Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the book Fight Club, on which the most excellent movie was based, has written another tale of modern ennui and self-negation that he warns the reader to stop reading in the first chapter if they’re looking to get saved or find any redeeming value in. The book is a dark tale dealing with addictions of a mainly sexual nature that is written with a humor and brevity that doesn’t dwell on the darkness as much as on some of its sillier symptoms and compulsions. It’s lead character Victor Mancini is a sexaholic who mainly goes to sexaholic meetings for sex and to get tips on how and where to get more sex. Here he tells us the mythological sex monsters we’ve heard about in stories like the woman, the peanut butter, and the dog at the dinner party, the cheerleader with a stomach full of semen, the guys who got mangled in the vacuum hoses with cutting blades for clogging, the zucchini guy, all the cautionary tales of sexual deviation, it is here that we find that they are all real. Victor knows them and he wants to fuck many of them as he gets better.
This will of course remind Fight Club fans of Jack’s attending various disease support groups in order to gain sympathy, a hug, and to feel something. It is this need for empty people so numbed by lack of meaning and modern culture that leads Jack to starting fight clubs. Pain becomes something to feel and connect him. Like Jack, Victor has that hole inside, instead choosing sex with as many women in as many sordid and novel ways to create a sense of connection.
But with Victor we get a bit more back story dealing with his mother that sheds light on his motivations and female issues. Vic’s mom, or a reasonable facsimile of one for a society poisoned with so much sickness, was in and out of jail and when out abducted Vic for some short term adventures that among other things taught him that art comes from pain and you have to risk your life to get love. That leads to Vic’s adult hobby of pretending to choke in restaurants to feel that love as he’s hugged back into life and reassured by strangers he tells himself he is saving by giving their lives meaning in this heroic act he gives to them as a gift. This goes back to an experience with his mother during one of her abductions where his choking gets him affection as it gets her arrested and thus probably contributing to his strange sexual proclivities.
That also is connected to the past where his first experience is revealed to have shaped him, and like with many people who are trying to recapture that first feeling no matter how bad, in many cases even abusive, he needs to escalate the novelty and minimilize the length of contact. He and his best pal Denny, who is a cronic masturbator, work at a colonial period theme park where they are literally stuck in 17th century America and have to dress the parts. And of course being stuck in the past is part of the problem for all these people stuck in their infantile sexual states. Past decides our future unless we make the effort to decide for ourselves what we want and it is Denny in tryiing to find a compulsion other than jerking off that starts to find a way to build something new by redirecting his pathology. Rocks and stones become his metaphor, standing as the something more solid we can focus our addictions on to build ourselves something more to help “the days of my life to add up to something.”
Victor has no such focus or desire to alter his behavior. Before having to quit medical school to support his mother and his addictions he became well acquainted with every bodily flaw that makes us so imperfect and susceptible to death. He seems like someone for whom life is death so they may as well get every fleeting moment of orgasmic satisfaction out of it. Like most addicts the addiction is what he must live for. The addiction is a viable option to the more frightening feelings of life like sadness, anger, fear, worry, or depression. But an obsession with a woman named Paige at the geriatric facility his mother is living and dying in changes him and leads to his attempt to find his father. The woman represents herself as a married Dr who is just trying to be one of Vic’s many conquests, trying gamely to get him to screw her in the hospital chapel while wearing nothing but her Dr’s lab coat. But Victor resists as part of his multi step recovery program for his addiction which takes a new turn when the Dr’s investigations into his mothers past reveals that she may not be so crazy when she said he was immaculately conceived. He in fact may be an offspring of Jesus as a matter of fact. This is due to a church conspiracy involving cells taken from Christ’s foreskin which actually has little to do with the novel and is not a featured part. I say this so no one will read this expecting to get any Davinci Code intrigue or even Tom Robbins Another Roadside Attraction.
This discovery does force a collision between his newfound, “enormous capacity for love,” and his excuse for his lifestyle, which goes something like this: “”There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit…We live and we die and anyting else is just delusional. It’s just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no God. There’s just decisions and disease and death. What I am is a dirty, filthy, helpless sexaholic, and I can’t change, and I can’t stop, and that’s all I’ll ever be. And I’ll prove it.”
The Jesus symbolism eventually winds up in bromides about saving ourselves, and creating our own messiahs, as Denny builds his rock counting and collecting obsession into something, anything, just so long as they build something of their own making. Vic even manages to get himself slightly stoned in the biblical sense. But the idea is to break from his mother’s confession of having wasted so much of life tearing things apart rather than creating. We live in a world where so many of us don’t know what to do with ourelves, a world where, “we’ve taken the world apart and dont know what to do with the pieces” Addiction becomes a way of escaping what we know, our bite of the apple, the knowledge of how lousy things are, to find peace.
Of course the peace is always short lived in direct ratio with the strength of our addiction and its danger. It becomes something to live against since we have nothing to live for, to paraphrase the book. Making a mess of our lives seems like a subconscious way of making our lives better since just living without sinking to such levels of depravity and lack of control seems like so much more than it does for those who have always lived average lives of quiet desperation and haven’t surrendered themselves to addictions. At least not of a huge nature since most of us have our addictions and patterns of behavior that console and comfort us though they may not be in our healthiest long term best interest. So for an addict life can only get better by making it worse.
Ultimately choosing and creating apart from what society has chosen for us to be is part of the books message. Denny comes to understand that in creating, “more will be possible. The longer we can tolerate being incomplete. Delay gratification.” The hint of the creative instinct shines through as the inference of how it is natures misfits that create great things, Vic’s mothers assertion of art coming from pain being re-thought as breeding invention. Out of rocks and chaos the Pilgrims Denny and Victor dress up as for work, turned their own nasty psychosis and repressive sexual weirdness into a very different reality as we know it. And so too can we turn our own shortcomings into something more out of a desire to just create and build and choose our addictions rather than letting them choose us.
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