Reading Rupert Taylor’s riotous, polyphonic debut novel Please Let Me Destroy You is like watching light reflect off a disco ball, spinning radiant, ever-shifting constellations across your mind’s eye. At turns absurdist and psychedelic, the book is an often funny, often tragic, breathless litany of (in no particular order): panic attacks, heartbreaks, humiliations, betrayals, globetrotting adventures, murder attempts, kinky sex, degrading sex, dismemberments, immolations, and much more.
The dream of Apollo Jones, the character at the heart of Please Let Me Destroy You, is something he calls “Untitled Original Series Set on Multiple Continents”—an ambitious, globe-spanning, multimedia narrative that he envisions will “run on TV and in cinemas, on social media, everywhere.” There’s just one hitch: Apollo has no story.
This epic, nebulous idea—about everything under the sun, but also absolutely nothing at all—mirrors not only the fractured internal life of Apollo, but that of the book itself. We meet Australian expat Apollo in Vietnam, where he’s working to create branded content (“like ads, but longer”) for a multinational insurance company. The novel paints an effectively bleak portrait of this soulless world and the almost religious fervor its occupants bring to what essentially amounts to making overwrought commercials. Taylor revels in the hollow poetry of its corporate speak, his characters earnestly rattling off inane empty-calorie lingo like “snackable content,” “omnichannel strategy,” and the always effervescent “disrupt the culture.” A Gen Z Bret Easton Ellis, Taylor follows Apollo through the consumerist, social-class ambitions of the world he’s trapped in, like a modern-day American Psycho or Glamorama dissecting and skewering the current moment we all are living through.
But the disco ball is ever turning, shuffling and reconfiguring plotlines and genres. After being humiliatingly sacked and seeing his chance to make “Untitled Original Series Set on Multiple Continents” slip away, Apollo is pulled, via one twist after another, into a heist of the Ha Tien Vegas casino in Cambodia, where an unmarked jungle grave awaits him if things go awry.
Like everything in his life, the heist doesn’t go as planned, forcing Apollo to attempt to find alternate avenues of funding (and elusive content) for his dream series. Through one deranged scheme after another, across several interweaving story arcs, the novel jet-sets between Saigon, Bangkok, Sydney, and Los Angeles.
In one scheme, he partners with an intense young actress to bring to life the meta-fictional rise of a Hollywood influencer and her swift fall into “the chaotic heart” of Skid Row. Another plan sees him latch onto Hang, a sex worker who dreams of escaping her life through photography, trying to place her candid photos of her clientele in a prestigious art gallery—not necessarily for her benefit, but in order to create a story arc befitting the season finale of “Untitled Original Series Set on Multiple Continents.”
Apollo’s infatuation with these men and women turns to obsession as he draws out their stories, extracting their biographies for both content fuel and to fill the narrative hole at his center. We learn that, long ago, his “central narrative” was fractured through trauma and abuse, and he now finds himself lost in foreign cities and within his own life, searching for the one story that will explain it all.
“I wanted his story,” Apollo says after hearing a harrowing family story from his friend Anaru. “We would take his story, and mash it with my story, and mash those stories with Hang’s story, as well as some made up stories.”
Taylor does not shy away from interrogating the colonialist nature of how Apollo appropriates the life stories of others for his own personal and creative benefit. Apollo is a new permutation of a long line of foreign invaders in Vietnam, masking their exploitation of the lives others with the search for “authentic experience.”
“You can just run away,” says Nhu, a gallery owner who seems barely able to stand his company. “Back home to Sydney. What about me?”
Or his photographer obsession Hang: “I think you want something from me, so you say many things. Just like men at the bar. Please can I do this, let me do that. I buy this ring, take you to the island. Too many lies.”
Apollo appears to understand his vampiric Westerner nature and seek punishment for it. He desires love but, like the masochistic Roman Roy in Succession, can find sexual gratification through pain and humiliation—to be degraded and coldly commanded and treated like dirt. “If we’re being honest here (and I hope we are),” he admits, “if you wanted me to love you, you had to treat me like shit. If you ignored me, kept me at arm’s length, treated me like a dog with fleas, I would shower you with affection.”
Through all this, there’s real pleasure to be had in moving line by line through Please Let Me Destroy You. Taylor is a gifted, musical writer, who lavishes both in the sensual and the language of the senses. He fills countless gorgeous sentences with the sights and noises of Saigon and other exquisitely realized locales. The whine of motorbike taxis through the maze of red-light districts, cities at night buzzing with life. Streets redolent of “jasmine and fish sauce and sometimes sewage,” perfume that smells of “petals, pepper, the ocean, and money.”
Taylor imbues his characters with so much life and detail that it’s evident he’s a careful observer of the human condition, and all the messy nuance and contradictions of it. In his debut novel, he’s created a brilliant story about friendship, love, loneliness, obsession, and the emptiness of modern life. Please Let Me Destroy You is a moving exploration of a man willing to sacrifice everything to find meaning and achieve a meaningful life. Like many of us, Apollo is searching for a platform to bare his soul. He just needs to find it first.
Please Let Me Destroy You, by Rupert Taylor. Nfb Publishing, June 2024. 314 pages. $16.95, paper.
Shane Joaquin Jimenez is the author of the novel Bondage. He holds an MFA from the Jack Kerouac School. His recent writing has appeared in Bristol Noir, Punk Noir Magazine, and Shotgun Honey. You can find him at shanejoaquinjimenez.com.
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