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The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp review – wild, absurd and wickedly funny
Nearly every page in Sophie Kemp's debut is smart, jarring and wickedly funny. Set in Brooklyn in 2019, this wild, absurdist take on the millennial novel tracks the adventures of Reality Kahn, a 23-year-old waterslide commercial actor and zine-maker who determines to become 'the greatest girlfriend of all time', after her drug-dealing sex partner, Emil, casually suggests that she gets herself a man. Prior to that point, Reality had just been living her life, no strings attached. 'Would having a special guy around really make me happier? Was this the life purpose I was looking for?' A boyfriend, she decides, might 'add colour to my life as well as provide intrigue'. And, New York City being 'a place where nefarious individuals got ideas', he could also protect her from 'getting raped so much'. Reality's quest kicks off with a hunt for 'intel'. Where do guys who make good boyfriends usually spend their time? Farcical as it is, her inquiry touches on that most sobering of cliches about true love: that it is darn hard to find. Emil responds with confusion: 'Where do they hang out? Girl, I think you're sexy as fuck and fun, but for serious, you are on some sort of insane-ass trip these days. They're not a pack of wildebeests in the plains.' Desperate for better advice, Reality turns to Girlfriend Weekly, Kemp's cheeky homage to the time-honoured world of women's magazines. It has all the answers she's looking for, even if they are hilariously fusty and over the top: 'Bring a little charm with you everywhere that you go. For example, when you are at the grocer's, be sure to give a smile and a wink to the dashing gentleman in the porkpie hat. Say: 'Gee whiz, woo-woo, you are a beautiful specimen and I am a virgin.'' Reality goes to the mall; the men there are all short on boyfriend potential. She finally finds it in 26-year-old crack-smoking Ariel, who helps her out of a locked bathroom at a music event (because really, who can resist a lavatorial knight errant?). A doctoral candidate in Assyrian history at NYU who's also in a boyband, 'sad-eyed' Ariel is your quintessential fuckboy: flaky, tactless and commitment-shy, but always up for some kinky fun. Alas, he is what Reality wants, and she works to win his heart and make their connection official. Her modus operandi? You guessed it: extreme devotion and sexual surrender. 'I'm trying to become a vessel for him,' Reality says, reclaiming the biblical metaphor. Betraying a naive optimism about the rewards of giving herself over, Reality's posture more worryingly smacks of what Kemp has, in an essay on Trump-era masculinity, described as 'a brand new way to be anti-establishment: to be kind of trad'. Men crave hierarchy, she writes, but so can women. The idea of male control, however dangerous, can be very seductive to those who feel 'exhausted by a certain kind of politics around consent'. Women, Kemp contends, reinforce men's toxic belief in their entitlement through 'the kind of sex they are having, in asking for things that they shouldn't ask for'. While Ariel is more of a regular jerk than an Andrew Tate, Reality appears more than willing to let him dictate their lovemaking, even as this gradually complicates her ability to freely consent. The sex scenes are as droll as they are provocative, precisely because, along with power, patriarchy and masculinity, they confront the contradictions of female desire. Kemp's language is profane and outrageously camp, blending punk-infused chutzpah, feminist irony, meme-worthy disclosures and mic drops with sick, unsettling humour. At one point, Reality's acquiescence is delivered in the 'terrible whorish voice of a sexualised child'. Ariel wants anal, and suddenly Reality's on an ecstatic cosmic ride: 'I was on a surfboard. I was wearing a blue dress. I was wearing a motorcycle helmet. It was lap after lap, veering past huge chunks of space debris. It was beautiful. It really was.' The further we venture into the story, the kookier and more absurd it gets. Reality signs up for a drug trial that promises to transform her into the perfect girlfriend (or an 'ethereal bimbo with no interiority', as Emil sees it). By the novel's close, she finds herself in a surreal place called Mount Nothing, where she meets a crew of other girlfriends (all bizarrely bald), and a talking, shades-wearing garden snake named Ungaro Ulaanbaatar. Too much? Well, for what it's worth, not everything in this book is meant to make perfect sense ('Exisssstence is meaninglessssssss and random. YOLO,' Ungaro Ulaanbaatar says to Reality). Indeed, if there's anything that Kemp seems to ask of the reader, it is to loosen up and have fun. I did, and I adored this novel: it's a clever and wholly original skewering of the modern dating landscape, our obsession with true love, and the outlandish lengths we'll go to in its pursuit. Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp is published by Scribner UK (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp review – a TikTok Stepford Wives for the Pornhub era
Set in upstate New York, Sophie Kemp's surreal satirical debut puts us in the uneasy company of a part-time model who calls herself Reality as she sets out on a crazed quest to become the perfect girlfriend. The chief beneficiary of her self-education is a crack-smoking postgrad and wannabe musician named Ariel, who cheats openly, gives her an infection and – in the reader's eye – sees her as little more than a sex toy able to fetch snacks. But Reality is besotted, ignoring her own doomsaying conscience – what she refers to with typical idiosyncrasy as 'the familiar voice' – as well as her best friend, Soon-jin, who thinks Ariel looks like a 'school shooter': 'I think what she was saying was: Ariel is a unique bad boy who often wore a leather jacket.' What ensues is akin to a TikTok Stepford Wives for the Pornhub era. Taking tips from a magazine, Girlfriend Weekly, which magically appears every so often bathed in light and accompanied by a cor anglais, Reality leans with alarmingly good cheer into the notion that the perfect girlfriend must be permanently ready to service every last whim. 'I loved the feeling of being sliced open in the butt by a nice, girthy, yet not too large cock,' she tells us, wiping her belly with a sock Ariel gives her after one of many bluntly described couplings. Reality presses him on whether she's actually his girlfriend now. 'What? Oh yeah. OK, sure.' 'My life had become beautiful,' she tells us. The style is George Saunders meets Ottessa Moshfegh, filtered through – at a rough guess – 4chan, mumblecore and 18th-century marriage manuals. There are arch intertitles ('In which the quest begins with three pieces of evidence'), faux-naif chattiness, narcotised dialogue and any number of left turns making a wild premise wilder still: when Reality participates in a clinical trial of a mysterious pill, ZZZZvx ULTRA (XR), designed to aid would-be perfect girlfriends, she ends up on the run from a machine-gun-wielding medic. It's safe to say your mileage may vary, not least because the piss-taking can feel ultra-specific (Ariel attends a seminar known to Reality as his 'James Joyce Opinions Class') and the lingering sense that it's all a kind of alt-lit prank a la Tao Lin (a suspicion heightened by the cover of the US edition, which displays an anime Eve in the garden of Eden, with Kemp's name in Comic Sans). Yet Paradise Logic rarely feels slack in the way that kind of fiction can; Kemp knows exactly what she's doing, and tonally the novel is a feat, expertly switching between laughter, shock and heartache, sometimes in a heartbeat. In one of many startling moments, Ariel forces himself on Reality when she's drunk with a head wound. The narrative splits in two to show us what she's thinking – the phrase 'I love you' 100 times – before cutting to inside Ariel's mind: 'The band is called Computer. We will perform in midsize venues all over the country and Europe, too.' Gary Shteyngart is quoted on the cover calling it the funniest book of the year. And it is funny – right from the Emily Dickinson epigraph, which finds new resonance in the poet's use of 'hoe' – but ultimately it's a comedy about misogyny in the way that Percival Everett's The Trees is a comedy about lynching. Witness the moment when Soon-jin says Ariel looks like a school shooter: 'It was so clear that she was jealous,' Reality thinks, 'but I felt sad. Me and Soon-jin had been through a lot together. Each time I got raped in college she was always so nice to me after.' Every few pages, a sucker-punch line like that bares the teeth behind the book's smile, and to even call it a comedy ends up feeling a kind of weird category error that doesn't get near Kemp's full-spectrum effect. How she follows this is anyone's guess. Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp is published by Scribner (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
