Controversy is profitable. Attention is limited. Accordingly, the publishing industry is quick to signal its relevance through clickbait book titles, often using flashes of provocative language to flag the modish extremes of online culture. Pitched by press and publishers as an exploration of urban masculinity in the Donald Trump era, Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi is the latest attempt to combine viral appeal with a more complex story.

Fuccboi is incredibly annoying. The main cause of this is the novel’s style: most of it written in a series of clipped, single sentence paragraphs that often suppress the subject or first word of the sentence. A Philadelphia native, the narrator’s voice is expressed through a consistent use of working-class colloquialisms (a voice that Conroe notes in the acknowledgements section he sees as merely the fictive expression of his own). But while Conroe is an aggravating stylist, he is also an original one. So I persisted through my frustrations — finding a more interesting book than I had anticipated.