Beat It, Rufus by Noah Van Sciver

Noah Van Sciver has a muse of cringe and self-obsession; that can't be easy. His characters often have boundless and unsupported faith in their own meagre abilities, a disinclination to look solidly at the world that actually exists, and a pugnacious optimism untethered by any kind of sense or reason. Fante Bukowski is his most famous example.

Rufus Baxter is another in that mold. He was the guitarist and asshole driving force of the hair metal band Funky Cool, almost forty years ago, when they got a deal with an exploitative minor-league label to record a cassette-only release before a plane crash killed the other two-thirds of the band. Since then, apparently, he's been gigging constantly, with no actual success. He has an agent...who books him for things like weddings two states away on one day's notice, because that's all Rufus is good for.

Rufus, of course, believes he's the last great rocker, a titan of the industry, a man who's had a few bad breaks (ancient car on the verge of death, living in a storage unit because he has no money, no friends or family or support structure of any kind). He's wrong. Comprehensively wrong, in almost every possibly way. But he's a Van Sciver main character, so realizing that will never happen.

Beat It, Rufus is the story of Rufus's cross-country odyssey over a few days. It follows the usual pattern: he loses what little he has, and goes on an epic journey to reclaim what he thinks is rightfully his (the expected massive royalties from that cassette), having various adventures and losing even more along the way. He reconnects with the girlfriend he had just before he "hit big," is repeatedly visited by the devil (and, much later and to less effect, the angel) on his shoulder, plays a random show with a random band, tracks down the office of that (long-failed) record label, and learns that one of his two bandmates actually survived the crash.

That bandmate, "Doing it to the Max" Eckhart, is an actually successful musician, with a big house and a home studio and a bestselling "how I recovered" memoir and a thriving career writing jingles - all the things Rufus reflexively loathes, but takes advantage of at the end of his draining and self-destructive odyssey.

It all ends in a "Lady and the Tiger" ending - Rufus is scheming to steal from and take advantage of Max, even as Max is willing to help out Rufus in ways that we readers think would actually be more productive and useful.

But that's the point of characters like Rufus: they don't learn, they can't learn. The humor is because they always do the wrong thing. I find that kind of humor wearying, especially when, as with Van Sciver, it's pitched in a relatively realistic mode - Rufus isn't a cartoon to bounce back up from any hardship, but a real person in a real world, getting older and hurtling headlong toward the kind of death that will leave people vaguely happy but uneasy about it.

This is funny, and realistic: it moves well, Rufus is entirely believable, and the various scenes are all told well. But he's so self-delusional, such an asshole, that I felt like I needed a bath when I was done reading it. How any reader responds to it will largely depend on how much they like cringe comedy: this is all cringe, all the time.