ANDROGENIC LITERATURE REVIEW Vol. 3: Multiracial masculinity in Mixtape Hyperborea by Adem Luz Rienspects

On multiracial masculinity and millennial adolescence

Adem Luz Rienspect’s Mixtape Hyperborea is the best indie novel I have ever read.

Let me add to that. Aside from Catcher in the Rye, it is easily the best coming of age novel I have ever read—certainly, the best contemporary coming-of-age story I’ve experienced in any medium. It’s like a Richard Linklater film drawn in minimalist prose but without the implicit political constraints of filmmaking—i.e., it has the virtue of a representational honesty that is no longer possible even in avant-garde cinema because of cancellation risks and strict norms around on-screen interactions with a racial element.

Relative to the standard stock of adolescent dog shit you will find at your local bookstore, it has all of the youthful vitality of YA but with none of its post-hoc therapeutic excesses or wish fulfilment fantasies or clunky prose or deficits in human characterization.

While reading it, I was, at numerous points, stalled by own surprise. How could it be? How could it be that someone I had never heard of had come out of total obscurity and written something this good? Stylistically, it’s what I had hoped Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi could’ve been, but with much stronger, more substantive core.

I’m an elder millennial who grew up with a multiracial group of friends in middle class America. I cannot describe the precision with which this novel captured my adolescent experience in anything but the most hyperbolic possible terms. The particularity of it—the way it distills the dynamics of inter-male banter, humor, and social dynamis from that era—borders on a level of resonance that I would’ve thought impossible had I not read the book myself. It’s like Adem reached into my brain and pulled this book out of my own memories.

Mixtape Hyperborea is everything that I had hoped to get out of alternative literature, and should be universally regarded as a classic. Its most essential characteristic is its ability to draw out the beauty from the banal in careful, restrained prose that verges on poetry—yes, I know you’ve heard that a million fucking times before, you’ll just have to trust me that it’s for real this time.

If you are an androgenic male millennial and if you enjoy literature, my feeling is that this novel is essentially a must-read. It’s funny but in a way that moves you directly into the body of your youth, and it’s honest in a way that reminds you of what was possible back when literature (and narrative media in general) was less censorious than it is now.

In one of the most vibrant scenes from the book, the boys square up for random fights with one another in a spontaneous ritual that reminds me of doing the same thing in my own youth. One time my Russian friend and I similarly decided to fight in his basement and laughed about the bruises we gave one another after. This type of joie d’vivre is the opposite of bravado because it doesn’t have a true audience in the form of girls who might be impressed by your martial prowess; it’s something that happens for internal social consumption among males. It’s a kind of adolescent instinct that can’t be totally explained because it’s a paradoxical expression of camaraderie rather than a conflict borne of a sincere animus.

And it’s just one of many notes that the book gets perfectly right.

Near the end of the novel, the protagonist expresses what we might even call a form of “loving kindness” meditation to his peers and all the people around him:

Walking around the museum, glancing over the class of ‘08, I realize I like everyone just the way they are.

I like that Inckle is a borderline psycho. I like that Daisy can’t bring herself to kill bugs. I like that Larry’s face is so fucking stupid. I like that Micky is a twig with no muscle, Sarah has a big forehead, and Chang is Asian. None of which am I, and none of which I want to be. I have certain procilivities and ideals I can’t help but voice, certain worldviews I inevitably impose on the people around me, but it’s clear in the museum’s palatial lobby that imperial uniformity bears zero spiritual fruit. I don’t want to change anyone’s mind, I don’t want to prove to anyone that I’ve figured out more about life than them, I want to become a pure and inalterable example of my own inner values, promoting my ideals via inspiration exclusively, taking constant joy in the heterogenous chaos around me. It’s not fair to say you love something if you wish it was something else.

We leave the museaum and get back on the bus.

I get hard on the drive and cover my dick with my backpack.

Mixtape Hyperborea is about a protagonist with a lot to say but very little to impose, and it transcends the era-specific details of its millennial setting.

But, because it’s boring to praise something without saying something more interesting about it, let’s talk about the novel’s presentation of race.

Multiracial masculinity and slur-based banter

Multiracial marines from James Cameron’s sci-fi classic Aliens.

There’s a recurring trope in male-oriented stories that I like to call the multiracial marine trope. You will find this trope in novels, films, and video games. I suspect it started with James Cameron’s Aliens but the real point of origin is probably the (hilariously) Filipino protagonist of Robert Heinlein’s military-fascism-fantasy Starship Troopers, a deeply psychotic book whose status as a sci-fi classic is no doubt indicative of the insane militarism that is arguably intrinsic to American nationalism (hint: the bug people are Asian communists).

In the multiracial marine trope, a mixed group of white, hispanic, and black American (or American-coded) marines exist as a close fraternity of militarized quasi-brothers. They universally refer to one another by last names—“Ramirez,” “Johnson,” “Washington,” etc.—and they often banter with one another through sarcastic racially-tinged jokes. In the modern iteration of this trope, the unit commander is almost invariably a stern African-American, and lately, these fictional combat units even have women included in them (this probably has less to do with DEI than it does with the actual recruiting crisis going on right now).

For example, a white character named “Johnson” might ask the hispanic character “Ramirez” how he likes his tacos while they are being shot at by < aliens || Muslims || designated American enemy group> and then the Hispanic character will say something witty like “I don’t know, maybe ask your mom?” and grin and then he’ll throw a grenade over the rim of the foxhole they’re both in.

These mild racial jokes are understood to be expressions of affection and not real insults or true expressions of racial invective. The implict idea is that they are all bros. The implicit idea is that they are all on the same side.

(Most of these films are literally produced, in part, by the Pentagon).

We can think of it as a nationalistic conservative assimilation fantasy. It is, in a sense, a fantasy from the “I don’t see color” phase of American assimilationism and an era that mainline conservatives—and even a big segment of the dissident right—would like to desperately get back to.

It’s a depiction of multiracial masculinity as a model of social inclusion.

When I was young, I used to love this trope, because it made me feel like I could indeed by an authentic American. I was always nominally proud of my heritage but cognizant of where I was situated in the racial hierarchy of 1990’s/2000’s-ish America, and multiracial masculinity presented a pathway for being considered “one of the bros.” Back then China was a second-world country and a place where sneakers and cheap electronics got made. We had zero cultural weight as a people and nothing in the way of soft power (the latter is still true to this day).

Instead of relying on multiracial marine trope, Mixtape Hyperborea presents a racialized, intra-masculine banter in a way that actually reflects the dynamic of inter-racial friendship as it actually took place in that era—as both a form of genuine masculine bonding and as an asymmetrical expression of power from one male to another.

Like many stories, it has a scene where a character mocks an Asian character with a fake-accent.

I was not offended in any way by this depiction, because it perfectly mirrored what it was like to grow up as an Asian-American in that era. Around that time, it was socially acceptable to make mild-to-moderate racially charged jokes at the expense of Asians, but explicit discrimination in most formal contexts was still verboten.

Let’s say you’re an Asian-American teenager in the late 90’s or early 2000’s. One of your friends, or perhaps someone you only tangentially know, makes a joke about your eyes being slanty or mocks you with a fake accent, and other people laugh.

As an Asian-American male, this scenario would invariably present you with three options:

1. Ignore the insult, which lowers your social status and makes you even more of a target for future racialized bullying.

2. Counter-escalate verbally to an even more extreme degree, all the way up to open physical confrontation.

3. Reciprocate with your own slur or racially-charged insult (not fully possible if the other guy is white, but if they’re not WASPs then you can target their sub-demographic of “off-color” whiteness like the New Yorkers in the Ellis island days).
   → If it’s a white guy, attempt to mirror approximately the same level of offense even in spite of your structural/systematic disadvantage as a visible minority relative to them.

4. Shame them as racist (this wasn’t an option at that time).

The most pragmatic option was typically #3—reciprocating the insult to approximately the same degree.

In multiracial settings, I became well versed in this kind of racially-charged banter and would often trade barbs with my various white friends, which would invariably mix some real level of mild insult and masculine bravado with a genuine degree of brotherly affection.

I learned, also, to very carefully delineate the exact level of invective aimed in my direction in what might nominally be delivered as a joke, and quickly became almost completely intolerant of this kind of language in my day-to-day interactions in academic or work-related settings, where relationships were more formal and couldn’t possibly be construed as genuinely fraternal.

I remember, also, when me and all my friends grew out of this. There were moments where it was clear that we were just insulting one another, and after some time I suggested that we stop doing this. Relieved from the burden of this intermittent tension, we all agreed that it was a good idea, and progressivism made it such that this type of bantering became impossible outside of extremely high-trust settings.

This is all to say that, in my view, Mixtape Hyperborea is a book that depicts multiracial masculinity neutrally to positively, and (possibly) implicitly accepts it as a viable method of social integration in a mixed society composed of different racial groups.

I do not view this as a deficit of the book because I know the context that it’s drawing upon very well and it echoes my personal adolescent experience, and I don’t expect this type of Foucaultian power analysis in a coming-of-age story that is fundamentally positive about the idea of multi-racial brotherhood and friendship and told from the POV of a white guy.

If centralized publishing had succeeded in suppressing the production and release of this novel, I think the world would be worse off for it. In the same way that a reader of my novel wouldn’t expect me to delineate the subtleties of being a Hispanic male or a black male and so on, I don’t need Adem Luz Rienspects to be Chang Rae Lee or Tony Tulathimutte. I only need him to write the best, truest book that he could write, and that he has done.