Book 305: The Rules of Attraction

 

"But I was running and I was running because it felt like the 'right' thing to do. It was a chance to show some emotion. I wasn't acting on passion. I was simply acting. Because it seemed the only thing to do. It seemed like something I had been told to do."

Dates read: March 23-27, 2019

Rating: 5/10

I was pretty sheltered in high school. I didn't party, I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs. I did my extracurriculars and then went home and did my homework, for the most part. So when I got to college, and had some freedom...I went a little bonkers. Nothing out of the ordinary, but LOTS of booze and the occasional marijuana cigarette. To me, this felt practically criminal, but when I hear some people's stories about college partying, I think it was all actually pretty tame.

It's a wonder that the students depicted in Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction even have majors, because it's clear that the actual activity that dominates their lives isn't going to class. It's taking drugs and hooking up. There are three primary narrators: Sean, Paul, and Lauren, though there are some chapters from the perspectives of other people in their lives. The story begins literally mid-sentence, as Lauren recounts being drugged and raped at a Dress To Get Screwed party when she was a freshman. One might think this would be a traumatic event, but Lauren's recollection of it is distant, almost bored. The only thing she seems to have strong feelings about at all is her boyfriend, Victor, who took a semester off to travel. The problem is that we get his perspective as well, and he doesn't seem to recall having a girlfriend, much less think that he shouldn't be sleeping with whoever he might like.

There's a loose love triangle that plays out: Lauren used to date Paul, who is bisexual. Paul has a thing for Sean, a rich kid who has managed to find himself in debt to a local drug dealer. Sean is interested in Lauren, who likes him enough to date him for a while, but she's still too hung up on Victor to really get invested. And things might have happened between Paul and Sean...Paul recounts quite a lot of sex, but Sean's own versions of the same nights note nothing of the sort. Everyone's an unreliable narrator, their perspectives are warped not only by their constant drug use, but their own self-centeredness.

This is an odd book. There's a lot in here that I usually would hate: a plot that centers largely around unpleasant people taking a lot of drugs, characters that are difficult to tell apart (I often had to flip back to figure out if it was a Sean or Paul chapter, and struggled to remember which of them dated Lauren when, and which one owed the dealer). But somehow, despite the fact that I don't know that I could say that I liked it, I found it compelling enough. The constantly switching perspectives (including one from Sean's French roommate, entirely in French) keep it interesting, and the unreliability of the narrators made it so that I was always questioning the veracity of their viewpoints.

There's a kind of tenderness there, underneath the jaded exteriors of these students, particularly from Lauren, that drove my continued interest in the book. I'm sure there are those among us who haven't tried to mask pain or feeling lost under substances or experiences, but most people I know have done it at one time or another. The emotional immaturity of the characters is reasonable...they are, after all, quite young. At the same time, it wasn't exactly enjoyable to spend time with anyone in this book. It's not without redeeming qualities, but I'm still not quite sure how I feel about Ellis as a writer. If you're interested in his work, I'd recommend this, but if anything I've described sounds off-putting to you, it's skippable.

One year ago, I was reading: A Bollywood Affair

Two years ago, I was reading: Plagues and Peoples

Three years ago, I was reading: Prep

Four years ago, I was reading: The Blind Assassin

Five years ago, I was reading: Border Child

Six years ago, I was reading: Unbelievable

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Book 305: The Rules of Attraction

Book 259: Sing, Unburied, Sing

 

"But when the sample size of fish food ran out, and I asked Leonie to buy me more, she said she would, and then forgot, again and again, until one day she said: Give him some old bread. I figured he couldn't crunch like he needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his eyes white, a slimy scrim like fat, no voice in his bubbles. Leonie kill things."

Dates read: September 3-6, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: National Book Award

It's...interesting how much more we as a culture are willing to forgive fathers, in a way that we're not willing to forgive mothers. Fathers can be physically absent, or emotionally unavailable, or not there for the hard stuff, or bad-tempered, and get a pass for it as long as they can convince us that they tried. But not mothers. Mothers are supposed to be always there with love and support and kindness, and if they're not, it's taken as mark of moral failure. Mothers literally give us life with their bodies, and once we're born, they're expecting to continue doing the hard work of nurturing and woe betide them if it doesn't work out that way.

Wicked, cruel stepmothers are a common enough trope, but literary examples of bad biological mothers are harder to find. Which makes Leonie, in Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award-winning Sing, Unburied, Sing, a relatively rare creature. In her late 20s, she is the mother of two children, adolescent Jojo and toddler Kayla, with her longtime boyfriend Michael. Leonie is also an addict, with a special fondness for the meth that's sent Michael to prison. The kids have been mostly raised by her parents in rural southern Mississippi, though their other grandparents have never even met them...you see, Leonie is black, Michael is white, and his parents are racists who helped cover up the murder of Leonie's brother Given when they were in high school, by one of Michael's cousins. 

When she finds out Michael is due to be released early, Leonie loads her kids in the car and drives to Parchman to get him. It's the same prison where her own father, River, once served time in his youth, and his past there becomes important because Michael isn't the only passenger they pick up: they're also joined by the ghost of a teenager named Richie. Only Jojo and Kayla can see Richie, who Jojo's heard about in his grandfather's stories, and when the family arrives back home, Jojo agrees to confront his grandfather to find out how Richie died. 

There's a lot more to it, and that's actually one of the highlights of this novel: it is rich in atmosphere. Ward deftly weaves together the stark realities of poverty, drug addiction, how parents and children can fail each other, and the way the justice system works for the white power structure and against people of color. She brings certain threads to the forefront at times, then others, but never loses track of any of them. She also does beautiful work of characterization, making Jojo an incredibly sympathetic and compelling protagonist, showing Leonie's selfishness and the damage it causes but depicting her as a deeply flawed human rather than a one-note villain, conveying the decency and strength of River and his wife Philomene, doing their best in a world that has not done right by them.

But though it does some things incredibly well, it stumbled hard (at least, for me) in other ways. The most pronounced was that it sets itself in the literary tradition of Beloved...and then doesn't measure up to the incredibly high bar of Toni Morrison's masterpiece. You can't write a story about the stain of institutionalized racism that prominently features ghosts and the mysterious death of a child without knowing that you're going to be compared to Beloved, and if you're going to go there, you better bring it. It wasn't brought. Ward's choice to use Richie as the most prominent ghost in the narrative rather than Given (who Leonie sees only when high), an actual member of the family whose perspective could have been used to give more context to Leonie's youth, is inexplicable to me. I never got invested in Richie, which meant that when Ward brought her threads together for a set of final climactic scenes that are supposed to pack a huge emotional punch, it felt overwrought and unearned rather than profound and cathartic. It has merit, and it's worth reading, but if you haven't read Beloved, read that and skip this.  

 

One day ago, I was reading: The Great Mortality

 

Two days ago, I was reading: Everything Under

 

Three days ago, I was reading: A Vast Conspiracy

 

Four days ago, I was reading: Invisible Man

 

Five days ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 259: Sing, Unburied, Sing

Book 166: Party Monster

"Oh, Angel was probably dead, all right. No big deal. Or maybe he was in the hospital. Who cared? They had probably been partying too hard and Angel overdosed. Happens all the time. People die around us all the time. Drop like flies. Overdose. AIDS. Sometimes they kill themselves. People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again. New people were already in line to take their place."

Dates read: August 5-7, 2017

Rating: 5/10

I've never really gotten what makes drugs fun. I'm not a total square, I drink regularly and I've partaken in the occasional marijuana cigarette, but nothing really harder than that. I don't like feeling out of control. I'm already high-strung enough without the help of uppers. Even very low doses of pain or anxiety pills just make me sleep, which I do love to do, but I don't really classify as "fun". And the idea of seeing or feeling things that aren't there just seems more scary than anything else. Who knows, if I tried those things maybe I'd like them, and if other people do enjoy them, that's their business, but I generally feel like I'll be okay if I meet my maker (or don't, I don't know what happens after we die) without ever having tried cocaine.

Suffice it to say that when it comes to drugs, James St. James and I have different opinions. In his memoir of his days as a New York City club kid in the late 80s/early 90s, Party Monster, he gleefully recounts his experiences doing LOTS of drugs, with ketamine as a special favorite. But the drugs aren't really the focus of the book. The focus is really on the murder of Angel Melendez, a crime that marked the end of the reign of the Club Kids. It's not a who-dunnit, as the murderers, Michael Alig and Robert Riggs, are identified right at the beginning through Alig's own confession to St. James. We even know how and partially why. What's left is the context.

To give us that context, St. James tells his own story. An earlier arrival on the scene than Alig, St. James tells us how he came to occupy a fairly high rung on the social ladder of the nightclubbers, introducing us to the people whose asses he kissed to get there. Just a short while later, Alig arrived and St. James tells us how he at first watched and then became a friend and sort of mentor to Alig as the younger man engineered his own meteoric rise up the hierarchy. And part of what Alig brought with him, along with a new group of hangers-on, was drugs. Well, there were already drugs obviously. But more drugs, and harder ones. The kind that let two strung-out junkies, high on a cocktail of pills and their own sense of importance and untouchability, brutally murder a drug dealer, shove his body in the river, and carry on with their lives like they're going to get away with it. And they very nearly do: despite the fact that Melendez is a missing person and Alig and Riggs' involvement in his disappearance is an open secret in their community, it isn't until the body is found that the police actually take any action.

I've never been one to find substance abuse memoirs especially appealing...reading about someone's experiences taking a lot of drugs doesn't really do much for me. But St. James' arch, gossipy writing style makes it about as good as it can be. And while there's no doubt after reading it that he mostly enjoyed the experiences, he doesn't shy away from exposing the less glamorous side of it. Like groups of addicts ripping the radiator out of an apartment wall because they think they remember someone dropping a bag back there, a scene he renders darkly humorous while still exposing as pathetic. Indeed, it's St. James' strong writing that makes this book workable overall. 20somethings drinking and dancing and getting high out of their minds wearing weird costumes is something that seems like it would make a decent essay but would be tiresome at book length, and yet the way St. James tells his story makes it mostly pretty fun to read. This is not great literature, but it's an interesting, well-told account of a very particular time and place.

Tell me, blog friends...are drugs more fun than I think they are?

One year ago, I was reading: Lost Horizon

Two years ago, I was reading: Marlena

Three years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 166: Party Monster

Book 148: The Panopticon

"It's the same in the nick or the nuthouse: notoriety is respect. Like, if you were in a unit with a total psycho and they said you were sound? Then you'd be a wee bit safer in the next place. If it's a total nut that's vouched for you, the less hassle you'll get. I dinnae need tae worry about any of that. I am the total nut. We're just in training for the proper jail. Nobody talks about it, but it's a statistical fact. That or on the game. Most of us are anyway—but not everybody, some go to the nuthouse. Some just disappear."

Dates read: May 26-29, 2017

Rating: 7/10

In identical twin studies, the incidence of schizophrenia, if one twin has it, is 50% for the other twin. Obviously, the rate of schizophrenia in the general population is much, much lower (only about 1%), so clearly there's a strong genetic link. But at only 50%, there's clearly something else going on as well: ye olde Nature v. Nurture. There are probably thousands of people walking around who have risk factors for this or any number of other mental or physical disorders, but because they've been placed in the right environment, will never develop them. And the inverse is also true...there are probably thousands of people for whom a genetic predisposition might as well have been fate, because their environments are going to make it all but impossible for the disease to NOT take its toll.

If anyone should be damaged, it's Anais Hendricks, the teenage heroine of Jenni Fagan's The Panopticon. Born in a mental hospital to a woman who disappeared soon afterward, she's shuffled through dozens of placements by the time we meet her as a 15 year-old getting shoved into the back of a police car with blood all over her, not able to remember what just happened. What she does know is that a policewoman is in a coma and that she's being blamed for it, and that she's headed toward a group home for wayward youth called the Panopticon. As Anais settles in and gets to know the staff and residents, we learn more and more about her background, about the places that she's lived and the ways (sex and drugs, mostly) that she's tried to escape and find a little happiness for herself. Even as she gets more comfortable, though, there's a constant axe hanging over her head, since she knows if the injured policewoman takes a turn for the worse she'll be sent to a secure facility to be under constant lock and key.

The book takes place in Scotland, and Fagan peppers the dialogue with dialect. It's a little hard to wrap your head around at first if that's not something you're used to, but it's pretty easy to tell what the words mean by context clues and after a while it becomes part of the rhythm of the novel. The plot itself is slightly off-kilter in a way that fits the story being told...there's a pretty clear "peak" near the middle of the plot after which things begin to fall apart, but there's not really a climax per se. And the people it shines a light on, teens that have lived through the kind of horrifying conditions that leave them in a group home, don't really have lives that follow the linear path we might expect either. There's a lot of very dark stuff here: drug abuse, rape, disease, cutting, parental abandonment, death, but it somehow comes together to end on a surprisingly hopeful note.

What really shines in The Panopticon is the characterization, especially of Anais. At first she's an off-putting character, a violent and drug-addled teenager who seems practically feral and certainly dangerous. But as her layers get peeled back, you come to see how her life has necessitated the hard shell she wears around herself and why she acts the way she does. Slowly, you begin to care about her and root for her and by the time there's a court proceeding where she's dismissed as a hopeless case who can never be trusted to live outside of custody you're offended by how smugly they assume they've seen all they need to know about her. Many of the other kids and some of the staff in the Panopticon are given strong personalities despite relatively little "page time", so to speak, but Anais is a bold and surprisingly winning heroine. As long as you can deal with the rough places the book goes, I'd definitely recommend it. Please don't do what I did originally, though, and assume it's YA. It is very much a book for a more mature audience.

Tell me, blog friends...what do you think about reading novels with large portions of dialect?

One year ago, I was reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Two years ago, I was reading: The Circle

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Book 148: The Panopticon