I have always had a thing for clowns. Their gaudy face paint, the theatricality of their antics, their running gags you can see from a mile away but still have to laugh at once they appear. I’m a sucker for the absolute commitment to their storytelling identities. But one genre of clowning draws me in a bit further. I’ve always been captivated by the sad clown, a performer who can make us laugh taking pie after whipped pie to the face, painted tears streaming down his cheeks. The duality of darkness and oddball comedy creates this amazing emotional friction when done right. That same emotional friction is ultimately what I found most powerful and provocative in Matthew Binder’s Pure Cosmos Club, out May 15th from Stalking Horse Press.
Matthew Binder’s newest novel tells the story of Paul, an artist living with his wheelchair-bound pup Blanche (“the only name fitting for such a distinguished lady”) in an artists’ loft in Brooklyn after he fails to pay rent for his own apartment. It’s a wacky slice of life tale that starts with Paul’s ex picking up her belongings and then evolves into a plot filled with deadly snake bites, expensive exhibitions for mediocre art, a stolen one-of-a-kind marble, outrageous retreats to the Hamptons courtesy of Paul’s wealthy friend Danny, a brief love affair with a cult leader’s wife, roadkill couture, and (to totally understate it) some toe dips into the spiritual cult that promises to “transcend the drudgery of daily life by tapping into the Universal Mind.”
The darker tones throughout the book lent an effect where I felt something was off but almost refused to let it phase me. I was so entranced by whatever gag Paul was lost in, be it stopping midtown traffic to chase a marble or passing Blanche off as a service dog to allow her entry into the Times Square Olive Garden (her service was picking out Paul’s dinner from the laminated menu—the lasagna classico). I don’t know any other book where I’d read a vignette about a mass suicide drill—a sure callback to Jim Jones’ white nights—and end the chapter feeling relatively neutral and even laughing. I saw these darker moments come up against Paul and others around him, but everyone breezed by them, unscathed and happy to continue on their merry way. Or they would justify the horrors with oddly profound aphorisms: “Life consists of madness spiked with lies, but some people are guilty of only ever hearing what they want to hear,” “The most poisonous of flowers often blooms from the smallest seed,” and “I never miss anyone longer than forever” being some of my favorites.
Pure Cosmos Club is a modern-day Everyman, it’s a Marx Brothers film if they unknowingly joined an MLM and Harpo was a canine, it’s Ace Ventura Pet Detective meets Art Basel, it’s Cassandra shouting unabsorbable truths dressed as a jester in the middle of Times Square, it’s Sullivan’s Travels about “making it” in the New York art world, but only if Veronica Lake was a girlboss dog who wore cashmere.
At first, I was totally thrown by the juxtaposition of jarring occurrences and characters just chugging along in response, but once I got used to this bizarre storytelling pattern, I leaned into it. Especially when it involved Blanche, because a dog with a character arc like hers deserves to be celebrated.
On the topic of characters: the cast of Pure Cosmos Club is full of life in every form it can take, deftly blending humor with melancholy in ways that transcend realism. Paul himself is the engine behind the plot’s rollercoaster: he is consistently inconsistent, a hot mess, an utter buffoon, and a potentially prolific artist. I’ve 100% dated some version of Paul in my twenties (it must be the clown thing!) As outlandish and wild as he was, I wanted to see him win. There is some childlike purity to his incongruous choices that makes him, for lack of a better word, likable. Considering Blanche’s gentle redirections (peeing or vomiting on his pants in response to some of Paul’s harebrained schemes), it’s clear who wears the pants in this relationship.
New York City itself is a major character, a spiritually gutted space where wealth and success are top of all priorities. For people who have nothing to anchor their faith in, it’s a hazardous environment. As someone who flitted through the Big Apple during my twenties spiritually adrift, I recognized this rendering as a sad reality I’ve known intimately. Hindsight being 20/20, my memories of that time take on a lackluster patina of gray, rotten centers. I too was a pawn in a “not a cult but pretty much a low-level cult” training group at a gym because I loved the way the community made me feel when I lacked a sense of self-worth. My acceptance within this group moved as fast as a shotgun wedding. It was sexy being wanted in that way, having people fawn over me like a new toy. I felt special and valuable. To top it all off, I had never been that buff in my entire life and for a kid who was always picked last in gym class, the validation was priceless. Having those people in my corner, whether that corner was a boxing ring or a bar taking shot after shot, was the strongest high I’ve ever felt. I never wanted to come down. I wanted to suck all the good feelings out of these experiences, marinate in them forever, but instead they ended up sucking everything out of me: my individuality, my free will, my gut instinct. Looking at photos of myself from that time, I see a young girl with insane biceps, a tiny waist, and empty eyes.
New York City itself is a major character, a spiritually gutted space where wealth and success are top of all priorities. For people who have nothing to anchor their faith in, it’s a hazardous environment.
It takes Paul all of the book to even get a hint of a gut instinct, what he believes is true and just on his own, and even then I wonder how long it will be before he joins another doomsday cult or spirituality MLM. But I didn’t close the book necessarily worried about what was going to happen to Paul. I closed the book grinning ear to ear like a child saying “Again! Again!” at a clown trick. It’s only in the weeks after I hit the words “The End” that I’ve thought back on Pure Cosmos Club and the bleakness of reaching The Ultimate Level. At first thought, I questioned if I’d read the book wrong, if I misunderstood what was happening to me as a reader, if my own history clouded a purer vision of the story. But I slowly accepted that two truths can exist at once, despite the discomfort and confusion of witnessing them together. I think of the surprise Milk Bar birthday cake my team presented me with on my 25th birthday at a dive bar in Williamsburg, before my trainer, after we were all good and drunk, told us if he ever put poison in our beers and told us to drink it, we would. We all laughed and kept drinking to avoid the truth in his statement. There’s something powerful about a book that can do this, pull us just close enough to see the outskirts of true chaos happening behind the scenes, while allowing a goofball character hellbent on finding some meaning in life take center stage.
When I first started reading Pure Cosmos Club, I constantly turned to read the summary on the back cover and will admit I balked a few times as the story grew wilder and hairier than promised. But honestly, I don’t even know what additions I would make to the jacket copy outside of, “Just read this book.” A month and some change after finishing, I’m still pondering how I’d describe the experience and even think I’m failing at this review. I feel that this struggle, trying to define a book by art I’ve consumed before and coming up short, comes only when I’ve encountered a work that is beyond comparison. But if I were to try, here is my short list: Pure Cosmos Club is a modern-day Everyman, it’s a Marx Brothers film if they unknowingly joined an MLM and Harpo was a canine, it’s Ace Ventura Pet Detective meets Art Basel, it’s Cassandra shouting unabsorbable truths dressed as a jester in the middle of Times Square, it’s Sullivan’s Travels about “making it” in the New York art world, but only if Veronica Lake was a girlboss dog who wore cashmere.
Ultimately, I keep coming back to the idea of a trick mirror from a fairground fun house: how ridiculous and silly it is to see your body morph into something clownish, almost unreal, before your eyes. But even in a trick mirror, there is some semblance of truth, however distorted. We can recognize our eyes, however cartoonish, our mouths, gaping, our legs, languid and unsure. No matter how skinny or pudgy, how stretched or how scrunched, the soundless forms still belong to us and are reflected back for us to witness. Whether they are laughing or screaming is only up to us to decide.
Pure Cosmos Club is available May 15th wherever books are sold. In addition to this review, I’ve curated a playlist based on the novel which you can listen to on Spotify. Apologies to Apple Music users.