Before this review was a note in my phone, it was jotted in the margins of my ARC, before which it was conversations with people in my life, which I wrote down as soon as I’d had them. Really it was the same conversation repeated several times. I described the premise of Camille Bordas’s The Material aloud. “It’s about an MFA program for standup comics,” I said and without fail got a full laugh, at least one loud HA from each person. This is the sign of a good premise, I noted.
The Material sets the first such MFA program in Chicago, over one long, frigid Wednesday right before winter break. The faculty, working comics themselves, worry over announcing their new spring hire, infamous stand-up Manny Reinhardt who has recently earned “accusations of emotional misconduct.” Before the faculty can make the announcement, an active shooter prank forces professors and students into classrooms and into closeness. They escape unscathed but gather again that evening for the students’ annual live battle with the Second City improv troupe, at which Reinhardt makes a surprise appearance to punctuate the end of a collective bad day. This shared suffering supplies each character with a different angle. In The Material, Bordas has written an actually brave novel that’s actually funny, multifarious in its insight, fine in its craft, and capped with a closing as sweet as Wodehouse.
If something’s funny — I ventured in the margins and still think it might be true — it’s because it surprises us. It’s surprising that Camille Bordas would write this story, a native of Lyon, France, neither a stand-up nor a graduate of an MFA program (though she teaches at one, the University of Florida). She’s the author of two prize-winning but untranslated novels in her native French, Les treize desserts and Partie commune, and one in English, How to Behave in a Crowd. This last, a story of a precocious preteen named Dory comforting his mother in the wake of his father’s death, seeks to prove, contrary to one of its character’s proclamations, that art can be both an intellectual and emotional experience at once. “Isn’t there a way to have it all?” Dory asks. The Material attempts in part to prove a similar point — that a novel can be at once caustic and emotional, misanthropic and generous, a combination we abbreviate with the word funny, a title it earns because of its high rate of surprise.
If surprises are funny, fulfilling expectations is hack. And like any good comedian, Bordas knows what’s hack and how to avoid it. Her surprising premise fuses, and neutralizes, two hack expectations: that MFA students tend not to be great at taking jokes, and that comedians tend not to be great at taking criticism. The book is, blessedly, not a satire of MFA programs, the favorite target for grouchy writers. Of course the humor hits on graduate students’ particular pretensions, one who goes to a bar and orders milk “only to be weird,” or another European student who reads Henri Bergson and gives her standup bits titles like “The Year After, at Marienbad.” But the MFA is a setting rather than a subject, a setup and not a punchline.
Likewise Bordas sidesteps complaints about cancel culture, the favorite target for grouchy comedians. She manages to mock both positions on the issue, prizing absurdity over partiality. Manny Reinhardt’s accusers’ primary complaint is that after sleeping with them, he “proposed marriage that same night, and never called again.” In response, Reinhardt, a drunk and a joke thief who donates to charities to expiate his own infidelities, plots his next show about “trigger warnings and safe spaces … people refusing to grow up and understand that life sucked.” Opposed to Manny’s hire is a student named Phil who, feeling his way into justice and comedy at once, has “pretty much decided never to contradict [a woman] again.” When women in the program support Manny’s hire, however, Phil lets them know they’re “turning your back on your whole gender.”
“In comedy,” adds Prof. Dorothy Michaels, “you were never looking for the real answer, but for the funniest answer.” Bordas’s characters don’t indulge any notions of comedy as being a way to speak truth to power or advance a social cause. It’s humor that sears and doesn’t cauterize, gleeful and blooddrunk. When locked in the room with a colleague who won’t stop yammering about his depressive wife, Dorothy quips, “No wonder his wife was suicidal.” One student declares in a conversation about the active shooter scare that Americans “need gun violence … Just like we need unaffordable healthcare. It’s what makes us who we are.”
Further comedic philosophy comes from Prof. Ashbee, “the founder of Stand-Up as an academic discipline.” Punching down is funnier than punching up, he says, because “no one really knew the people who were up, but almost everybody had been a form of down at some point.” Humor begins with a shared loathing. Its materials are human ugliness and inclusive contempt. Once comedians have found these dark parts, their job is to “shape them right in order to serve them back to those who’d run away from them.” The characters claim a nihilism and misanthropy that often permeates real stand-ups’ ethos, e.g. Doug Stanhope or Richard Pryor. The book’s most talented MFA student, Olivia, is quick to proclaim, in the recycled line of stand-ups and Slayer alike, that she “hate[s] everyone equally.” Dorothy thinks the flaw with Reinhardt’s critics is to “reduce Manny’s all-encompassing misanthropy to simple misogyny.”
At the same time, Bordas’s writing is incapable of misanthropy. It undercuts those claims in its tone and attention. She loves her characters and makes them loveable, somehow shows them each in a sympathetic light. Bordas has been compared to Salinger before, for How to Behave in a Crowd, which features an analog of Salinger’s Glass family (“freaks with freakish standards,” Zooey says), but here the comparison’s more apt. As with good old Holden Caulfield, any claimed misanthropy is an inch deep, and it doesn’t take much digging to find a protected sensitivity. Prof. Kruger, regretting his cruelty to a student, thinks, “Perhaps people only meant a small percentage of what they said.” Much of the fun of the book arises because Bordas is so clearly not grouchy herself but rather infectiously delighted by her characters at every turn. Her work refutes the goofy-footed optimists who mistake comedy for a branch of epistemology when instead it’s more important, a source of joy, taken from wherever you can get it.
As far as The Material does have an intellectual project, it’s an acute consideration of the ways in which we process experience. Pasts are full of pain — Manny’s son’s battle with Hirschsprung’s disease in his infancy, Dorothy’s loneliness and self-loathing, Olivia’s molestation at the hands of her stepfather. (Sweet first-year Artie may be “only ever depressed for minutes at a time,” Bordas writes, “but they were intense minutes.”) And it’s the bizarre digestive malfunction of a creative person, a writer or a comic, that treats these less as events in themselves than as material to be used. To different degrees, each fails to live their life rather than simply process it. Bordas’s unusual dexterity with her characters’ interiority — by my count, on one bravura page, she switches point of view six times — works to probe subtle ways in which these processes differ.
When Sally, Olivia’s twin sister and also molested by their stepfather, comes to visit and announces that she’s suing him, Olivia wants to pretend nothing happened. She can’t bear to call herself a victim, the dread term. “[S]he wasn’t afraid of him,” Bordas writes. “She was angry that he’d made her life a cliché.” (This horror spreads to multiple characters. “‘I’m a fucking cliche,’” Manny tells his ex-wife Rachel. “‘Not a monster. There’s a big difference.’”) When she takes the stage that night, she does try out new jokes, but they’re based not in her own trauma but nicked from Artie’s experiences at a Holocaust museum. Bordas masterfully draws the irony out: in striving for originality, she’s stolen. She kills on stage but finds herself in a creative paradox: “it was the truth that would have sounded like a lie.”
Dorothy, on the other hand, the book’s most compelling character, uses her life almost before she lives it. Dorothy thinks in bits, her mind “used to opposing any point of view it became aware of, for sport.” The reader watches her come up with material in real time. “She was never able to tell whether she was living something,” Bordas writes, “or already writing it.” Stuck in a classroom waiting for the active shooter to kill her, she can’t stop riffing on Brad Pitt’s death scene from Burn After Reading. Reflecting on her suicidal past, she adds, “Now I only think about it once or twice a month.” She also slept with Manny years earlier, she reveals, and also had gotten a proposal, but unlike the others, “she’d known to laugh in his face.”
In Dorothy, Bordas considers a cold, removed dimension of the artistic life, which used to make us lonely and now makes us modern. It’s a life of documenting and refracting experiences in language—a life that now, because of our new and constant mediation, seems to have spread to nearly everybody. Admit it. You’re never present when you live. You’re always later, thinking of how you’ll recount it. “Perhaps that was why she wrote for a living,” Dorothy thinks, and it could easily be Bordas[1]. “To know what it was she was thinking.” She’s like us, checked out at the moment, taking notes of what’s around her as a way “to kill time before real life happened. After which real life became material to take notes on again …”
[Published by Random House on June 11, 2024, 288 pages, $28.00 hardcover]
[1] For what it’s worth, Dorothy Michaels is also Dustin Hoffman’s alter ego in Tootsie, a connection that makes for the professor a kind of drag Bordas puts on to reveal herself, which is any good fictional character’s function.