For Spencer and Dwight

a Nutcrankr review

I first read about Nutcrankr, author Dan Baltic’s debut novel, through a review on Incel author ARX-Han’s Substack. In his post, Han compares his novel to Baltic’s and classifies them both as androgenic lit and incelcore, writing:

Baltic’s treatment of the incelcore micro-genre proves the point of convergent cultural evolution: we may have taken completely different paths, but we have ended up in much the same place. To me, this is what is so fascinating about art: it’s inevitably highly individualized—especially fiction—because no two authors can produce the same fictionalized stream of consciousness. This is what it means to be human, to be generative. Mimicry is more difficult than something sui generis.

I know I’m not the target audience for edgy indie novels by and about young right-wing men, but this observation stood out to me because, as a female reader, Spencer doesn’t feel like an incel to me—not in the way that Han’s protagonist (a young male student who is referred to simply as anon) does. Though I felt profound sympathy for anon, at no point did I like him.

In fact, I was often contemptuous of anon. To Han’s credit, I suppose this response is authentic to the female experience of encountering a bonafide truecel. But you don’t need to like anon to find his story compelling. To read Incel is to lose yourself in Han’s concrete, technical prose—you don’t just see the world through anon’s eyes or walk in his shoes. You think his thoughts, you adapt yourself to his patterns of cognition and his bleak, materialistic worldview.

This is not the case for Nutcrankr. Baltic’s prose is sensual, haughty, and quick-witted, and these traits color the reader’s sense of Spencer’s interiority and make him seem more desirable. Unlike Anon, who blunts his despair with doomscrolling and pornography, Spencer sublimates his frustrations with women and modern life by becoming increasingly grandiose and recasting himself as a fallen aristocrat.

Spencer is spergy and porn-brained, but he’s also eloquent and not without charm. In one scene, Spencer goes on a first date with Crystal, a young liberal woman he meets on a BDSM website. His lack of social grace causes him to waver between awkwardness and brazen dominance throughout their date. He is intermittently able to perform a pastiche of competence and virility, though Spencer is really an unemployed NEET writing a deranged political manifesto. Baltic crafted this scene so well that I understood why, despite his behavior, Crystal decides to go home with him after their first date.

By contrast, Han’s anon is so unappealing to women that nothing short of a hypermasculine display of violence can draw female attention his way. Although anon never does anything in Incel that comes close to the worst things that Spencer does, I found myself rooting for Spencer much more (a true foid moment). Baltic’s characterization of him, though comically pitiful, is also seductive.

That’s why I find it odd that both Han and Baltic seem to agree that Nutcrankr is an incelcore novel. Maybe I’m being overly literal. I understand that people use the term incel to connote a man who women don’t like very much. A creepy, weird guy. Even JD Vance, who has a pretty wife and a gaggle of cute kids, gets stuck with the label. So, Spencer is certainly the type of guy that women on BlueSky call an incel, but he’s not an unfuckable hate nerd.

In one particularly telling passage, a heartbroken Spencer binge-watches The Office while recovering from a recent breakup. Baltic writes:

Spencer reminded himself that he cared not one whit about Crystal as he consumed many hours of the television program called The Office, which was a situational comedy about a hapless supervisor surrounded by mutinous employees, with the exception of one man of firm character named Dwight Schrute. With his Teutonic heritage and background in agriculture, Dwight was, in many way, the hero of the show.

---

Do you feel a little bad for John Krasinski? If People had named him Sexiest Man Alive back in 2008, there’d be a small army of young women defending his honor. But a supermarket check-out lane staple like People has to appeal to the broadest possible swathe of bored suburban married women, and the then-boyish Krasinski was still in his 20s when The Office started. I don’t think a man that young has won SMA since Tom Cruise in 1990. Now, at 45, Krasinski is the correct age to be SMA, but he’s not exactly a relevant star anymore. And the girls are not holding back. Pop culture substacker Hunter Harris writes:

John Krasinski could be the sexiest man at an airport Panera. He could very well be the sexiest man on the campus of a small midwestern private university. He could be the sexiest man at a Pottery Barn outlet, getting a great deal on a big lamp. No, John Krasinski was not the sexiest man alive in 2024. He was not even the sexiest man on The Office! (That was David Wallace.) John Krasinski is not even the sexiest man in his own family. That’d be his brother-in-law, Stanley Tucci.

Apologies to all the heterosexual men who subscribe to me. I promise this is going somewhere.

I normally wouldn’t care at all which famous dude an irrelevant, failing celebrity magazine thinks is blandly hot this year. But I can’t help but enjoy the backlash a bit, because I’ve long hated Jim Halpert.

Jim is lazy, unambitious, and condescending despite having no discernible interests besides hanging out and watching basketball. He had the nerve to string along Rashida Jones, and he didn’t even ask Pam about buying that house. He has terrible opinions on movies and doesn’t seem to be particularly good at anything.

Dwight Schrute may be a dork, but he owns and operates his family’s ancestral lands. He’s authentic, driven, and loyal. He doesn’t shirk his duties or think they are beneath him; he takes them seriously and strives to be the best, even if he’s just selling paper in Scranton.

I’m being entirely sincere when I say Dwight and Angela are the superior love story in The Office. They’re exciting in a way Jim and Pam could never be without disrupting the equilibrium of the show’s overall arc. Dwight’s devotion to Angela is whole-hearted, as he goes to great lengths to steal her back from Andy and eventually cucks her gay state senator husband. His intensity is more appealing to me than any half-hearted smirk from across the office.

Dwight, for all his flaws, is lovable. By relating to him, Spencer becomes more endearing as well, which makes it more palatable for the reader to follow him as he spirals out of control during the novel’s climax. You can’t fully hate a guy who relates to an Amish-adjacent man in a mustard shirt.

The comparison also highlights Spencer’s narcissism and lack of self-awareness. Like Dwight, Spencer lives unironically, believing his quirks and convictions make him profound instead of absurd. Dwight works as a character because he’s a heel in a wry sitcom. Nutcrankr is grounded in reality and current events, and so Spencer becomes both comic and tragic.