Last week, I was at karaoke, singing “Happy Hour” by the Housemartins (because, as we’ve established, I’m cool like that), when I noticed something about the lyrics.  What with the lines “where the haircuts smile / and the meaning of style / is a night out with the boss” and “he tells me that women grow on trees / and if you catch them right they will land upon their knees,” it could be a theme song for anybody who has ever had to put up with the Hubert Puberts of the world.  So I decided to put together a Hubert-themed playlist, as a (hopefully) final goodbye to girls and all who sailed in her.

“Help The Aged” by Pulp:  A song about what Hubert wants in a relationship (“give a hand, if you can / try and help them to unwind / give them hope and give them comfort / cause they’re running out of time“).

“Material Girl” by Madonna:  What Hubert imagines that women see in him (“cause the boy with the cold hard cash / is always Mr Right“).

“Now You’re A Man” by DVDA:  I’m not going to spoil the lyrics for you- just click on it and listen for yourself (but not if you’re around small children).  It’s very Hubert, especially the second verse.

“See You Later, Alligator” by Bill Haley and his Comets:  In honour of the heroic alligator farmer early on in the book.

“Pretty Vacant” by the Sex Pistols:  An accurate description of Hubert’s dream woman.

“Jilted John” by Jilted John:  What happens whenever Hubert makes the mistake of competing with a man who has actual positive traits, such as the alligator farmer or Clay the copper (“Oh, she is cruel and heartless / to pack me in for Gordon / just cause he’s better looking than me / just cause he’s cool and trendy“).

“Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears:  OK, the lyrics don’t have much to do with Hubert, but the song was obliquely referenced in the book itself, so it seemed worth putting in.  Plus, the video features a pretty eighteen-year-old dancing around in a school uniform, so Hubert probably watches it on repeat constantly.

“Perfect” by Alanis Morissette:  Hubert’s vision of ideal parenting (“don’t forget to win first place / don’t forget to keep that smile on your face“).

“He’s Misstra Know-It-All”” by Stevie Wonder:  A depiction of Hubert’s business practices (“makes a deal / with a smile / knowing all the time that his lie’s a mile“).

“Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne:  In honour of Hubert’s strange, five-year-old-harassing friend (“and I know that you think it’s just a fantasy / but since your dad walked out, your mom could use a guy like me“).

And, of course, “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by The Police.

(I’m sure we all wish that Hubert would take the title literally.)

Unfortunately, I will be unable to continue my reviews of girls, as I seem to have destroyed my copy in a fit of rage.

(Let’s just say the plot was full of holes.)

It was that dig at Lolita that finally did it.  When your first novel is a blatant knock-off of another, much better-known, book, it’s probably not a good idea to throw in sneering references halfway through.  It’s not even as if Lolita’s one of my favourite books, but there’s a reason that it’s considered a Twentieth Century classic while girls was on sale for £1.99 in The Works less than two years after its first printing.  For one thing, Vladimir Nabokov actually gave his characters names.

Beyond that, I just couldn’t stomach another moment in this strange parallel world where justice and compassion are a myth, nothing is more important than money and power, and all men secretly want to go to bed with twelve-year-olds.*  I suppose you could interpret my giving up as evidence for J.T. LeRoy’s quote about the razorblades pressing in too close, but, by that logic, the same is true of YouTube comment sections, because I’ve given up reading those as well.  Saying the most infuriating thing you can possibly think of doesn’t automatically make you worth listening to.

I’m sure that, at some point in the last sixty pages, there was some kind of plot twist in which Hubert and Business Cat realised exactly how moronic everything they’d said, done and thought so far truly was, but it had got well past the point where it would have been worth it.  Quite apart from the horrible characters, the book was a load of pretentious wank that seemed to think that disconnected musings about anything that came to mind was the same thing as being profound.  People make fun of E.L. James for essentially publishing her fanfic, but I think Nic Kelman might have essentially published his dream journal.

My only regret is that I now have no excuse to post any more of my silly mouse drawings.  But I’m sure I’ll survive.

*True, I am not myself a man, nor can I read their minds, so I don’t have any definite proof that they don’t.  But I’d say that, in a case like that, the burden of proof is really on the person making the claim, wouldn’t you?

 (pages 127-149)

Hubert’s at a nightclub with his girlfriend, feeling insulted when the DJ describes a ten-year-old song as a “classic.”  Look, if calling “I Predict A Riot” a classic is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.  He is taken aback to see a thirteen-year-old girl wearing an obscene T-shirt.  I’m not sure if the implication is that he’s having a sudden attack of conscience, or if it’s that he’s thinking, “See?  Teenagers talk about sex sometimes!  Therefore I am completely justified in trying to have highly exploitative sex with them!”

Hubert likes young girls because they’re the only ones who aren’t scared of him.  I think he’s mixed up “scared” and “repulsed.”

He meets a PVC-clad goth girl, and stares at her boobs.  He sees her again a couple of times throughout the evening, which makes him think about how fat his girlfriend is going to get as she gets older.  Hubert himself is already middle-aged and bald, but apparently that’s not important.

The band they’ve come to see pulls fourteen-year-old boys up on stage, gets them to take their shirts off, and encourages the audience to ogle them.  Hubert is turned on.  He is NOT GAY, you understand, just happy for the boys because they got to be felt up by older women.

Hubert has a friend who regularly goes up to five-year-olds and tells them how much he fancies their mothers.  Strangely, this friend isn’t in jail.

There’s a bit about women in Russia who resorted to prostitution after the Soviet Union collapsed, and how men would flock to Russia for the chance to humiliate a well-educated woman who now couldn’t get a job.  The narrator (who is presumably neither Hubert nor Business Cat, owing to this whole bit being in third-person) worries that some of these women might have faked their qualifications, meaning that the poor men who wanted to degrade a former university professor were tricked into degrading a former shop assistant or something.   Unethical business practices are a terrible thing.

Business Cat’s wife redecorated their flat while he wasn’t there.  How very dare she.

Hubert once had a dog.  Sorry- Hubert might have once had a dog, since saying anything happened for certain would be dangerously close to having a plot, and we can’t have that.  Anyway, Hubert loved his hypothetical dog, but worried that one day he and his dog would swap places and the dog would be the one to decide where he ate and slept.  I’ve got to say, I’d probably trust the dog’s judgement more.

Hubert’s now been divorced twice.  Big shocker, I know.  He asks his friend how his marriage has lasted so long, and it turns out that it’s because his wife lets him have threesomes with eighteen-year-olds.  This is getting really monotonous.

Back in university, Hubert set his friend up with a girl so that he could lose his virginity.  We find this out in the first sentence of this section, but Hubert still takes a page and a half to tell us.

“The Romans didn’t believe in Justice more than the early Greeks, they simply realized its usefulness.  They realized while a man fights well for something he wants, he fights even better for something he thinks he deserves.”

Everyone is afraid of Hubert, even his parents.  He thinks it’s because he’s become so rich and powerful, but I think it’s just because he’s Hubert.

Oddly enough, there’s now a bit about Lolita.  I swear I didn’t know this before I wrote the last post.  Anyway, apparently Nabokov wimped out by making Lolita twelve rather than, say, eight, because that made the book less shocking, because we all know that all men fancy twelve-year-olds anyway.  I think Nic Kelman might have missed the point of the book.

Business Cat denies that he hates women.  No, you just want to make them into lobotomised sex-dolls who conveniently disappear as soon as they turn thirty.  Nothing hateful about that.

(pages 110-127)

More than once over the last couple of weeks, I’ve described this book as “a bit like Lolita, only crap.”  Of course, the important thing about Lolita is that it has an unreliable narrator, a guy who convinces himself that he’s a bold romantic hero, only to realise near the end of the book that he’s actually just a scuzzy little sexual predator who has ruined the life of the girl he claims to love.  I’m looking forward to Hubert and the first-person narrator having a moment like that.  I hope they’re going to, anyway, because at the moment girls is looking an awful lot like a literary version of this.

Speaking of the first-person narrator, I’m still not sure what to call him.  I’m torn between King Dong (because of his great thoughts on how men have more in common with gorillas than with women) and Business Cat.

Hubert’s employees gossip about him behind his back.  You would too, if your boss was Hubert.  Specifically, they talk about the time he fell out with his business partner, who then shot himself.  Honestly, that strikes me as the least gossip-worthy thing about Hubert, but to each his own.

We also find out that Hubert’s wife has left him.  Good for her!

Something about Paris killing Patroclus in The Iliad.  You know, I think I’m going to skip the Iliad quotations from now on, unless they’re particularly juicy.  They rarely have anything to do with what’s actually going on in the story.  Such as it is.

Hubert is travelling the world, eating guinea pigs.  As if we didn’t already know that he was history’s greatest monster.  Oh, and he also finds kinship wherever he goes with other men who like to sleep with teenage girls.  It’s nice to find something that transcends cultural borders.

Business Cat (it’s the classier option) talks about his wife kissing him goodbye in the car instead of in front of his mates, who might make fun of him.  The he talks about the origins of the C-word, and how it was Homer who started using it as an insult for women, so blame him.  It’s funny; where I come from, the C-word is almost always used as an insult for men, not women.  In fact, for a few years in the early 2000s, I only ever heard it applied to Tony Blair.  It was like his own personal insult.

Also, the C-word is related to “cunning,” which makes sense because women are crafty bitches.  Trufax.

Hubert has a female friend.  I know- I’m as surprised as you are.  The book does specify that she’s the only one, though.  I mean, let’s not go nuts.  He’s surprised to find that he’s attracted to her, even though she’s his age.  Surreal!

He doesn’t enjoy sleeping with her, though, so that’s alright.  It turns out that she also has a thing for teenagers, and enjoys it when her boyfriends end up sleeping with Hubert’s girlfriends.  The phrase “wind them up and watch them go” popped into my head when I read that bit, and I’m still shuddering.  But still, Hubert looks down his nose at her because she just sleeps with teenagers for “aesthetics,” not for philosophical reasons like he does.  Hubert the hipster perv!

Hubert denies hanging around outside local schools.  He very specifically denies it.  Why would you suggest such a thing?  Honestly…

Let’s see…  Men admire villains because they dominate people…  Hubert used to believe that his face would stay that way if the wind changed…  Business Cat associates his wife with temples…  I’m not seeing much of a connecting theme, here.  See, this kind of thing is what I mean by “like Lolita, only crap.”  Lolita had an actual plot.

Finally, Hubert meets a gay person who is into teenagers as well, which makes Hubert decide to extend the hand of brotherhood.  It’s a beautiful story of social acceptance.

We’re nearly at the halfway point now, and, so far, I’m not seeing the transgressive beauty that J.T. LeRoy and the others were raving about on the back cover.  If you’re just joining us, we’ve been through ninety pages of Hubert Pubert and the first-person narrator, who may or may not be a) the same person or b) intended to be remotely sympathetic, trying to compensate for their many, many inadequacies by dating girls who are too young and naïve to realise they could do better.  Occasionally they wax lyrical about how they are men and therefore warriors and they seek power as their birthright.  If I wanted to read in depth about people like that, I’d spend an hour looking through the We Hunted The Mammoth archives.

The above is a cartoon I drew when I was fourteen.  Clearly, my Year Nine rough book deserved excited back-cover cover quotes from memoirists who fib a lot.

Back in the book, Hubert reminisces about his bisexual ex-girlfriend and how they once had a threesome with her ex.  Then there’s a bit from The Iliad about a guy whose mother made him seduce his father’s mistress in order to stir up trouble.  Now why can’t I be reading that story instead of about boring old Hubert?

Hubert compares his girlfriends’ political beliefs to small children getting excited about pointing out fire hydrants.  You might think that this is patronising, but when you know what’s coming up in a few sections, you’ll see that it’s actually horrifying.

Hubert has a daughter who is older than his girlfriend.  He makes her work his law firm, within reach of his slimy friends.  Ick.

There’s a bit about the lamia, who is known for drinking men’s blood.  And yet I know that this book isn’t going to end with Hubert and his mates being exsanguinated by one, so why are you taunting me, Nic Kelman?

The first-person narrator blames his divorce on the fact that he and his wife never went to museums anymore.  Nothing to do with the fourteen-year-olds, then.  Sooner or later I need to come up with an insulting nickname for this guy, too.  What can it be?  Herbert the Pervert’s already taken.

There’s a bit about how proud Hubert’s dad was that he was a total horndog as a kid, and another bit about strippers and porn stars and how they’re actually complex human beings, you know.  As long as they’re under thirty, I guess.

(Actually, I completely agree that it’s wrong to dismiss somebody’s intelligence and worth as a human being just because they’ve got a slightly raunchy job.  It’s just that when someone like Hubert tells you how intelligent and grounded most strippers are, it always comes with the implication that, if you were intelligent and grounded, you too would give him a lapdance whenever he asked.)

Hubert is in Amsterdam.  Guess what he’s doing.  Go on, guess.  You know, in How Not to Write a Novel, they warn against something called “The Second Fellatio in the Laundromat”; i.e.- when one sex scene is functionally identical to another one earlier in the book, and only really exists to provide padding.  That’s this scene in a nutshell.  This prostitute is also underage (or rather, would be underage in the US, where Hubert lives), and Hubert again congratulates himself on being so adventurous.  He reflects that she was probably abused as a child, and also that she’ll be surprised when she’s twenty and men find her less attractive.  He gives her a bit more money than he needs to, by way of charity.  I’m pretty sure Hubert’s still alive at the end of the book.  There’s no justice.

There’s a sentence that begins, “There is so much sociobiology I cold bore you with.”  For “could,” read “will,” and for “bore you,” read “make your synapses shut down in self-defence.”  But anyway, apparently men have more in common with gorillas than they do with women.  Well, gorillas have tiny penises, so that’s true for Hubert, at least.

Hubert’s friend is dating an eighteen-year-old model.  Hubert is also dating various eighteen-year-olds, but becomes jealous when he hears that his friend’s girlfriend collects cuddly toys and makes him “pinkie promise” to call her.  She’s so childlike and charming!  That’s totally not a creepy thing to find attractive in somebody already younger than your daughter!

(I’ve never once met an eighteen-year-old who used the phrase “pinkie promise.”  Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve met anyone over thirteen who used it.  And then only the really annoying thirteen-year-olds.)

Hubert’s friend feels a bit guilty for dating an eighteen-year-old, but Hubert thinks, “When he realises that this is something he not only needs but deserves, he’ll stop feeling bad.”  In Hubert’s worldview, his friend deserves to be with an eighteen-year-old girl who talks and acts like she’s twelve.  This is what the universe owes him.  I’ve read books about actual, real-life serial killers that have creeped me out less than this.

More from The Iliad.  Achilles wants to kill Helen for turning men against each other.  Bros before hoes, eh?  Meanwhile, Hubert is impressed by another friend’s beautiful, subservient girlfriend, and even more impressed that said friend is secure enough in his relationship to call her fat in front of his friends and refuse to acknowledge her otherwise.  Finally, we find out that the divorce rate for veterans in the US is no higher than the national average.  Good for them.

The first-person narrator says that it’s a parent’s job to teach children to be competitive.  In particular, it’s their job to teach their daughters to compete with other young, pretty girls for the attention of old, grimy men.  Seriously, My Friend Dahmer is a million times less creepy.

There’s then a bit about Elizabeth Bathory, who is also not going to kill Hubert.  Granted, I’m probably going to see every character who is introduced from now on as yet another person who isn’t going to kill Hubert, but I know for a fact that Elizabeth Bathory has both the means and the motive.  It’s a shame to see a genuine talent go to waste, that’s all I’m saying.

And with that, we reach the halfway point, and I think I’m going to take a break from this for a week.  This book is seriously getting me down, and this was the worst section yet.  There’s only so much time you can spend in the head of a misogynistic borderline-paedophile before you start to lose faith in humanity.  I’m going to spend some time with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, reminding myself that sometimes books have an actual plot, sometimes characters aren’t completely reprehensible in every way, and sometimes sentences contain actual humour instead of condescending pretension.

“The average Vogon will not think twice before doing something so pointlessly hideous to you that you will wish you had never been born- or (if you are a clearer-minded thinker) that the Vogon had never been born.”

Ahhh.  See you next week.

We discover that Hubert doesn’t enjoy sex unless the women he’s with let him rough them up a bit and call them whores and bitches.  Surprise.  He also acts sniffy about the concept of “women’s liberation.”  Double surprise.  I mean, it is a movement based on convincing women that they have options in life beyond catering to the whims of Hubert and his pals.  I can see how that would annoy him.

The first-person narrator remembers buying a house with his wife, resenting the fact that she chose most of the furniture, and having sex in every room.  Following this, it’s The Iliad again, with Achilles lamenting over Briseis.  Then Hubert worrying about his love-handles.  One of these things is not like the other.

Also, it’s OK to cheat on your wife because everybody does it.  And rich men pay assistants to distract their wives from the fact that they’re cheating on them, so that’s doubly OK.  Good to know.

Hubert wanks over a photo of his underage girlfriend.  We finally have a confirmed age for him- forty-two- which just makes me wish I was reading Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy right now.  Arthur Dent is more man than Hubert will ever be.

More from The Iliad, then we have Hubert on holiday with his long-suffering wife.  He has a fancy new camera.  He is very proud of his fancy new camera.  His wife shows off the fancy new camera to another couple.  Hubert suspects that the husband is jealous because he cannot buy his own wife a new camera as fancy as this one.  After they’ve gone, Hubert’s wife refers to then as “a nice couple,” but Hubert knows his wife is foolish, because the husband is jealous of his fancy new camera.  This is beginning to sound like something from Clickhole.

There’s a bit about people going to see graveyards and monuments while on vacation.  I think it’s supposed to be profound.

Hubert goes to New Orleans.  You have probably guessed that he meets a beautiful young woman who is inexplicably attracted to him, and you would be correct.  Her name is Elena, and he knows her from a modelling shoot a few years ago.  We’re told that he only went after her because she’d been seen with another man previously.  I’m not sure if we’re meant to read this as jealousy or homoeroticism.  Could be both.

In the present day, Elena seems upset about something.  She married the other man instead of Hubert, and now he cheats on her.  Hubert, meanwhile, has a much younger girlfriend who thinks Elena’s top is too low-cut.  The moral of the story is, never dump Hubert.

The first-person narrator and his wife skip work and go for a romantic drive.  He assures us that he never really loved her.  There is then a discussion of the various meanings of “love,” and how it’s really about owning things.  Woman are things, after all.