Searching For The Naked Cowboy: Pure Cosmos Club By Matthew Binder

Evidently there is no escape from the venal hellhole of the modern condition. Matthew Binder’s latest novel would be delicious were its satirical take not so viscerally close to home, so attuned to the implosive decadence of a West in terminal decline. Like the ‘Injun’ in a Forties Western, Binder’s lug is pinned to the sand, listening for the distant onrush of a train bearing inexorably down upon us, and the tried and tested rubric of our customs.

And it is a characteristic of his métier that the solution is pyrrhic, that the grand clarifier can provide no resolution because it, too, is an embodiment of the problem. The Pure Cosmos Club is a postmodern cult, a reaction to all that the central protagonist and narrator of Binder’s story, Paul, is enmeshed in. Seeking a way through the woods – it is significant that that narrative is linear but ad hoc, as lost to reason as its denizens – Paul is in no sense abandoned. An oddly sympathetic figure, he clings to the wreckage of what I am tempted not to call a dystopia because it runs too nearly parallel to our own, as he is seduced by James, the charismatic leader of the cult. James purports to lead the “spiritually adrift”, like the gullible figure of Amol, towards a Krishna-esque Ashram of mental harmony, except that his mission is as prefabricated as a Televangelist’s. To an honest declaration of disinterest in “this world of material value”, James lets the cat out of the bag:

“I’m afraid your presence here is a mistake. There are minimum financial baselines required to advance through our program of cosmic oneness”.

The moment we learn of James’ agenda corroborates our long-held suspicion that certain purveyors of bullshit in our own age no longer bother to conceal the smell; Binder is a wise enough satirist to know that populist balloons float on thermals of overheated air, even as they gently persuade us of their stately bearing and rectitude. As Amol disappears flailing into the Adirondack rapids on a voyage of self-discovery, he is encouraged to “Just believe harder!” The answer to the book’s question is that there is no answer: any scraps of joy reside in watching what Philip Larkin called the ‘whole boiling’ crash and burn like the Hindenburg.

Paul, as narrator, is undirected, fully aware yet strangely dislocated, and it is to Binder’s credit that the tone of his novel(s) is characterised by an amused detachment, a philosophical imperative to look on everything with a wry and knowing smile. For here is the writer’s panoptic gift: the 'widening gyre' of information, of easy reference, of an intuitive knowledge of a depressing world’s kaleidoscopic mosaic, eternally broken and reconstructed as though by the designer of a jigsaw without corners or context. Because there is so much that glitters in this teeming, narrative-less universe, where things happen to Paul, who is both passive and reactive: in one sense a hapless character out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, in another, a searcher of truth beyond the mire of surreality and swamp of internal contradiction.

The story is not a story but a long, mentally skewed road trip, in which the fleeting dramatis personae are archetypes of addiction, of self-interest, emblematic of a tangential world bloated on opinion, self-aggrandisement and half-truth, where the settings for reason are disabled: Orsi, the sexually-charged and seductive Mittel-European acolyte; Danny, the loaded and cold-hearted wit who is unable to distinguish between art, commerce and self-promotion, and occupies an ivory tower of intellectualised near-psychopathy; Winston, the biddable follower. All are pushed and slapped about by the blandishments of impulse, self-propelled into deepening ignominy like a carnival of grotesques. And all are unconscionably believable.

It is fitting, in this anti-clockwise landscape, that the one oddly sentient corrective should be a dog – Blanche – who perambulates on wheels for back legs that don’t work and who has a fondness for quiche. Blanche is intelligent, an arbiter of good taste who directs traffic around her, exercising reasonable criticism and cajoling Paul towards a species of sense, not unlike ‘Colin from Accounts’, the semi-ambulant terrier-mix of the Australian comedy series, upon whom the narrative conceit of each episode hangs.

But most, the figure of James himself: uniquely skilled at the art of persuasion and of separating his followers from their cash, the increasingly remote leader is cunningly drawn by Binder. Burgeoning power leads to an increasing sense of cognitive dissonance as James detaches himself from the sphere of routine administration of the cult to be its supreme dispenser of guiding light, its godhead. Malleable and newly pliant, his acolytes begin to resemble the suicidally committed ciphers of David Koresh or Jim Jones. James’ hold is total; amongst the Bradbury-esque promise of book burnings (‘Marked for Incineration’), the spiritual leader’s mantra negotiates truth in its own perverse image:

“What is true is what serves the Pure Cosmos Club. Whatever harms it is a lie.”

There is much to savour, here: amongst the detritus, the re-emergent phenomenon of Populism is systematically size-nined - an unarguable swipe cast at those demagogues and arch-manipulators currently exercising a domino-effect across the globe, inverting truth as they pass through in increasing numbers: Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Bolsonaro, Johnson et al.



It would be laughable were it not so terrifying. This, for Binder, is where wealth, decadence, ignorance and a surfeit of indifference lead. His greatest suit lies in research, in his precocious ability to absorb the zeitgeist, and its hysterical range of follies, into a single condensed space, like Joyce. And to make it seem effortless. Referential, often concealed, Binder’s sense of Art is insouciant, meaning loaded into sentences like missiles into bomb-bays; his knowledge of art, history and contemporary culture is worn as carelessly as his protagonists’ capacity to deceive. Why is it, for example, that the platter of shellfish placed under the nose of Paul after a party is so redolent of William Carlos Williams’ symbolic plums?

“He leaves me there, the spell broken, and returns in a dry uniform just minutes later, with a fresh tray of shrimp. They are delicious.”

Except that Binder’s story is clotted, again like Joyce, with a thickening of purpose. Paul’s observations accrete with a kind of ingenuous elan, his artistic flair is at once prophetic and terminally innocent. He can make concealed intellectual pronouncements, invite philosophical bon mots in others, without compromising the salient truths of conditions of decadence and solipsism. Like the louche and degenerate Danny, who perorates with immense moral authority, then arranges for the mass extermination of cats to facilitate his burgeoning catskin bag business. Finding comedy in absurdist contradiction, Binder condemns the marginal-become-mainstream: the analysts, the personal ‘graphologists’, and the purveyors of New Age snake-oil, whose creative instinct is bound irrevocably up with the appeal of the fast buck:

“That his art sells so well is the best indication that he lacks any semblance of talent.”

Paul’s own moment of Freudian indiscretion – the pain of jealously overheard sexual congress precipitates a bout of voyeuristic onanism in a spidery attic – is almost matched by a practical illustration of the Sex and Death impulses as the ignominy of vicious intercourse is preceded by the letter of a wealthy socialite declining to support his impoverished, cancerous daughter.

Perhaps most surprising in a book of acerbic wisdom and intelligence, we find profoundly lyrical moments, whose presence is as sensitive to the claims of common humanity as it is counter-intuitive in a landscape rendered refractively. Such moments anchor Binder’s excesses in a heartbreaking present of grief, hope, and a kind of charity, and it is to these that we are somehow indebted:

“A hunched old woman with a red and yellow babushka is praying before three graves, her husband and children, I learn. She visits the cemetery every day, she says, because she loves flowers so much. I sniff her bouquet of daffodils, and she points me toward my hotel.”