Controversy surrounded the publication of Mark Peel’s long-awaited debut novel Shithead this year. A grueling account of a series of semifictionalized sexual encounters, running from public fellatio on the Brooklyn Bridge to a threesome with a member of the Trump administration, it sharply divided critics.
Some reviewers thought it heralded the arrival of the “neo-bro” — “the sort of man,” in the words of Emily Yudkowsky from the Startler, “who has greasy facial hair, listens to a lot of podcasts, and is just self-critical enough about his own worst instincts to imagine that he can get away with being misogynistic.” Other reviewers praised the novel, with Anna Novak in the Manhattan Review of Books calling it “the bastard son of John Updike and Hubert Selby Jr.” For Novak, reactions such as Yudkowsky’s represented a “neo-puritanism” that “would have actually got D.H. Lawrence banned.”
