![]() Even Princess Jasmine himself: “I, too, am a Christian, although lately I’ve struggled to make sense of God’s plan.” The believers, meanwhile, are the good guys: devout Herschel in Sell Out, Carlos the Catholic janitor who saves the hamsters. In Spoiled Brats, though, divine beings are just guys out to do a job, like the benevolent grim reaper who kills people’s artistic dreams before they waste too much time on them. After a series of bit parts in early stories, he landed the lead in What In God’s Name – about a lazy deity who wants to chuck in the universe and start up a Thai fusion restaurant. The other recurring character in Rich’s work has long been God. Simon Rich in his publisher’s office in London. Yet this ghastly alter-ego cameos in other stories, too as “a pudgy, hyperactive boy with some kind of undiagnosed emotional problem” in the hamster story, for instance. Like one of his heroes, Woody Allen, he writes seven days a week, is scrupulously polite, sweet, careful, alarmingly smart. Of course, real-life Rich is nothing like as awful as this twisted mirror vision. This was my way of jolting myself back into awareness.” From time to time I’ll find myself obsessing over some trivial problem. “It is a pretty bluntly self-loathing book,” says Rich, smiling wildly. He’s also vain, lazy, alcoholic and avaricious, a cowardly egomaniac addicted to porn and thrilled by minor celebrity. A doctor of scripts, corrects Rich, who’s currently working on something called Penguin President. To Herschel’s delight, he learns Rich is a doctor. A century on, he’s revived by conceptual artists reclaiming the building as a performance space, and tracks down his descendant. The third is Herschel, Rich’s great-grandfather, who in 1912 emigrated from Lithuania to Brooklyn, only (and here’s where it gets fictional) to be preserved after falling into a vat of brine in the pickle factory in which he works. Another to throw up is a toy elf, sent by Santa to sit on a bedroom shelf to check if a child has been bad or good (in fact he’s depraved). ![]() The first to gag is a hamster, Princess Jasmine, enduring a special kind of torture as the class pet in an elite Manhattan prep school. Visceral is right three times in the 13 stories someone vomits in the face of privilege. The test? “Is it funny, is it high stakes, and is it visceral?” ![]() “I always have to write about something that’s emotional,” he says, “otherwise it comes across as boring or shallow or didactic.” His approach is scattergun: chuck stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It’s not a manifesto, and Rich retracts from the idea of satire, but it does offer an indication that his ambitions go deeper than killer skits. Spoiled Brats is a very funny, endlessly inventive broadside against the horrors of hipster society and the cosseted monsters who populate it. Rich’s most recent collection takes his usual formula – lampooning the mundane by making it epic – and adds moral bite. Two of his books have been optioned – one by Seth Rogen, the other by Jason Reitman. He’s scripted movies for Pixar and is the youngest writer ever to join Saturday Night Live. ![]() Critics have compared him to Waugh and Wodehouse, Borges and Thurber. He has six books behind him – four story collections and a couple of novels. But Rich is fresh off a plane from New York, and one of the most idolised artists of the age, so we’ll let him get away with it. He returns to his espresso and octopus: the breakfast of the maniac.
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