Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters and Jennifer Egan's Look at Me

   Neither of these is a new novel; Egan's is only recently in paperback, but an award finalist in hardcover, and Palahniuk's has been sitting on the shelf since Lullaby debuted. Nor have I only just read them.  But I just feel like writing about them,as is my prerogative in the role of book reviewer.  So here we have two books with the same theme: beauty is only skin deep.  Love yourself, because if you love what you are, you'll never love who you are...blah
blah.  You know the drill, and you also know that on this planet (I have resolutely sworn never to employ the phrase  "the real world" because reality is merely a mode of personal interpretation so all real worlds are relative....and you probably don't want to hear about that.  Onward and upward!) that's a notion only applicable in a novel.  But it's nice to read about journeys of self-discovery and for a whole minute or so, you can be on one, too, with the characters and the author.  Then you remember that those are friggin' boring and that blatant hedonism is the life for you,hi ho hi ho!
   Right.  Review.  These books, they're like...Milky Way bars.  One is Milky Way Lite, the other Milky Way Midnite.  Same essential properties, but one has more...is it milk?  Butterfat?  Milk is the main difference between milk and dark chocolate, isn't it? I feel like I should know this.  Palahniuk (he of
Fight Club fame - oh Brad Pitt!  I realize Jennifer Aniston is an award-winning TV star and uber-babe, but I know all the words to "Mr. Roboto"!  Renounce your vows for me!) is kind of a one-trick pony who manages with each successive book to make his single trick look like four or five new ones.  But he doesn't fool me!  I've read all of his work except Survivor, and I have a pretty good idea of how that book will read. He has this hook, this way of writing.  This...this. Dammit, I can't describe it.  And hence Palahniuk's status as a bestselling author, whereas my livelihood depends on my ability to track imagery in an Eliot poem.  If P.'s a candy bar, I'm a Sour Patch Kid. Candy store stockboys would shriek at our propinquity. Suffice to say, every book has the narrator's stamp based on his career - in Choke, he was a former med student, so everything glib he had to say was defined by medical terminology; in Invisible Monsters, the former fashion model (everyone's a former something. Can't anyone hold down a job?    Besides the psychotics populating the novels?  I know, it's not fair, in some instances, they've lost their faces or minds or whatever.  Go work at a publishing house.  No one sees you there for months.) treats every scene as though it were a snapshot.  Palahniuk is like that friend everyone has: the one who has only one story to tell and you have to hear it retold and embellished every time someone new wandes into the room.  Great story, but after the third time self-immolation is starting to look damn appealing. 

It's irritating, but if we can overlook style for substance - and hey!  We'd be expanding on his theme, wouldn't we? - the book's not too shabby.  Key players: our narrator, model deformed in suspicious freak accident; clearly closeted male companion; and Brandy Alexander, coolest drag queen EVER (that means you, Nathan Lane.  Get off the stage.  I can't stand your longwinded fame any longer; quit coasting on The Birdcage.).  They are on a mission to steal drugs from unsuspecting housewives, and their alliance seems random, except nothing in a Palahniuk novel is random. Key plot: I can't say.  No, really.  If I did, I'd ruin it for you.  Plot and message appear parallel in
my telling, but they converge.  Just keep this is mind: what sort of supermodel are you if half your face is missing?  Cheers!  The irreverent tone, I have to say, distracts - the narrator relates things so flatly you'd swear she's an automaton - and precludes you from taking the book seriously, even if the theme would ordinarily give you pause to think.   As does our Milky Way Midnite, aka Look at Me.  Our narrator, Charlotte, is a raving bitch, and her condition - another deformity via suspicious auto accident - hardly improves her outlook.  The other Charlotte (yes, there are two Charlottes.  Not in a Julia and Julia way.  One is named for the other.) is far more provocative a character, especially since she represents the flip side of fashion model-Charlotte. There are other characters, their outlines stock (elusive childhood friend, mad genius, alcoholic detective) and their purposes at first unclear, but even for those who don't drive the plot, the characterization is realistic.  And that's important, because Egan has a lot to tell us (without telling us anything), and the only people who can do that are the characters.  Her take on identity in a consumer culture is pensive, not fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants witty, and both Charlottes are so lonely for want of a purpose - hell, all the characters are lonely for that reason - that commiseration is immediate.  Also, I found immediate parallels in Look at Me and Have You Seen Me?, a 2001 novel about a stripper/prostitute who goes through the motions physically and emotionally. Empty narrator, but the book itself is anything but.
Am I rambling?  I write half this shit at two AM and re-read at a reasonable hour, and I just realized that I don't actually have a point.  That's probably the point. Invisible Monsters is a book you'd read after consuming about a bathtub full of Brandy Alexanders. Swiftly paced and funny enough to produce a few
liquor-soaked laughs....a good summer read, and if you're good and drunk by the end, you'll probably call all your friends to reveal your newfound "meaning of life" whilst coming off your high [or email them... sorry again about that. :( --Kirstin] Read Look at Me when you're in the throes of depression, because it'll either bring you out of it (good) and plunge you further (good, or self-satisfying for the mentally ill).  But don't take my word for it.  Please, I'm the girl who can't pick up The Nuclear Age because of a deep-seated belief that any contact with the word "nuclear" is a message from God's lips to my ears that such an attack is imminent and that I should've hightailed it to the Yukon, like yesterday.  So, play it as it lays.  Ooh!  Incidentally, another excellent woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown novel.  Don't combine that with Egan, though, unless you're suffering from what Holly Golightly deemed the "mean reds."  In that case, gimme a Brandy Alexander, and don't be stingy, baby.  
This review was brought to you by the letter A.