Ross Mathcamp might have just become a millionaire overnight due to losing both of his parents in a helicopter crash on route to Turks & Caicos, but it’s the least of his worries. He willingly let go of his girlfriend Lora Liamant, the love of his life, as a dastardly test to convince her of his own greatness, but it backfires, and he finds himself alone. Now free to do however as he pleases, he embarks on a mission of self-discovery and improvement in order to win her back, but a neurotic and insecure young Jewish guy might have more problems than a medicine drawer full of supplements and high-tech gadgets can manage on their own. A ridiculously funny and absurd tale of heartbreak in the modern age, Let Me Try Again is as witty and sharp as debuts come.
Our Culture sat down with Matthew Davis to talk about nice Jewish boys, writing provocatively, and moral absolutism.
Congrats on your debut novel! How does it feel for it to be out?
It’s an interesting change, because I wrote this four years ago, and it’s taken so long for it to come out. There have been all sorts of weird roadblocks and false conclusions that come up along the way. I’m glad people are liking it; it seems people are responding moderately well to it. I guess I’m waiting for it to get more attention — I haven’t done enough of these yet, I guess.
I just read the piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books!
Yeah, I was reading that this morning. It compared me to these great Jewish writers, [Philip] Roth and Joshua Cohen, Saul Bellow — there was a lot about Saul Bellow in that article, actually. But it failed to consider how my book subverts some of the neurotic nihilism of the Jewish comic novel by introducing a pretty significant Catholic element, which is how it differentiates itself from different Jewish novels.
With you and Ross both young Jews in New York City, Let Me Try Again could be read as autofiction, but there’s enough jokes and absurdity for it to be an entirely new character. But was your own life a starting point?
I think certain feelings I had, articulating what’s funny about them — all of the worst things about me are probably there in Ross. But I think the biographical details of Ross are actually quite different, and I didn’t do any of the stuff he did. But it’s fair to say that Ross reacts to things around him in a similar way that I would have at that age.
Ross is such an interesting character — he’s health-obsessed, cocky, convinced of his greatness. He says to his psychiatrist, “I want someone to tell me I’m smart and amazing and handsome and cook and clean for me.” How was it like writing his thought process?
There’s part of Ross that’s deeply insecure, because he is quite young. Looking back at some of the stuff, it’s hard to remember whether I was making fun of what 23-year-olds have to say, or if they’re things I actually felt. Now with four years of distance from it, I can pretend they’re genius satire insights into the young Jewish psyche. But I tried to imagine some of the worst and most selfish and delusional thoughts I’ve ever had. I was probably writing this like how I acted when I was 19. Whatever the quote you just read is probably pretty close to something I would have wanted around then.
Yeah, he’s a very provocative narrator, deeply funny but unflinching — he laments that poor people aren’t smart enough (like he is) to be responsible for their money, helps friends who associate his Jewishness with financial knowledge, and after not registering a white mugger as a threat, he offers pro-bono tutoring for children of color. With him being so sharp, did you feel a need to limit his ideas or personality?
No — in all of those things, I feel like he’s coming from a good, 21st century liberal place, but I think the commentary basically is reviewing some of the crueler, arrogant attitudes that are behind some of these well-meaning things. Through the book, he comes up with these policy proposals, so he talks about taking the money when you buy a lottery ticket and secretly investing that for poor people. That’s probably an idea I had when I was younger that actually would work, but it’s articulated in a way that’s so convoluted and patronizing. Basically mean. It’s coming from a mean place, but it has the effect of doing something good, and I think there’s something funny and subversive about that.
Let Me Try Again is a very Jewish book and I related to most of it — the standout phrase is when he says, “My upbringing simply wouldn’t allow me to love any woman who didn’t treat me like her special little genius.” We talked about Roth earlier, were you trying to emulate someone like that?
I was actually thinking a lot about Franz Kafka, who I think was a more worthy predecessor in this funny Jewish guy way, for people like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. Roth, to me, seems like an evil version of Woody Allen, and maybe it’s just that Woody makes these lighthearted movies and Roth has a darker side to him. I was definitely inspired more so by Kafka, Woody Allen, Larry David. I think there’s a lot of George Costanza in Ross’s outbursts and frustrations of the world around him.
To win back his girlfriend, Ross employs The Goldberg Strategy — based on a physically fit Jewish wrestler who resisted against the stereotype of the weak Jew — and ups his prescriptions, supplements, and starts weightlifting. Why do you think he’s so health-obsessed, and eschews the idea that his personality might be the problem?
Well, the obsession with health and supplements — he has all these gadgets, like a headband that measures his brain waves while he sleeps — I think there’s so many remedies available to us. I think there’s a tendency or hopefulness to think that if I just buy one more pill, it’ll be the thing that fixes me. But I think there’s also something going on with a deep dissatisfaction with his body, he feels limited by it. He’s arrogant about his mind and mental abilities, and there’s this sense that his personality and his mind is who he really is, and if someone doesn’t like him, it’s very likely there’s something wrong with his body which he’s constantly at war with and takes measures to modulate.
To his credit, he does admit that breaking up with Lora is the wrong decision.
Yeah, he’s full of regret. I think he’s a ruminator and ultimately dissatisfied. Throughout the book he thinks he’s an idiot, which I mentioned earlier there’s a deep insecurity and he hates himself in a lot of ways. He was unhappy when he was with Lora and then was unhappy when he wasn’t with her. He couldn’t help but feel like he made a mistake.
One thing I thought was interesting is how antsy around sex he is — he regrets the women he brings to his apartment whom he meets on apps, and hates to see Lora with her new man, and both his being replaced and her dating anyone influences it. This seems atypical of a wealthy guy in New York to be disgusted by them — what influenced this trait?
I don’t know if he’s quite disgusted — I think the second woman Ross encounters, she’s kind of mean to him. He seems to like having sex with Lora in the book, because he views that as actually liking him. But when it’s with some stranger he can’t wrap his head around why someone would even want to do that. It disturbs him, I guess.
I just remember that word because a chapter starts with the phrase, “After my night with that disgusting woman…” and I laughed.
I don’t remember that line, but that’s a funny line, for sure. What’s interesting about Ross is that he wasn’t raised with religion, so he has these feelings and moralistic tendencies but he’s not exactly sure where they’re coming from, they’re deep inside of him. He has these intuitions but can’t fully articulate why he feels this way.
Is that why, when Emily [his sister] converts to Catholicism, he thinks it’s wrong, but isn’t sure why?
Yeah, I think there’s some central tension with Jewish identity and what it means to be Jewish — Ross isn’t a practicing Jew, he isn’t going to shul, keeping kosher or wearing a kippah or anything — Emily points this out, that at least she believes that Moses was a real guy. In a lot of ways, she’s being more Jewish than Ross, she thinks the events of the Torah actually happened.
He’s kind of the opposite of an NJB, in a way.
You don’t think in a lot of ways he’s a nice Jewish boy?
Well, when we’re reading his thought process, no…
There’s something very honest, at times, maybe brutally honest, you could say. It’ll be interesting to see how this book will be received among nice Jewish boys. I wonder if they’ll find it relatable.
I found it relatable.
Do you identify as a nice Jewish boy?
I do. Do you?
I don’t know if I would use that term, but I identify with the sentiment… I think I basically am… [laughs] when it becomes an acronym, I don’t like it with the letters capitalized… But I like it as a phrase, I think it’s a nice-sounding phrase. But it becoming a trademarked capitalized acronym… I wouldn’t want to be part of any group that would have someone like me for a member.
Interesting. I know someone who did a Nice Jewish Boy Pageant, which is a little much for me.
Exactly. I wouldn’t want to go to a meetup. Or call myself that. But I guess I’m nice, I’m a boy, and I’m Jewish.
I love the conversations he has with his psychiatrist, who doesn’t pretend to hide his attraction to Ross and thus prescribed him anything he wants. Do you think Ross is using the relationship for material gain or he genuinely benefits from someone listening to him?
A little bit of both. I think he likes having someone he can go talk to. But he also likes going to a psychiatrist who [gives] endless praise and compliments for him. It’s nice to go somewhere every week and be affirmed, to have someone tell you how great you are.
In regular therapy, you can’t do that. You have to work on things.
I dunno, is that true? I’ve been going to psychoanalysis for the past 15 months. I go to a woman analyst and she says nothing. I lie there and look up at the ceiling and she doesn’t give me any insight or weigh in. She doesn’t tell me anything.
Sounds Freudian.
Yeah, exactly. Ross hints at craving a psychoanalytic experience like that. But instead, he just gets this guy. There’s something funny about this, which is maybe not fleshed out in the text very well, this idea that most psychiatrists’ job is just to give you pills. But they make you talk to them and it’s this awkward thing. If you’re going to a therapist for [cognitive behavioral therapy], which I’ve never done, they give you homework.
Yeah, in college, I saw a therapist for CBT specifically for OCD, but the homework, stopping your compulsions, was so difficult.
Did you do it, or just stop going?
I stopped going. Well, he was really rude, too. He took my call while running errands and I wasn’t assertive enough to say something.
I’ve had psychiatrists I’ve gone to, and on Zoom, it’s really ridiculous. They’re eating black-and-white cookies and playing video poker. The idea of the ‘Zoom therapist’ is something funny on its own. I wrote this book during the pandemic, as it’s known, but I didn’t want it to be about that.
Ross is pseudo-cancelled after teaching an open-ended philosophy course where the students report him after a thought experiment in which he asks them to explain why racism is wrong; a pretentious and silly student journalist breaks the “news.” What did you want to explore with this idea?
I think that broader discussion is part of the themes of religion and morality in the book. As someone who is a moral absolutist, someone who believes everyone is created equally by God, I think it’s wrong to discriminate or hurt people. I agree that you can intuit it’s wrong to be racist or sexist or mean or to kill someone. You can have deeply felt beliefs about them but I don’t know if you can rigorously account from where any of your morals actually come from. And this is not a new idea, this is probably a 19th century idea when people stopped believing in God. I think what I was trying to say is that there’s a great certainty and confidence young people have in their beliefs — which are often right — but I don’t know if they can explain why they think that.
Random, but, do you consider the book a satire?
I don’t know if I really like that word. It is funny, my agent asked me this when I first signed with her two years ago, like, it’s kind of making fun of me, since I take all these pills. But I would consider it a comic novel, with some satirical elements and fake props and pills and dating apps. It’s one of those words I don’t like using, similar to ‘Nice Jewish Boy.’
I ask because I was talking to another novelist who said some things he does are satirical and some aren’t. It’s hard for me, at least, to find the distinction, when I write.
It’s kind of natural that Jews have a detachment and ironic approach to everything — they’ve been kicked out of every country they’ve ever been in. You can’t help but be ironic and satirical, making fun of things you see around you. I’m thinking again of Kafka. Is The Trial a satire of 20th century bureaucracy bohemia? I dunno, maybe it is. It might be the best word, but only because there’s no better word for it.
The Instagram account you’re using for memes related to the book is very entertaining — it looks like fun, but is it also just the way one has to promote a novel these days?
I have a weird publisher that’s good enough, I’m in the system, and you can buy my book at Walmart and Target. It’s distributed by Simon & Schuster, but it’s quite small. It’s hard to get a lot of reviews and media attention, so I attempt to appeal directly to the youth. I’m not even sure how effective it is at promoting the book. It’s a fixation of mine. I’m thinking about my book a lot because it’s an exciting and nerve-wracking thing to have a book coming out, and it’s a good place to dump these half-formed ideas somewhere. I like the Story format a lot since it goes away.
Are we running out of time? I’m seeing this thing in the corner.
No we’re good, my university kicked me off of my Zoom account and now I don’t want to pay for the full version.
Good thing it lets you record on the free version. Put this part in, this is the type of thing I would love to have in the interview also. I’m not joking.
Sure.
Me talking about how it’s interesting that the free plan of Zoom lets you record still.
You’re outing me as someone who doesn’t want to pay.
Yeah, true.
Finally, are you working on anything else?
I’ve been thinking about how there’s probably going to be more stuff to talk about now with the book out. There’s some Nabokov quote about how when you have a story or a book that’s unfinished, it’s like a big trunk you carry around. I feel like I’m about to be relieved of this great burden, actually. And maybe it’s scary, like it’s not clear what comes next, but I imagine it’ll be easier. I haven’t written anything novel-length because I had a sense that if I started another novel and this one sold, then I’d have to go back and I’d have two unfinished novels at once. If I start another one I’ll have to sit down and write every day until a first draft is done, which is how I did this book. So I’d like to get my life in order in a way where I can take three months and sit down and write for an hour.
Let Me Try Again is out now.