A review by tinido
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility by Isabel Waidner

challenging funny lighthearted mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

In most cases, reading highly theory-informed, self-reflective and experimental prose has little to no entertainment value. It's more of duty a reader with cultural ambitions has to perform from time to shore up cultural capital. And most of these texts are written for being processed in the secondary and tertiary text production mills anyway. Not so with the novels of Isabel Waidner. Their stuff is really smart and incredibly funny, full of a sort of black humor that is also strangely upbeat. And their stories actually have a plot and the reader gets invested into the protagonists. Here it's Corey Fah (which is very probably a word play with the German Koryphäe – eminent personality in their chosen field) who has won a prestigious literary prize, but apparently the whole literary scene, including the people who run the prize commitee, are conspiring to not let them, a working class person, actually get the prize trophy.  They use teleportation and worm holes to keep the trophy, the prize money and the social prestige coming with the prize out of the hands of Corey. Corey and their partner, accompanied by a strange Bambi mutant, are not so easily deterred and are going on the hunt for the prize trophy. A hunt, which is in turn made into a docufictional TV format, which then feedbacks into the hunt, with strange, hilarious, dangerous and creepy consequences. It's basically the Stranger Things writers doing a Bourdieu-informed post-apocalypse / dystopian absurdist series, or a bunch of cultural sociology majors doing their version of Stranger Things-like TV-series. But to enjoy this short and funny novel on the cultural and infrastructural waste land that is post-Brexit Britain, you don't have to know any of this. I really liked it and look forward to the next Waidner novel. 
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