Invisible Monsters

Each month, I meet with some girl­friends for a dis­cus­sion on a book we’ve recently read.  This infor­mal book club has no pre­set read­ing list.  One mem­ber gets to pick the book and the venue for dis­cussing it.   So far, we’ve read Water for Ele­phants: A Novel by Sarah Gruen, Ain’t She Sweet? by Susan Eliz­a­beth Phillips, and The Host: A Novel by Stephe­nie Meyer.  This month, my friend decided to shake things up, and chose Invis­i­ble Mon­sters by Chuck Palahniuk.

If you don’t know who Chuck Palah­niuk is, he’s the author of Fight Club: A Novel.  Accord­ing to The Cult, his fan club, Chuck had a hard time get­ting Invis­i­ble Mon­sters pub­lished because it was too dark, so he wrote Fight Club: A Novel.  While that book was def­i­nitely darker, it brought him suc­cess, and later he pub­lished the first book.   Chuck is an angry, pas­sion­ate writer, and this book has a style that is crass, vul­gar and over the top.  In fact, it’s so unpol­ished that there are some times that I wasn’t entirely sure that some of his prose was inten­tional, or sim­ply sloppy edit­ing.    Still, it’s a fun, irrev­er­ent, thought-provoking read, and a big depar­ture from the types of books we’ve been reading.

Here’s Chuck’s own description:

My agent calls Fight Club “hyper-macho” and he calls Invis­i­ble Mon­sters “hyper-camp.” I wrote the first draft years ago sit­ting in laun­dro­mats and the only mag­a­zines to read were like Savvy and Made­moi­selle, and I think Glam­our and Vogue. So I sort of stud­ied the lan­guage of those mag­a­zines; the lan­guage of fash­ion descrip­tion, you know; 600,000 adjec­tives before you find the word sweater at the end. And I thought, why couldn’t you write a book in this lan­guage? So I did, and it’s about a fash­ion model who is always the cen­ter of atten­tion until her face gets shot off in a drive-by shoot­ing. And so she becomes cul­tur­ally invis­i­ble and she real­izes there is more power in peo­ple being afraid of acknowl­edg­ing your pres­ence than on peo­ple focus­ing on you all the time.

The book is writ­ten in a non-linear fash­ion, much like a fash­ion mag­a­zine.  It hops all over the place.  Descrip­tions of cloth­ing and atti­tudes are incred­i­bly indepth for such shal­low top­ics.  The entire book is tawdry.  The main char­ac­ter is under­go­ing an awak­en­ing, and decid­ing what to do now that she has no face.  The char­ac­ters in the book are prod­ucts of the plas­tic world of other people’s opin­ions.  Most of them are strong, or weak, based on oth­ers’ per­cep­tions of them.  The for­mer model now hides her destroyed face behind veils.  “It’s a look that says, Thank you for not shar­ing.”  She has a new­found strength in her invisibility.

Since begin­ning to work on this web­site, I had already been think­ing about the power of invis­i­bil­ity.  I’ve been hid­ing behind the pro­tec­tion of being rel­a­tively anony­mous for years.  I bought the url for this project ages ago, not know­ing what I was going to do with it.  A large part of why I haven’t moved is that I’m so exposed out here!  Even though it’s a tiny step out of the front door to a full fledged extro­vert, I’m not one.  I feel like I’ve thrown my pri­vacy to the winds.   You can google me now!  (Actu­ally, at this point, that’s an exag­ger­a­tion. I can’t find www.ladyglutter.com on google yet, or even LadyG­lut­ter except in for my char­ac­ters in some online games and a com­ment or two to some blogs I read.)  Pub­lish­ing any solo artis­tic ven­ture risks expo­sure.   Though I feel con­fi­dent I will be able to retain a rea­son­able amount of my per­sonal pri­vacy, a tiny part of me whis­pers, What if I’m wildly suc­cess­ful?  I don’t want that, because I don’t want to become famous! (My mind likes to go straight to the worst case sce­nario.)  Also, What if peo­ple judge ME on what I write, or any of my creations?

I’m here.  I decided I can deal with it.