ANDROGENIC LITERATURE REVIEW VOL. 6: Juan Ecchi's 'Dryback' and the terminal endpoint of the gooner male
"What if Houellebecq was a person of color?"
As a reader, I’m very much in the camp of Bret Easton Ellis. Even before the quality of prose, voice is the number one thing that pulls me into a work. Juan Ecchi is an American novelist from a decidedly androgenic tradition where a particular middle-aged male sadness carries the weight of the entire novel in the style of a Hispanic-American Houellebecq. Dryback is a book about male horniness, and, more broadly, it’s a book about wireheading and technology in general and what that does to meaning.
That is to say—it is sad, and I say that as a writer who wrote a book that many readers felt was intensely depressing.1
Like Ecchi, by the standards of modernity, I am old. This means that I am a contemporary of his: I am about forty years old and the Norwood Terminator has obliterated my once-beautiful hairline and I have wrinkles around my eyes when I smile and I remember Nokia brick cell phones and the transition from no-internet to dial-up to broadband and playing Starcraft on Windows 97. Occasionally when I run into younger and smarter people in corpo-world they affectionately joke that I’m a boomer and feel mildly embarrassed when I need them to help me do something they consider the GUI-equivalent of opening a PDF.
Being old in the year 2026 means something else as well—it means that I’ve lived through roughly 3-4 cycles of gender-discourse around sex, dating, and desire. What’s interesting to me is that I can feel the speed of cultural evolution is accelerating because social media has radically increased memetic liquidity; that is to say, it’s made the transmission of social norms and behaviours hyperliquid. One has the sense that Zoomers are in a state of continuous cultural anxiety because there is no social superstructure that can confer a sense of stability.
Hyperliquidity is a property of the modern app-based dating market where attractive people can effectively order other human beings like commodities in a way that fundamentally degrades the human condition.
It is also a property of pornography. If pornography is best conceptualized as a form of wireheaded superstimulus, then Dryback is a cautionary tale about the terminal endpoint of sexual desire: as an autocatalytic process that results in your own annihilation. What we see through iterative evolutionary processes is the progressive enhancement of pornography via deepfakes, OnlyFans parasocially-supercharged desire dynamics, and so on.
Ecchi’s Dryback is nominally about an underemployed guy in New York with a deepfake pornography addiction who has aged out of viability in the sexual marketplace but nonetheless lucks into a relationship with an attractive white woman. The tension in the novel comes from the overdetermined certainty that something horrible is going to happen. It’s a voice-driven novel anchored on the anomie of a man whose sole nexus of meaning is his own desirability to others and the utility of the desirability in bringing about sexual and egoic gratification.
The comparison here to Houellebecq is obvious, and the novel felt like a reformulation of Platform (particularly the ending). I mean that in a complimentary fashion since it’s very hard to nail the Houellebecqian voice without being overly imitative.
Dryback is, broadly speaking, well written and decently executed in the structural sense. The plot itself is not particularly central to the reader’s enjoyment of the novel as it is heavily scene-based, although I found that the story sagged about halfway through (which is not an uncommon issue with many debut novels). Ultimately, I found the book’s blackpilled ending to be a depressing albeit valid artistic choice. I’m very glad New Ritual Press is out there releasing books like this because there’s a macro-level momentum that needs to be sustained for stories like this to continue to get traction.
When it comes to art, you often only have to get one thing right for a story to be compelling on some level. With Dryback, the voice of the protagonist hooked me fairly strongly even though some of the subplots and humor didn’t quite land for me. Over time, I think this book will rightfully find its readership among appreciators of the androgenic style.
Just for the record, I had a lot of fun writing it!
It sounds good. If you think 40ish is old, try 63. It’s like I came from another planet entirely.
I don’t think the current miserable situation is long-term stable. I hope it isn’t.
Nice article. I learned a few new terms. In reading it I would say, however, that the 'transmission of social norms and behaviors hyperliquid' is, in my opinion, not a grass roots or 'bottom up' evolution, but more the result of deliberate social engineering by hidden hands to the hands of those staring into their glowing mirrors. Yeah, I'm paranoid.
Also, I just turned LXXVIII today, so to hear you as a 40-something speak of being out of it due to old age is curious.
I like the premise of Dryback. I believe one of my books has a similar theme.
I was curious. In your review you state that the 'underemployed guy in New York' 'lucks into a relationship with an attractive white woman. I don't have a problem with that, of course. But it does make me want to know the race of the POV character.
Anyway, have a nice day.