Review by Molly Case: Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters
Posted by sregan | Filed under misc
Don't expect the norm; Palahniuk creates a turbulent narrative that the reader must try to decipher along the way ... a bizarre road trip of drag queens, drug trafficking and ultimately self-destruction.
Invisible Monsters is the monster lurking beneath your bed, the childhood nightmare suppressed for years. It was originally intended to be Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, but at the time was hailed by his publisher as 'too disturbing'. Now released as his third novel, Palahniuk's monster is finally ready to escape from the darkness under the bed. Take the novel's tardiness in being published as a small warning; it is horrific, it is hard to swallow, but hey, isn't that the reason we read Palahniuk's stuff?
Invisible Monsters confronts the reader directly. The narrator admits they will shift between time zones, change the setting and even occasionally change gender. Don't expect the norm; Palahniuk creates a turbulent narrative that the reader must try to decipher along the way. Our protagonist - a disfigured gunshot victim who befriends a pre-op transsexual - takes us on a bizarre road trip of drag queens, drug trafficking and ultimately self-destruction. Along the way we discover the strange twists of fate that led up to the shooting and the sex change.
The energy of the book is exhilarating; reading on is integral to fitting the narrative puzzle together. Palahniuk consistently creates characters that defy social conventions; antisocial creatures that have to find ways to adapt in their world. We are immersed in their make-believe lives where they must struggle to survive and grow. Palahniuk frequently uses dark humour and 'gross-out' scenes to illustrate this struggle: one scene in particular - in which a misunderstanding occurs over a polite dinner with the parents - will have you reading through squinted eyes. The crude detail and level of embarrassment generated by the characters' misunderstandings is hugely amusing, and will have you laughing out loud.
However, Palahniuk hasn't merely gone for gold on providing us with horrific scenes and dark humour. There are also subtle questions, posed to an increasingly image-conscious society, which create a thought-provoking and chilling end to his tale. Palahniuk takes the idea of beauty and the efforts we go to achieve it in the West to the extreme, yet never comes across as preachy or didactical. He subverts anterior works in his own way; the drug-addled road trip reminiscent of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the bond between the two 'female' characters like that of the ill-fated Thelma and Louise. Surely the love child of Hunter S. Thompson and Callie Khouri is worth a read, even if the result is something quite seriously horrific.
- Molly Case
