Boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, written and designed by Zach Plague, is a book I picked up 13 years ago because the publisher, Featherproof Books, co-founded by Plague, had some wacky, innovative works in their catalogue. I had a phase when I read lots of their books, but most were hit or miss. Zach Plague’s Boring book (yes, I know that’s boring 7x) is a total hit, and I loved it. Loving it may depend on having a niche college experience, though, because some of the characters were familiar!

Boring (7x) benefits from the design complementing the form. Chapters are short — as in 3 pages max. But there was so much to absorb that it took me a while to finish.

In the novel, we meet Ollister and Adelaide, two artists well-respected in the local art scene in a town that is mostly art scene by volume. Have I mentioned Plague’s novel is satire? Everything is over the top. Ollister and Adelaide are brought together (though they don’t know it on opposite sides of glass) to be interviewed because The Platypus, some wealthy art guy, wants Ollister’s “gray book.” We don’t know what those are and assume they’re valuable. Does Ollister have them? Does Adelaide?

Plague sets the novel at UNI-ARTS, an art college where students try to make avant-garde works and become super famous, filling galleries and make a splash on the art scene. Some of the best chapters are made up of apathetic male artists explaining their work in front of the class and professor, so they are ready to share a portfolio upon graduation. One student responds to a question about an artist who inspires him:

[Jack Mackerel’s] disciples could achieve no empathy with the wider aesthetic. Agnosticism. The null-and-void framing device, definitively a post-modern anarchist stratagem, discouraged would-be imitators from filching, referencing, or indeed even knowing about their work. The implied ideological bias was folded into the larger thought-form of radically sensitive misanthropy. Mackerel’s unified anti-manifesto, while never directly stated, unregardless whipped his constituents into a frenzy of converging artistic and mock-conscious thought streams.

If you read that and thought, “What a load of horse shit,” then you’ve got the point. Ollister, fearful that The Platypus is closing in on him and his gray book, attends the portfolio class to hear these speeches as a sort of interview for a group of Art Terrorists he’s assembling to dismantle The Platypus’s reign over the art kingdom, so to speak. Ollister isn’t even a student (anymore).

Meanwhile, Adelaide was Ollister’s one true love (for a hot minute). It doesn’t seem to work between then, though flashbacks suggest they didn’t have much of a foundation for any relationship. Did I mention almost all characters are 19? Before the first chapter, we get a cast, including The Art Terrorists, The Art Kids, The Prep Kids, and The Adults. If I have one criticism of Boring (boring boring, etc.), it’s that 19 didn’t sit right with me. The “kids” all behaved as if they were in senior year of college, about to be launched into the “real” world, thus facing dread and panic over making a living or an impression. Or, even better, they could have been grad students in an MFA arts program. 19 is college freshmen, possibly sophomores, so how did Adelaide already graduate? How did Ollister start school, blaze a trail, then leave for reasons? Just up the age in your head; no sweat.

The Art Kids and the Prep Kids function as foils at the college, showing the ridiculous contrast in the groups yet highlighting their similarities. Again, this is satire, so the Prep Kids are more shallow than you want to believe, saying things like, “Have you seen my vanilla cake lip gloss? Life blows without it…” On the other hand, the Art Kids are trying to change the world in droll ways, like one student who says, “Well, there’s also some awful poetry on an upstairs computer. I almost erased that hard drive just to, you know, spare us all.”

Author Zach Plague lambasts college arts programs, emphasizing the singular pursuit of students seeking advancement through UNI-ARTS, even when their artistic expression is a giant circle jerk: “[UNI-ARTS] boasted an impressive placement rate, especially when it came to the top three grad programs. Those universities in turn boasted about admitting students from UNI-ARTS. It didn’t seem to matter that a commercially, or critically, successful artist had not been produced by this system in more than 25 years.” Whether you think art happens in an arts program or on the streets, Plague’s Boring responds “yes and no,” but in the funniest ways possible.

Characters are not spared massive embarrassment, and I don’t just mean the time Punk, a homeless art kid, shits his pants. Miriam and Dolores, two Prep Kids, use college as a dating service, looking for well-bred men to marry, but it goes wrong particularly for Miriam, who tries to elope with her boyfriend:

[Miriam] closed the door in his face and started sweeping violently, flinging mounds of cat hair into the air. Sneezing then overtook her so violently that she collapsed on the futon, sinuses draining onto its fur-coated fabric. She began crying. Through the tears. She took out her pink cell phone and called her dorm room number. Dolores picked up on the first ring.

“It’s… unh… it’s gross! Miriam. Through choking subs.

“Well, what did you expect?” Dolores. Gloatingly. But, then: “Listen, you’ve got to hang in there. He’s the love of your life.”

While Ollister and his mysterious “gray book” seems aloof, unknowable, and the like the pulse on the art scene, his heartbreak over Adelaide puts him in awkward situations, too, like when he wanders drunkenly into a graveyard and falls down: “Ollister was on his back, his head ready on a fresh bouquet. With his bloodied hand he signed his urine straight into the air. Taken by gravity at a rather impressive height much of it returned a slap at his already wet legs and thighs.” I loved Plague taking this character down a peg, but I also loved how Ollister can list what art students will create to seem edgy when their choices are already predictable. Ever notice how young adults think they’re experiencing everything for the first time in human history? Plague mocks that through an art scene lens.

I know I’ve quoted here more than usual, but I’m hoping readers are getting a sense of the sharp focus on art, artists, and art in a commercial sense (galleries, college programs, wealthy buyers). I found Boring boring boring boring boring boring boring endlessly smart, amusing, funny, grungy, and entertaining. And that gray book? Readers knew what it was the whole time, only we didn’t know it. Clever.

summer reading

• So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison
• Goodbye Earl by Leesa Cross-Smith
• Girls with Long Shadows by Tennessee Hill
• All this Can Be True by Jen Michalski
• Graveyard Shift by M.L. Rio
• Best Laid Plans by Allison Brennan (Lucy Kincaid #9)
• Big Man with a Shovel by Joe Amato (did not finish)
• Going Bovine by Libba Bray (did not finish)
• Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring, Boring by Zach Plague
• Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind
• Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
• Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
• The Outsider by Richard Wright
• Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Building a Life Out of Words by Shawn Smucker
• Kittentits by Holly Wilson
• The Last God by Jean Davis
• Homing by Sherrie Flick
• The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli
• Bitter Thirst by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs #8)