The Novel as Revolutionary Instrument

Holiday Dmitri interviews “Mars Review of Books” founder Noah Kumin about his first novel.

 

Stop All the Clocks by Noah Kumin. Arcade, 2025. 240 pages.

 

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Noah Kumin when I stumbled upon his manifesto-like salvo on Substack, “Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism, Part 1: A New Path Forward for the Literary Arts (My Ultimate Aim),” and the subsequent “How Did Literature Get So Stuck? Why I Decided to Destroy Modernism, Part 2.” The essays express Kumin’s dismay with contemporary literature in 2024, in particular its fixation on individual subjectivity, and lay out his ambition to usher in a new literary movement.

 

Kumin, 35, is the founder and editor of The Mars Review of Books, a countercultural lit mag adjacent to New York City’s Dimes Square literary scene and its vaguely anti-woke politics. He is also the author of a philosophical pamphlet on the history of computing entitled The Machine War (2023). With his new, debut novel, Stop All the Clocks, Kumin excavates another timely topic: how technology is shaping humanity at this moment when the line between man and machine is becoming ever more blurred. His story centers on Mona Veigh, the misanthropic genius creator of an AI-generating poetry program, and her attempt to unravel the conspiracy connecting her to the alleged suicide of Avram Parr, an unconventional tech entrepreneur. Stop All the Clocks is a cloak-and-dagger thriller reminiscent of Graham Greene and William Gibson—a nimble novel brimming with big ideas, a summer page-turner whose intrigue lies in how technological progress interfaces with human hubris.

 

I met Kumin at a hotel lobby in the West Village where we conversed about AI, the New Right, Russian lit, the role of the philosophical novel today, and how contemporary writers might exploit the opportunities of the current age.

 

HOLIDAY DMITRI: It was so much fun reading about CRISPR, parabiosis, and biohacking in Stop All the Clocks—all things I’ve been toying with in my own novel that I haven’t seen written about in books with a literary bent.

 

NOAH KUMIN: They say be careful what you write about because then your life sort of becomes that. I now know people who are into biohacking and bio-modifying, which I didn’t when I started.

 

Is that something you’re into now too?

 

I’m curious about it. The furthest I’ve gotten is injecting pig brains. Have you heard of cerebrolysin? It’s an intelligence enhancer designed for stroke victims. But if you take it without having had a stroke, it’s supposed to do the same thing. I felt I could see the colors of the sunset more sharply.

 

Scientific and technological advancements play a big role in your book. Though you started writing it eight years ago, the novel’s themes and ideas feel so current.

 

Yeah, it’s crazy how of-the-moment it feels—like it’s ripped from the headlines. I mean, Hildegard [an oracle-like, poetry-generating computer program in Stop All the Clocks] is basically ChatGPT. It didn’t take Nostradamus to see that there was going to be something like this. I started writing it in 2016. Then [during the pandemic], I had more time on my hands and thought, Why don’t I try to understand this tech stuff rather than just kind of resist it? I zoomed out and made the story more philosophical.

 

I’m fascinated with your character Avram Parr—this techno-futurist cum mad-scientist entrepreneur. Was he inspired by someone you know?

 

No one in particular. I wanted to create somebody who embodied the new zeitgeist. We’re being faced now with more and more new questions because of how fast technology is accelerating. In some sense, I sympathize with those who believe it’s time to rethink things or want to think from first principles rather than rely on custom. There’s a new sort of person emerging that we haven’t seen before, and I wanted to get that type of person down on paper. You could call it the tech bro who writes code or is obsessed with writing code.

 

Do you know Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons? Bazarov is this nihilist, which in 1860s Russia was a hyper-left-wing position. He doesn’t subscribe to any authorities and takes nothing on faith. Neither church nor state nor family. I see Avram Parr as a new kind of Bazarov even though Bazarov was left-coded in Turgenev’s day and Avram Parr is more right-coded. But in a way, they’re the same character.

 

People who want to understand what’s happening today with tech—and, if you want to call it, “the New Right”—should read my book. The Avram Parrs of the world are Bazarov.

 

Speaking of which, the left-wing press has linked your magazine with the “avant-garde New Right.” What’s your response?

 

It’s a little cringe, but I associate [my magazine] more with the flourishing Dimes Square scene. When anybody talks about anything in literature or publishing or magazines, they invoke politics to make it more digestible or exciting. What I saw was [a] certain flourishing movement happening in the online world—weirdos, some of them anonymous, able to exist totally outside of the mainstream publishing world, which can be sort of a clubhouse and doesn’t necessarily select for the best people, because it’s kind of like, “Who do we want to invite to the club?” rather than looking for quality.

 

So, it’s not your intention to be provocative?

 

No, though sometimes I get into an unguarded mood. Maybe I’m a little schizophrenic. Maybe I’m not reading the room well. I go in and out of having that kind of bomb-throwing attitude. I will say, though, that the good things that have happened to me tend to come from my being unguarded and heedless. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter if people don’t really like you. We’re all eventually going to die.

 

Unless that biohacking stuff works.

 

[Laughs.] Yeah. So maybe we’re all going to die.

 

You’ve had authors from Christian Lorentzen to Magdalene Taylor in your magazine. Would you say you’re willing to engage with a diversity of voices?

 

Exactly. If you bring together the people published in The Mars Review of Books, they would all hate each other. I think I have been particularly successful at combining tech and arts in a way that other people aren’t otherwise doing. I published the “Zoomer Manifesto”—this Deleuzian pro-tech, insane manifesto about using new technology. So many people are doing interesting stuff online, and at the same time, there are so many other people in the prestige publishing world who want to have a little more freedom in what they’re able to write about and the way they are able to write. I was like, “Oh, what if I smash these two things together and kind of see what happens?” But, I mean, it’s hard. The people who are still reading are the older generations, and they’re less into that kind of innovation. It’s harder to engage your readership with new ideas and doing things differently.

 

I get it. The world feels like it’s slipping beyond comprehension. We want to hold on to whatever vestige we can.

 

But the incentives we’re faced with—we’re talking about tech incentives online—take that uncertainty and quash it, like “I’m so certain about this” and “This is so terrible.” We could all stand for a little more ambivalence in our lives. Something beautiful and alchemical happens when you take two opposite forces and you just kind of let them fight each other within you. That’s the thing the novel can do that nothing else can—bring ambivalence to life.

 

Or what the novel should do.

 

Absolutely—I’ll say that without ambivalence. If you just want to polemicize or propound theories or say “This is right or wrong,” social media does that well. What’s the point of writing a whole novel about it? It’s a waste of your own time and everybody else’s.

 

You’ve written about how contemporary fiction has become too polemical and insular, and you say that what’s needed is a new literary arts movement based on “the play of ideas.” Can you say more on what you want to see for the novel of tomorrow?

 

In the future, we need to return to the novel of ideas. There’s a great essay by Lionel Trilling called “Art and Fortune,” and in it he says that what the novel can do is make ideology concrete. You can’t just have theories in a novel but have to look at how those theories play out in your life. The novel can and should do this very delicate thing of elaborating on an ideology concretely, teasing out the thread.

 

But we’ve shifted away from that. I don’t see lots of novels with a new Bazarov. You can trace this lineage—the focus on details and smallness—in the novel from Nabokov to Updike to Zadie Smith. Rabbit, Run was just this story about one small-town guy. I love all these writers, but we’ve lost the sense of the novel as a grand forum for ideas. In the 1980s and ’90s, the focus was on “the end of history.” Religion was over. Liberal democracy was going to spread across the world. Everything had been figured out. There really wasn’t anything to say about the way we should live, or society, or politics. Now, all of that is in play again. It would be good if Zadie Smith or Jonathan Franzen learned to code. I want to read my contemporaries. I feel awkward saying, “Oh, people aren’t doing this” when there are lots of great people I don’t know about, but I don’t know who they are. We kind of lost that curatorial element, and that’s what I wanted the Mars Review to do: separate the wheat from the chaff. How do you know who’s a reputable source when everything is so decentralized and fragmented? Because of technological changes, it’s hard to figure out.

 

That’s my biggest fear as someone who’s taking forever to finish her novel. How do you catch up to the times when technology moves so fast and writing and publishing take so long?

 

That’s a really good question. That’s the hardest part. I intend to write a sequel to Stop All the Clocks that takes place in the near future because I want to capture the spirit of the age. But it’s a big disadvantage that novelists face now.

 

You need to be Octavia Butler in your ability to predict the future.

 

Yeah, when you fall behind on stuff like that, it breaks the spell. Take Nathan Englander, who is a good writer, and who had a book come out called kaddish.com. I saw that and was like, “This shouldn’t be a website. It should be an app!” Which, of course, is not the point, but it’s also true. I think that’s the answer though: you’ve got to be five years ahead. Then by the time your work is published, it’ll be especially relevant.

 

Holiday Dmitri holds an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson with additional degrees in journalism, social science, and international affairs from Northwestern, University of Chicago, and the New School in New York City respectively. She lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a speculative literary novel exploring identity and isolation in an age of so-called connectivity.

 

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-novel-as-revolutionary-instrument/