I'm
an invisible monster, and I'm incapable of loving anybody. You don't know which
is worse. -
Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk
What
do you get when you mix guns with AIDS with “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God”?
A hot mess!
Or, a novel by Chuck Palahniuk.
Never read any of Palahniuk’s other
novels. New City’s quote encapsulates most of my reaction to Palahniuk’s skill
as a storyteller, a master of plot and language:
“…his style – this time jumping
through chronological time like a nervous whippet – breaks all rules and conventions, like he never learned them.” [bold is mine]
Disagree
with New City on one thing. It’s impossible to break a rule until you’ve
learned it. Messy timelines confuse the reader and muddle the plot.
Everyone has had a writing
instructor correct a story for jumping around a timeline too much. Mine advised me
to cut out all but one flashback saying, if you find yourself covering a lot of
backstory, then start over at the beginning.
The word ‘jump’ appears at least
once per page in Invisible Monsters. OK,
that is an exaggeration. However, occasionally three (page 176) or four (page
214) jumps in the timeline are made in a single page. Jump to childhood. Jump
to pill popping. Jump back to everything is on fire.
And, you know what? I never once
lost my place.
How does Palahniuk get away with
it? That’s my burning question.
Palahniuk
is not the only writer in Portland who thinks that story telling does not mean
chronology as a straightaway from birth to death. Lidia Yuknavitch, fellow Oregonian
literati and member of Palahniuk’s inner circle, thinks that language is more
than a marker on a story trail. She
writes in her memoir, “Language is a metaphor for experience. It’s as arbitrary
as the mass of chaotic images we call memory – but we can put it into lines to
narrativize over fear.”
There
is spontaneity and messiness to life that the linear “and then, and then, and
then” cannot illuminate. Palahniuk addresses those who would hate him for
jumping back and forth across narrative and trampling all over the tradition of
storytelling on page 20.
“Don’t look for a contents page,
buried magazine-style twenty pages back from the front. Don’t expect to find
anything right off. There isn’t a real pattern to anything, either. Stories
will start and then, three paragraphs later:
Jump
to whatever.
Then,
jump back.”
It was as if Palahniuk was ready
for outcry from the literary community. It may have also been to reassure
readers. Fear not! There was a method to his madness.
I’ll say right off that I love
Palahniuk’s whippet-like movements in time and place. And it tore me up inside.
How does he get away with this stuff? Is it because he found just the right
context to make Memento-like breaks in time reliable? We know that when the
word jump appears you are moving, travelling, and surrendering. Fortunately,
Palahniuk delivers with every move. There are sad sack zingers like:
“It’s all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way
money is power the same way a gun is power.”
And
“All God does is watch us and kill
us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
Outlaws do not plod, they dart.
Fashion does not conform, but transforms. Revenge is not predictable; it is
dramatic. Jump. Now.
Palahniuk was out of his mind when
he wrote this book. He is also the author of several bestselling novels. Two of
his novels, Fight Club and Choke, were made into films. So, he has
a niche and an adoring fan base that craves his brand of indulging in
self-destruction.
In Invisible Monsters the heroine never fully redeems herself. She
never apologizes for the fires or the attempts to destroy others lives.
Instead, Shannon McFarland (aka Daisy St. Patience, Bubba-Joan, Bump, Miss Arden
Scotia), our heroine-villain-victim, enables her savior bent on hurting herself with too much plastic surgery. Our heroine is narcissistic. She is pathological. She
does not have a face. Her one selfless act gives life to someone who clearly
does not want it.
Why
is Palahniuk crazy good? Maybe it’s because he rejected the status he achieved
with Fight Club and got Invisible Monsters published anyway. Because
he is not afraid of brutally attacking his characters by revealing their
misguided thoughts of “being saved by chaos” or “What I really hate is me so I
hate pretty much everybody.” Because his details are imaginative, his observations are sharp-witted, and he is hilarious. This
book will blow something up in you. Guaranteed.
Jump
to me reading Choke.
