Blind Prophecy

Typing is rather difficult today because I chopped off two of my fingers yesterday. Two digits completely gone from my right hand.

Okay that’s a lie. I’m just desperate for attention is all. C’mon, LiveJournal, love me! And speaking of shallow, attention-seeking ploys, I finished reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters yesterday.

So in Palahniuk’s tale, every character is obsessed with beauty and attention. Every major character in the book is a man turning into a woman – except the narrator who starts as a woman but destroys her looks to become essentially asexual.

Give me confusing and offensive themes of gender.
Flash.
Give me characters so unlovable Jesus couldn’t love them.
Flash.

Jump to me spotting several of Palahniuk’s famous twists of coincidence long before they are revealed in the story. Jump to me completely losing my suspension of disbelief in the last few chapters as the plot twists are revealed. Jump to me getting over this professed Vogue-style narrative with huge jumps in timeline and the fake fashion shoot gimmick.

Give me something I can relate to.
Flash.
Give me those good-time overreactions and Drama with a capital D.
Flash.

Okay, enough of me cleverly trying to mimic the style of the book. Here’s the bottom line. This book is about shallow, selfish, emotionally crippled people who do hysterical, extreme and absurd things in order to be loved, for attention, or for revenge. But mostly for attention. All of this happens so that the narrator can learn the big lesson – how to love someone else more than herself. How very sacrificingly “female” of her. In a tale that confused gender roles at every turn, how disappointing the finale was when the only biological woman sacrifices her identity, her career and her life to someone she first knew as a man. She can only find happiness by putting the needs of someone else before her own. Well, that’s not true, self-sacrifice is what she “needs” at that point.

Every character was so emotionally stunted (and playing into a culture of victimization) that I just couldn’t care about the big reveals in the end of the book. Halfway through, I wanted to start yelling at them, “take some fucking responsibility for your lives!” One particularly telling scene comes when Brandy Alexander reveals that she’s only interested in getting gender reassignment surgery because it was “the biggest mistake [he] could make.” He doesn’t, in fact, want to become a woman, it was just the most over-the-top kind of self-mutilation he could think of to do. This is the kind of Drama as art form world these people live in. They get revenge on the most masculine character by secretly feeding someone months worth of female hormones, or on the shallow socialite by burning her house down (twice), by staging murders and playing a never-ending game of manipulation and treachery.

In the end, though, I don’t regret having read the book. Palahniuk managed just enough originality and managed to surprise me just enough that I didn’t wish for those hours of my life back. Plus, it’s one of those books that are so easy to read, you can knock it off in a single day if you want to (I split it over two just because it was the only new book I had for the weekend).

In other news, I’m running on empty after another night of insomnia.

I may not always be the best friend someone could have, but when a friend calls me and really needs to talk, I do try. So last night, I found myself at Gipsy letting Michelle tell me about her troubles. I shouldn’t have gone out on a work night, but she sounded dreadful when she called me. It was good that I was there, but I paid for it in sleep. By the time I got home, I couldn’t take a sleeping pill and expect to get up in time for work, so I just stared at the dark ceiling of my bedroom for hours.

Saturday night I was very naughty… but since I’m not friend-locking my journal yet, let’s keep the details a mysterious secret.

Filed under: livejournal by Jere Keys