A young gay writer named James Smale is sent by his agent to Doubleday to take a meeting about his book, with no advance warning that the editor who wants to acquire his manuscript is the former first lady.
Rowley ( Lily and the Octopus, 2016) likes a shot of fantasy with his fiction-last time it was a malignant sea creature attached to the head of a dachshund, this time it's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her day job. Not worth replacing your old paperback, but a nice collector’s item for Palahniuk’s cult.Ī debut novelist finds that his book has been acquired by Jackie O.
The book is really a superfluous artifact, but that doesn’t change the fact that Palahniuk remains one of the most gifted writers in American fiction. Throw in some more drag queens, a knife-wielding ex-cop, plenty of drugs, sexual abuse and even a wedding, not to mention some eerie family values. While recovering in the hospital, Shannon meets Brandy Alexander, a voluptuous pre-surgical transsexual who adopts Shannon and takes her on the road, granting them new monikers, identities and trades in the process. The narrator is Shannon McFarland, a fashion model whose beauty has been obliterated in an enigmatic accident. The book that Kirkus drubbed “Too clever by half” in 1999 is still here in its ghoulish entirety. In matter of substance, there’s not much of a “remix” to be had here, just a, “Now, please jump to Chapter Forty,” Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style that doesn’t so much reorder the book as augment the disjointed, whiplash atmosphere its author intended.
The elder statesman of transgressive fiction even sounds a bit cynical-“You young people, you who think you invented fun and drugs and good times, fuck you.”-though with his skewed sense of humor, it’s generally hard to be sure. In a new "Reintroduction," Palahniuk explains that Invisible Monsters was never meant to be a conventional narrative, resembling in its original incarnation the Sears catalogue or an old copy of Vogue magazine, jumping forward and backward in time with the quick-cut style changes of a classic MTV playlist. Palahniuk ( Damned, 2011, etc.) plays literary DJ, revisiting and updating his 1999 novel Invisible Monsters.
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