Chloe Pfeiffer

Some Narcissistic Compulsion

On Alex McElroy’s satirical debut The Atmospherians

In Alex McElroy’s debut novel, The Atmospherians, childhood best friends Sasha, a disgraced wellness influencer, and Dyson, a washed-up actor, start a cult to reform toxic men. They base the cult at Dyson’s family property in New Jersey and call it the Atmosphere, a term from Dyson’s days as an extra: the twelve men that they’ve recruited will learn to “cede power, the spotlight, to let others speak.” Dyson believes that their project will change the world for the better: “We’ll make the world safer for everyone. Because the world is full of terrible men,” he tells Sasha. “Despicable men… who get worse every day.” The only solution is to remove them from society and reform them one by one.

Both Sasha, who narrates the novel, and Dyson, who came up with the idea and drags Sasha into it, have been traumatized in some way by masculinity and its pressures. Dyson is haunted by his late father, who instilled in Dyson a hatred of his body that manifests as bulimia. Sasha is living in the aftermath of a distressing scandal: at the height of her influence, we learn later, one of her male trolls—who wrote heinous and lewd comments to her wellness posts—killed himself in a live video and blamed her. He committed suicide, allegedly, because of her response to one of his comments: “The world would be so much more beautiful if you and everyone like you were dead.”

It’s one of many situations in the novel that gesture to the violence and hypocrisy not only of masculinity, but of the beauty and wellness industry as well. The scenes at The Atmosphere hilariously intertwine these two systems: Neither Dyson nor Sasha knows how to run a cult, and their efforts to reform the men end up mirroring their own efforts, as teenagers, to conform to patriarchal beauty standards. When the men get food poisoning on their first night at the site, Dyson turns their subsequent vomiting into a lesson about toxicity; bulimia becomes a part of the men’s recovery process. Sasha and Dyson serve small portions of health foods as a way to discourage finding “self-worth in consumption,” and the men wear tracksuits in too-small sizes to “remind them of the stranglehold of masculinity”; as teenagers, Sasha encouraged Dyson to buy clothes too small as “investments in your future.” The way “health” is discussed is so often conflated with beauty and an implicit morality; that confluence reaches a clever and ugly apogee in these scenes.

McElroy balances the humor and absurdity of the characters’ schemes with the seriousness of their critiques. The result is an effective satire of the wellness industry. (That the language of Sasha’s pre-Atmosphere wellness culture so closely resembles that of a cult—“followers,” “influence”—is not lost on the reader.) But the book is also a critique of something larger: the language of the Internet, which seems to flatten real issues—patriarchy, bigotry, mental health—by centering the self, as well as by emphasizing interpersonal relationships and interactions instead of structural issues.

The Atmosphere teaches the men to think of the world in terms of pain and interpersonal harm: the way we hurt others and are hurt by them, and end up hurting ourselves, too. (As does Defense Against Mistakes, or DAM, an absurd anti-cancel culture start-up at which Sasha later works.) When the men first arrive at the cult, Dyson asks, “How many of you have hurt people—emotionally, physically—because you couldn’t handle your feelings?” All but one of the men raise their hands. The takeaway from a particularly gruesome therapy session is “how foolish it is to chase pain, how abundantly absurd to think pain brings you anything other than pain.” No one emerges unscathed from patriarchy, the men learn.

What to do after they’ve accepted that pain, however (seek forgiveness? learn to treat others better?) is harder for Sasha and Dyson to teach. Sasha’s behavior—including secretly sleeping with Peter, a meek Atmospherian—and unwillingness to empathize with their situations ultimately leads to disaster. Dyson, who misses acting and selfishly wants an audience, has the men go through a “reconciliation” process in which they apologize to him for their mistakes, but he withholds forgiveness from them (in order, Sasha suspects, to punish his dead father). Any progress the men make is undermined by the leaders’ incompetence, of course, but also by something more insidious: the road map that Sasha and Dyson have of personal growth and productivity, as well as the language of pain and harm—picked up from social media and the wellness industry—is quite limited in its ability to improve the men’s broken relationships, because it begins and ends with the self.

This language and framework, too, can be easily coopted, and is thus not a useful way to evaluate moral character. Sasha frequently claims to be “hurt” or “harmed” by others. In some cases, this pain strikes us as valid; in others, especially as the novel progresses, it seems narcissistic and exploitative. When Blake, her ex-boyfriend, perceives that everything in her hometown “used to hurt” her, she finds it “the wisest and kindest thing anyone had ever said” to her. When Peter attempts to stand up for himself and asks Sasha if she’s just using him for sex, she responds, “What a cruel question! I refuse to answer something so hurtful.” The question of her self-awareness—whether she is consciously invoking this language to her advantage or genuinely considers herself an injured party, or both—undergirds the novel.

I found certain aspects of McElroy’s style to be awkward or distracting, most notably the many metaphors and similes in the prose. While some are particularly effective or precise, others are inexplicably shoved together (“The words shot out like an arm knifing through the closing doors of an elevator”; “The week…left me scooped out, crisp as a cracker”) or too on-the-nose (“Dyson’s body sliced through the center of the pond like a scalpel splitting a stomach”). More significant, stylistically, is the analytical, controlled structure and voice of Sasha’s narration: there are lengthy flashbacks to traumatic childhood scenes, and Sasha is constantly explaining herself and her actions, as well as those of others, instead of letting the reader understand her on their own. She only liked Peter, she explains, because he was the “inverse of Blake”; she has a few asides about her “unconscious drive” to get back at her mother and Dyson’s “unconscious pursuit” to replace his family. These conclusions are obvious to the reader pages, even chapters, before Sasha acknowledges them.

Such narration is apropos for a novel about people who are not only steeped and fluent in therapy-speak, but who are so self-important as to think they might be uniquely able or brave enough to understand and help others. But it also hinders the novel’s ability to portray the tender, loving friendship at the heart of the story. What grounds the novel emotionally are the intertwined journeys of Sasha and Dyson—especially the latter, whose body image and family issues seem less narratively convenient or satirically extreme than Sasha’s, and whose relationship to masculinity and sexuality is one of the more mysterious and interesting elements of the novel. Their friendship, with its push and pull of resentment, guilt, and care, is a compelling one, but Sasha’s explicatory, self-centered voice is unable to convincingly convey the love she claims to feel.

If there is a way to learn to treat others better, and to forgive instead of punish, the novel seems to warn us, then it won’t be found in the culture or language we have now. At best, a solution like DAM or The Atmosphere just gets people out of the way. During a reconciliation exercise at the end of the novel, Sasha reminds her men that “We do not apologize for how the other person felt but for what we did” (a kernel I’m sure I’ve seen go viral on Twitter). And yet the irony is that the men at the Atmosphere are not apologizing to the real people they’ve hurt, but a scarecrow stand-in. The men are not practicing for real-life apologies; they’re not, in fact, leaving the cult’s premises at all. There’s a limit to the usefulness of self-betterment and self-examination; one passes that limit, presumably, when they aren’t examining themselves in order to be better towards others, but rather out of some narcissistic compulsion. The “beautiful world” that Sasha is striving towards, we understand, is one in which people are too obsessed with themselves to hurt other people, or—the flip side of the same coin—to love them.