Until Our Faces Have Been Blown Away

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True fact: you will not find two writers as dissimilar as C.S. Lewis and Chuck Palahniuk so proximal as in this essay. You might be surprised at authors I list among my favorites. Yes, I appreciate the father of modern Christian apologetics, the genius behind Narnia, right alongside the man who gave us Fight Club and a short story about an adolescent who lost the better part of his lower intestine to an autoerotic pool vent incident. (Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.) I’m usually pretty bashful about it, though. The Palahniuk side, that is, because even if I’m not talking to good-loving Christians who (bless their souls) prefer not to read about a plane hijacked by a quasi-Anabapist terrorist, most everyone else has written him off for his gratuitous violence and generally unsavory characters anyway. But it’s his characters that keep me coming back, novel after novel. What I found when I read Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters is surprisingly the same thing I was so floored by in the C.S. Lewis novel Till We Have Faces: the imperfection of human love. Simply put, pare them down to their souls and you’ll find Lewis and Palahniuk both see humanity’s profound potential for love and hate as precarious sides to the same coin.

Most people who know C.S. Lewis know The Chronicles of Narnia, or sometimes The Screwtape Letters, but rarely Till We Have Faces, his final novel and the retelling of the classic Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, published in 1953. Moreover, these people will certainly not be likely to read a book by Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, your average population doesn’t recognize Chuck Palahniuk’s name, and much fewer know how to pronounce it. You’ve usually got to follow up with the guy who wrote Fight Club—and a brief lesson in phonetics—before people nod with a goofy sort of smile: I saw that movie. Brad Pitt was hot in it. ¹ As a bookseller, I’ve seen that look a lot, but I persist.

In 1999, somewhere between his novel about men who get their jollies from breaking bones and the one about the porn queen looking to break the record for serial fornications (and perhaps herself) in a single day, in a single film, Palahniuk published his only straight-to-paperback novel, Invisible Monsters. True to form, on this ride in the transgressive theme park that is Palahniuk’s mind, the narrative features an ex-supermodel with half a face (Shannon McFarland); the man she desperately loves and whom she is secretly feeding hormone supplements (Manus Kelley); and Shannon’s estranged, transsexual brother (Shane McFarland, a.k.a Princess Brandy Alexander); all together on a road trip to pump full of lead the rival supermodel, Evie Cottrell—who allegedly disfigured Shannon—at her own wedding.

I encountered Palahniuk’s work late into my junior year of high school. At the time, I was working at my hometown’s public library, stocking the books returned throughout the day. When new books came in, I was to place them on special displays near the entrance. This was a little while after the publication of Palahniuk’s sixth novel, Diary, and the stark book jacket caught my eye. For reasons I can only explain as my then-affinity for minimalist literature and a fascination with the man behind the motion picture Fight Club, I tossed the book back like my first—much later—drink of brandy, in a nervous hurry of morbid fascination. Next I read Lullaby, Diary‘s predecessor. From there, I was hooked. By my senior year of high school, I had nearly read everything Palahniuk had published up to that point, getting to Invisible Monsters sometime in the middle of February.

What fascinated me most, I think, was how bizarrely opposite all the characters seemed to me and my own experiences, and yet they remained so readily accessible. I grew up in rural quietude; Palahniuk’s people vibrated with aggression and angst I always associated with the urban underground I imagined existing in places like Seattle and Los Angeles, hipsters and rockers and entities of varying degrees of celebrity careening toward self-destruction. Even the placid island community of Waytansea in Diary reminded me of the incommunicable violence inherent to the expressionistic art movement its main character seemed to be evoking in her paintings. I remember lying on my bed one night, nearly catatonic but for my eyes racing along the pages of Invisible Monsters, and getting a phone call from my brother at college. When asked what I was doing, I tried to give him the rundown of exactly what it is I’d found myself inexplicably addicted to.

You see, there’s this supermodel who gets her face blown off by this other supermodel, and now she’s on a revenge road-trip across the country with a sort of transsexual Jiminy Cricket and this guy she keeps feeding hormones to make him fat and effeminate so he’ll love her again, stopping at estate sales along the way to dope up on whatever they find in the medicine cabinet.

All my brother said was, Oh. Uh, are mom and dad home?

I’ve never had an easy time explaining just why Palahniuk works as an author for me, when, on the surface, there is nothing particularly exceptional about his prose. He’s a postmodern novelist whose narrative voice hardly changes; every story is first-person, has refrain lines that tie the plot together, and relies on a knack for pushing the envelope. Every book seems to have a plot twist roughly two-thirds through, and every character seems to embody one dysfunction or another. While formulaic seems harsh, it’s the first word that comes to mind. While the circumstances vary, the story remains the same, requiring protagonist after protagonist to spiral in self-destruction until, at whatever last possible moment, they are saved from themselves–something readers sometimes miss.

In Fight Club, community (while eventually dissolving into its own destructive tendencies as a collective) serves the purpose of saving the narrator from his own depression and insomnia. Our narrator-protagonist in Invisible Monsters finally understands herself through the love and acceptance she’s found in the queen supreme Brandy Alexander.

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