I’ll Raise a Glass to the Drivel

I was a freshman in college when I found Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. The story was enthralling. But it wasn’t just the plot—although the deformed supermodel and her transvestite road friend were certainly entertaining. The writing style spoke to me. I thought, “My GOD! Someone wrote a novel that sounds and thinks like me!” This novel, like so many other books to so many other people, was not a book: it was an entity, a force with which to be reckoned, an icon. I spent many a lunch or phone conversation describing this book to friends. The phrase “I think you’d dig on it” often fell out of my mouth.

“No matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when a pool of their blood edges up too close” (15).

“I was the picture of calm. I never, never panicked. I saw my blood and snot and teeth splashed all over the dashboard the moment after the accident, but hysteria is impossible without an audience. Panicking by yourself is the same as laughing alone in an empty room. You feel really silly” (50).

Look at that language! Look at those topics! Love. Blood. Betrayal. Solipsism. Self-consciousness. Violence. This book preyed on my sophomoric need for attention and brooding emotions.

I didn’t even have to pull out the text for those quotations; I was so in love with this book, I have a word file on my 6-year-old laptop titled “Rocking with Invis Mon.” Oh my.

I often hear people refer to their favorite books influenced by what I call the “Charlie Syndrome.” Charlie being from Flowers for Algernon: You can’t go home again. I hear people say how ridiculous their ex-favorite books were and how elevated their tastes have now become.

As snobbish as it sounds, I agree. Invisible Monsters is drivel. It catered to my fledgling tastes, and when I leafed through it again recently, the narrated masturbation, sex acts, violence, and emotional brooding seem no more literary than pornography. After a few years have passed since I first read the book, and loved the book, and lived the book, and subjected my friends and family to the plot of the book, I doubt I will ever read it again in its entirety.

But I believe there is more to the Charlie Syndrome than a simple denial of past passions. I often forget that Invisible Monsters lead me to more “Chuck Books” (apparently a genre), and while I was in a store buying more “Chuck Books,” I bought a copy of The Lovely Bones. And I loved Alice Sebold so much, that I went back to buy her memoir Lucky. While I was in store purchasing Lucky, I saw a folded Japanese crane on the cover of When the Emperor Was Divine. And Julie Otsuka’s book is now one of the four books I am analyzing in my thesis discussing Japanese-American Literature.

Perhaps what I’m saying is that I owe Invisible Monsters something more than simply calling it drivel. The book made me love reading. The book made me feel smart and learned. The book gave me a reason to buy more books and join the Border’s Rewards Program and ask for B&N giftcards. Invisible Monsters might be drivel now, but it inspired me at the time. I don’t think people can jump right into Hemingway; they need a spotter to lift a behemoth like that; my spotter was Palahniuk. I couldn’t love Jake and Lady Ashley without Shannon’s self-loathing and self-destructive behavior.

It’s fine to have a Charlie Syndrome moment; in fact, I applaud the self-awareness and growth in readers. But let us not be too hasty. Remark on the ephemeral enjoyment of a novel, but let us not disregard the enjoyment completely. I probably won’t read any more “Chuck Books,” but I still smile supportively, and, more importantly, empathetically when people tell me they are “DYING for Chuck’s next one.”

I’ll drink to that.