Forgive me. It is utterly appalling that anyone should have to read a book review that begins like this. It really is. But there is just no shying away from the fact that Abby Horne, the 30-something protagonist of Jordan Prosser’s latest novel Blue Giant, desperately needs a good hangover shit. It has been weeks since she last had a bowel movement and there are only so many bottles of Yellowtail Cabernet Sauvignon a tactless, crude, self-absorbed millennial can drink each night before the Riverina-rich tannins start leeching upwards into the decision-making part of her brain, convincing her she ought to take the task of saving humankind into her own hands.Review: Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser (UQP)Blue Giant is a satire. A commentary on 21st-century decadence in all its stinky, bloated, gaseous guises. It is the sort of book Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Chuck Palahniuk might have co-written if they had been living next door to Martin Amis in a Fitzroy sharehouse owned by Thomas Pynchon’s twice-removed Australian cousin, during the most recent Victorian bushfires. A “deranged love letter to a generation torn between helplessness and selfishness”, as the blurb on the back cover so cutely puts it. The novel is funny, foreboding and outlandish. But only insofar as the meme-saturated world we live in is funny, foreboding and outlandish. If you were not simultaneously amused and horrified by the sight of Jeff Bezos arriving back from space in a pair of cowboy boots emblazoned with the words “Gradatim Ferociter” (“step by step, ferociously”), or Elon Musk slashing governmental profligacy in half with a punk-studded chainsaw gifted to him by the Argentine president, or hordes of fangirls pledging their support via TikTok to accused murderer Luigi Mangione, this may not be the romp for you.A reality TV Mars tripThe plot starts out simply and plausibly enough. Norwegian tech billionaire Tor Skovgaard is seeking participants for a one-way flight to Mars. Their mission: to ready the already-red planet for the next leap forward in this rapacious project we call human progress. Like all good reality TV shows, applicants need a gimmick – a unique angle to set their application video apart from the thousands of others. Abby Horne is employing blunt-force cynicism as a placeholder until something better comes along.With a once-promising fashion career behind her and nothing more illustrious than her laxative-resistant constipation in front of her, Abby locks into a strict training regime for the would-be voyage to Mars. This mostly involves drunkenly rewatching The Martian by night and solving the sorts of puzzles they sell at the Questacon gift shop while holding her breath underwater by day. She is aided and abetted in her pursuits by longtime friend Niki and fellow-contestant Oscar. Niki has her feet planted firmly on the ground and thinks Abby would be better off sorting through her problems here on earth than seeking out new ones on a distant planet. Oscar, a paleobotanist on sabbatical from his academic position (and family), has his own reasons for wanting to trade atmospheres. As befits the genre of satire, the characters are flat by design. Denouement-stage efforts to round them gesture toward the novel a more sincere writer might have come up with, if given the premise. By and large though, Prosser’s sensibilities are superficially comedic. I do not mean this pejoratively. He possesses the stand-up comedian’s skill of identifying what passes as totally normal behaviour until somebody stands on stage with a microphone and draws everybody’s attention to it. I believe they call it wit. The approach is largely successful. At their sharpest, the trio serve as avatars for millennial anxiety, existential statelessness, premature world-weariness, and all those other maladies contracted through too much screen time. At their flimsiest though, they can (and occasionally do) read more like mouthpieces for authorial cleverness than narratorial constituents, with set-pieces designed to house the sort of wry Melburnian observations one makes to oneself while “riding around on the 86, so hungover”. Too clever by half, I think they call that one.This is not to deny Prosser’s abundant gift for simile and metaphor. He is a stylist of a very high order. A “size-seven sewing needle [pierces Abby’s] left thumbnail like a javelin penetrating a foot soldier’s shield”. The “numbers in her savings account [are] in exponential free fall, diminishing rapidly like the last dregs of bathwater circling a drain before one final, violent slurp”. Her stomach burbles to produce “a lilting sound, almost sympathetic, like that of a pet watching its owner pack a suitcase”. Doozies like these appear almost by the paragraph. He can plot, too. Apart from a detour to Canberra for a school reunion revenge fantasy subplot that plays out like a comedy starring Lisa Kudrow, the novel is cleverly and tightly assembled. The cinematically extravagant climax more than earns its place at the novel’s apex, and it is both impressive and rewarding to see so many seemingly innocuous details introduced in the first half of the novel take on relevance in the second half. I cannot think of any Australian novelists who are doing a better job working in this genre in 2026. Jordan Prosser is a stylist of a very high order – but can be too clever by half. Sarah Walker/UQP However, like his wit-wielding contemporaries (Steve Toltz surely being the nearest living relative), Prosser faces a serious conundrum. How exactly to satirise a society that is inherently self-satirising? The primary targets of his comedic ire – celebrity entrepreneurs, hipsters, social media exhibitionists, handsome guys named Marcus – have kind of beaten him to the punchline. They have evolved into post-aware simulacra of their former selves, leaving behind all capacity for shame and humiliation. They tend either to be in on the joke that the rest of us lower-order content consumers take them to be, or have developed an Instagram-filter-like resistance to such feeble attacks on their glossy personhoods. A little too self-congratulatoryHerein lies the fraughtness of a novel like Blue Giant. While the writing is slick, the action entertaining and the multilevel conflict aligned with cosmic elegance, the commentary risks being just a little too familiar, a little too obvious, a little too self-congratulatory. The Peter Thiels of the world have a deranged set of priorities, you say? Virtue signalling is actually, like, a really fucking annoying behavioural trait? Colonialism is, was and always will be problematic? Yes, yes, and yes. But surely, by now, we can take most of this as read.Prosser is a dazzlingly brilliant wordsmith. He may even be a dazzlingly brilliant novelist. I would love to see him put this beyond doubt by dragging himself away from the all-you-can-eat dessert cart that is Western civilisation and its artificially sweetened discontents, and scoffing down something with a little more fibre. The celebratory condemnation of capitalism is a sponge cake satirists have been having and eating too for several decades. It’s one the rest of us should have well and truly digested by now.Luke Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.