people who have to work for a living, much less keep track of their book spend. So many books are about people who make so much money that if they have jobs, they’re for status or fulfillment rather than paying bills. How many novels contrive inheritances or other windfalls so their characters can have time for whacky adventures? The characters in The Loud Boys live in a world that’s more colorful than our own (the “pop” here is real pop) but you can relate to their concerns.

If, like me, you took a chance on a novel like Stoner because a marketing email from The New York Review of Books said to and you can’t figure out how you never got around to finishing such a slim volume, I do understand your reticence to try something new. But The Loud Boys is a worthy gamble and I say give it a shot.