Nut Cutting Time

This is a Carousel guest post by an Anon Substacker

Nut-cutting time.

“Nut-cutting time” is a phrase mostly heard in my neck of the woods. Us Southerners love a colorful phrase, and we especially love a colorful phrase if it is one-part black humor and one-part pure grotesquerie. Nut-cutting time refers to a last resort—when all else has failed, it’s time to grab some cojones and go forward. Most men will face multiple nut-cutting times in their life. For Spencer Grunhauer, the protagonist of Dan Baltic ’s excellent novel NUTCRANKR , his nut-cutting time comes after months of embarrassment. Cancelation, humiliation, and a  hyper-speed descent down the social ladder lead Spencer, a graduate of one of the finest liberal arts universities in the United States, to bring a 9mm Glock to the Monkey Love May Day, a communistic celebration of bondage and workers’ rights. Spencer’s goal is an explosive missive—a high-velocity impact statement jacketed in metal designed to right wrongs and save the West. This is the end of the Project, Spencer hopes.

But let’s back up a bit, shall we?

NUTCRANKR is Mr. Baltic’s debut novel. Besides being a popular Twitter personality and podcaster , Baltic is a razor-sharp wordsmith. NUTCRANKR is a tragi-comedy that gets at the heart of our schizophrenic era. The aforementioned Spencer Grunhauer is Mencius Moldbug (not Curtis Yarvin, but the kayfabe character) shrunk in miniature. However, this wannabe prophet of a restorative monarchy has the social grace of a lolcow. An autist and a coward, Spencer lives life mostly in his head. We see his foibles play out in college, in the corporate office, and in the bedroom.

NUTCRANKR begins in April 2009 at a highly prestigious liberal arts university somewhere far away from New York City. Here, an end-of-the-semester party proves to be the perfect venue for Spencer to announce his love for the professor Nora. Even though she is married to a successful lawyer, Spencer believes that Nora has signaled her love for him throughout the semester. For instance, Spencer sees Nora’s support for Hector over Achilles in The Iliad as “a sign of her commitment to traditional morality.” Her laughter during office hours is, to Spencer, representative of her “submitting to the vigor of Spencer’s wit and displaying the soft belly of her mind.” In short, Spencer’s elaborate inner world has concocted a symposium wherein he is both Socrates and a glutton ready to dissect the Nora-feast. 

Reality hits Spencer hard in the form of a meaty fist. The party proves to be a disaster for the self-styled Greek hero: his witty response to a black female student’s liberal hectoring causes her to cry, his grasp of Nora’s hand is immediately rebuffed, and his lonely stand for Nora’s honor in the face of an ass grab ends with the handsy culprit throwing Spencer out of the house and into the street. Everyone at the party, even Nora, is happy that he is physically removed.

Spencer’s luck only gets worse in NUTCRANKR. In May 2016, Spencer is fired from his cushy job at the Center for Social Advancement after a nosey HR harridan finds evidence that Spencer is a prolific poaster on 3Chain and the author of such seminal treatises as “A Theory for the Equitable Distribution of Wives” and “On the Virtues of Divine Kings: A Monarchy for You and Me.” The Center sees Spencer’s defense of absolutist monarchy and his proposal for giving unmarried men fifteen-year-old concubines as inimical to their corporate interests. Out he goes again.

Next, Spencer finds himself a girlfriend named Crystal Clancy on a BDSM website. On the outside, Spencer plays the role of progressive boyfriend. Inwardly, he dubs the hefty and pierced Crystal as “the piglet,” and conspires to shape her into the ideal woman for the restoration of the West. Again, Spencer’s mental landscape is inverted in the real world. He attends the Women’s March in 2017 with the pink pussy hat on his head. Despite wearing the cloak of neo-communism, Spencer is almost beaten down by Antifa “ninjas” after giving a goth girl an unwanted tickle. That bad day at Washington, D.C. turns into worse months as Crystal finds his writings and dumps Spencer for the anarcho-communist film editor Enrique. The world is still not done with our hero. His new venue for the Project, which is the name for his collected writings, is the comments section of a porn site called NUTCRANKR. But this too ultimately cuts him adrift. Even going to their office and demanding his porn account back does nothing for our unlucky Young Werther.

So now we are all caught up. It’s nut-cutting time and Spencer has a gun.

The genius of NUTCRANKR is that is a novel that can speak truth to both sides of the polarized aisle. Left-wing readers may see in NUTCRANKR a hilarious takedown of spergy right-wing personalities. Spencer is the personification of a delusional lonely man. His inner life, wherein Spencer is a brilliant member of the Western elite, does not touch his real life, where Spencer resorts to craven self-defense tactics whenever pressed about his out-of-bounds politics (for example, telling Crystal that his Project is a humorous epistolary novel rather than a political tract). Spencer is an incel (although he has sex in the book), a troll, a man in dire need of touching grass. He is also a gigantic failure. All of his plans, hopes, and aspirations fail in NUTCRANKR.

However, Baltic is not a leftist. Spencer is meant to be mocked, yes, but NUTCRANKR is far from a mean-spirited denunciation of 4Chan and Amarna Forum types. This is not an example of a “based” ruralite dad bullying an anime avi into being normal, nor is it an anti-right screed by a bluehair. It is abundantly clear that Baltic has love for his protagonist and others like him. We see everything through Spencer’s unreliable eyes, and even when he makes us uncomfortable, we still like Spencer G.

The real potency in NUTCRANKR is its clear-eyed presentation of our distorted reality. It is easy to make fun of Spencer, and yet those who judge him in the novel are themselves absolute freaks. Crystal is a bondage queen who excoriates Nietzsche and other philosophers as racist white men. Enrique is nominally the masculine foil to Spencer’s effeminate goofiness, and yet he cavorts around in open relationships with the bloodthirsty Hunter and the morose goth Alana. Speaking of Hunter, she vociferously wants Antifa goons to beat Spencer to death because he had the gall to tickle Alana. In the other psycho-sexual scene in the novel, wherein Spencer gets a beating from another undergraduate at Nora’s house party, the student in question admits that yes, he did indeed grab Nora’s ass. Spencer may be socially maladjusted, but NUTCRANKR makes it clear that the world around Spencer is far from sane. By the end, following a kind of epiphany for Spencer, normalcy means lying on a grand scale, and our luckless hero manages to turn his life around after donning the disgusting mask of disingenuous moralism.

NUTCRANKR ultimately reveals that there is no grass left to touch. No segment of life is free from the psychopathy of the Internet. Spencer is an obvious victim of digital age insanity, and yet the moralizers who brutalize him at every turn are themselves warped by the same infernal engine. It is a damning indictment that Crystal and those like her are the social median, what with their unthinking radical politics and acceptance of all manner of sexual perversity. This fact alone makes NUTCRANKR one of the most important novels of the twenty-first century. It is much more than a send-up of Internet culture; it is a hilarious, yet stark revelation that for every Spencer Grunhauer, there are ten more fat, polygamous masochists claiming the mantle of “normal” in order to both suppress right-wing weirdos and twist our perceptions of what is culturally acceptable.

Purchase Nutcrankr here