Mean Boys

Reviews

In Mean Boys, Mak maps the wide range of male insecurity, drawing a distinction between self-destruction and the destruction of others, while also letting these outcomes brush up against each other and even bleed together. In eight arresting essays, Geoffrey Mak probes culture and selfhood. Mak investigates art and desire, transgression and forgiveness, and ultimately, the value of connection in a sick world. No one before Geoffrey Mak has so well described the ‘feeling’ of the Millennial era that ended with the pandemic—or acknowledged the absolute vanishing of this ‘feeling’ ever since, along with the alienation and exquisite spiritual longing left in its wake. This book is a rare comfort, a companion, a book that makes you say: yes, that is exactly how it is. A piercing inquiry into the long 2010s: platform Crocs and Normcore; failed digital media strategies and right-wing trolls; American expats in Berlin and the rebirth of the rave. Mak tries to figure out what sanity should look like when the world is deranged. He finds one thing is certain: the old models are obsolete. Mean Boys charts the anxious contradictions of being of two worlds at once and invites us to feel the past as it is and then again as it was. Geoffrey Mak’s precision, perspective, and approach reveal a masterful pen. Geoffrey Mak has a rare ability to inhabit and narrate the contemporary, that enticing hollow of the now, as seen and heard and felt from its current cores of Berlin and New York. There, art, fashion, and nightlife are one continuous attraction, best investigated through the art of hanging out, at which Mak is both a deft hand and delightfully self-aware. What emerges are many of the themes of our times: psychosis, vertigo, addiction, identity, status, casual sex, casual violence, the post-industrial hustle. In the corners lurk the mean boys, avatars of the sheer carelessness of power. Yet Mak also discovers something like a faith in the precious, passing quality of anything that can be truly cherished. His is a sensibility of shelter in the storm. An intellectually rigorous memoir-in-essays that pairs reflections on [Mak’s] difficult sexual coming-of-age with sharp musings on the digital era . . . By turns heartbreaking, enlightening, and frenzied, this burrows deep in the reader’s psyche and doesn’t let go. A young, queer, Chinese American writer ‘well versed in the theoretical discourse’ takes on fashion, social media, and urban nightlife . . . [Mak] offers trenchant observations about the emasculation of the Asian American male and identity-based rejection . . . After fashion, career, psychosis, and recovery, a personal essayist finds ‘grace in the ordinary. A compelling chronicle of [Mak’s] rise as a critic and style expert. Expand reviews