Book Review: Diary, A Novel

I have a new friend in my life named Bethany Leigh who I met on a really cool social website entited 43Things (www.43things.com -- check it out when you get a chance). As I read her materials, it became pretty clear to me that we have really similar reading tastes and that we both love to read. Later on, I did the visual personality test on facebook and found out that she and I are 100% intellectually compatible so that verifies the similar reading tastes thing. There was, however, a new author on her list who was not on mine: Chuck Palahniuk. She likes him so much, as a matter of fact, that she wants to come visit him in his native city, Seattle. Pretty cool! All I knew about this author was that he wrote Fight Club and I totally loved the opening scene in Fight Club where he totally disses (how do you spell "disses"?) the Ikea lifestyle. Anyway, I thought it was about time that I read this guy so I started with Diary. I also discovered that Amy Hempel was the one writer P. constantly refers to as his favorite writer so I also picked her main book: The Collective Stories. To my credit, I didn't do what I usually do and buy every possible thing that P. wrote. I started with one book. Ahh, what a display of great restraint!!!



I have to admit that it took awhile for me to get into Diary. The book is written in what is called the minimalist style. Hemingway is probably the best known in this style. It is exactly the opposite of F. Scott Fitzgerald in many ways. F. absolutely drenched everything he did in words. On the other hand, the minimalist attempts to simply words. Great minimalists are capable of saying a great deal while maintaining tremendous economy. They also tend to be very multi-interpretational. It's not always clear exactly where they are coming from but they come along with these absolutely marvelous loaded statements every once in awhile that make you think and think and think. The other thing about P. is that his plotlines are rather outlandish in a manner reminiscent of one of my all time favorites: Tom Robbins.



I'm not going to talk much about plot line. I don't think that I can try to describe this plot without destroying it. I'll leave that to the book. Suffice it to say that Diary is the story of Misty, a waitress at the Waytansea Hotel, and a erstwhile artist who everybody in the town turns back into an artist. You can find out the rest. The book is supposed to be Misty's diary and it is written to her husband who is in a coma.



The first place that the book catches me is on the entry dated June 28 (p. 17). This chapter introduces Misty to the reader. The rhythm to this writing reminds me very much of the movie beginning to The Fight Club:



"This is a day in the life of Misty Marie, queen of the slaves.

"Another longest day of the year. It's a game anybody can play. This is just Misty's own personal coma. A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat.

"Everytime someone asks for table....you need to take a drink...

"Well you should serve tofu instead of vale!" take a drink...

"Misty, how could you? You know I'm always a regular here at noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Really, Misty..." then you need to take two drinks.

"When the summer people ask for coffee drinks with foamed milk or chelated silver or carob sprinkles or soy-based anything, take another drink.

If they don't tip, take another."

And it keeps repeating the same mantra over and over--take a drink, have an aspirin, take another--until you know exactly what it feels like to be in the midst of yet another longest day of the year with Misty, queen of the slaves.

In the midst of all this is a line, however, that opens up the whole chapter and really the whole book. In the midst of the repetition, Misty says,

"You can see where this is going.
"This is where Misty Marie Kleinman's whole life has gone.
"You have endless ways you can commit suicide without dying dying."

And in the midst of this rhythm and this repetition, we are slapped in the face with this one liner.

I enter into this one liner in my own life. Today I am halfway through my weekend. I have come to realize that my weekends can make or break my week. You see, I am in the midst of a job that is not anywhere close to my main passion in life and yet I have experienced jobs that are so my main passion in life. If I waste my entire weekend by RESTING, DOING NOTHING, taking a drink, having two aspirin, taking another--whatever my drink may be--then I will return to work unrested and feeling like a nothing. The week will be a horrible experience for me and spend all of my time thinking about the next weekend when I just might completely repeat the process if I'm totally stupid, which I occasionally am. The one saving grace in my life is that I am forced to one of my passions and that is parenting. My children don't let me rest, do nothing, take a pill. I have to father. Because, however, this weekend I have at least chosen to write this blog, and to clean my office by the way, then it is at least a little bit possible that I will break the cycle and truly go back to work rested, refreshed, energetic. Everyday we choose life, as it says in Deuteronomy, or we choose suicide. Misty had reached a point in her life where she no longer believed in herself so there's no way that she could be all that she was supposed to be and every day was the very longest day of her life until the next one.

Now for a few one liners that caught me throughout the book:

July 12 entry (p. 102):

The resort where they live has gone through cycles of being a resort and being nothing. In this chapter, Misty talks about other places like that:

"Money gives you permission to just walk away from everything that isn't pretty and perfect. You can't put up with anything less than lovely. You spend your life running, avoiding, escaping.

"The quest for something pretty. A cheat. A cliche. Flower and Christmas lights, it's what we're programmed to love. Some young and lovely..."

I am reminded of a long conversation that I had with someone at Candler School of Theology on the campus of Emory University on the topic of "the aesthetic of pretty". She captured a realization for me that I had never been able to articulate. This above quote names it again. We are all about the pretty in our lives. It's what America wants to capture. If we can just keep things neat and tidy and not ugly. Think of Target. It's a much prettier and more orderly store than K-Mart. And things cost more too. We want to beautify our streets. We want to keep the riff raff out. We want old people in nursing homes. We don't even really like to talk about sex because it's kind of messy, after all.

We prefer our nature to be cultivated instead of wild. It's funny because my children and I went to a little nature refuge not one half mile from out house. We wanted to get to the lake because it was the lake but there was no direct pathway and so we went through the bushes and just made a mess of ourselves. It would have been so much more fun, we thought, if we had just stuck to the nice, neat, well-manicured pathway. But the bushes were such a great adventure!

I could go on with this topic for quite awhile. Certainly we expect our lives to follow orderly patterns and they almost never do. We also expect our God who is an ordering God (from page one of the Bible: the creation of order out of mystery and chaos) to provide us with order. And our churches and other institutions also have to be very orderly. I want to on about this but I think I"ll wait. It is those who would have us order the church that have led me to absence the church. SOMEBODY PROVOKE ME ON THIS SO I CAN CONTINUE. ASK QUESTIONS. ARGUE WITH ME. I truly am an extrovert who needs a response if I am to keep babbling on.

August 2 Entry (p. 172):

This is the section in the book where Misty has been confined to her room and forced to do only one thing: draw. "Just for the record, ever color Misty picks, every mark she makes, is perfect because she's stopped caring."

Haven't you ever reached that point? I know I have. That point is when I do really, really good because I could just care less anymore. It's like our worries, our debts, our fears all ebb away because we just don't care anymore. If I haven't played pool for like two years and then come back to a game, just watch me. I'm friggin' incredible! That is, I'm incredible in game one because it really doesn't matter. Game two sucks. I was always the best practice basketball player on the court but I sucked in game situations except when I was playing for the Mormons and then I didn't really. I didn't really care in that game when I scored 23 points. I just didn't care.

We can just be who we are made to be and if we are truly being who we are made to be then we just don't care who we are and who we are becomes action instead of words. I get so tired of telling my eldest daughter how to do her work in school. I would love to let go so that she can just go through the cycle on her own and yet I keep holding on. If I don't care, then she will be forced to care and she can eventually get to the point where she doesn't care and then she becomes verb and just does who she is instead of doing who she wants to be.

August 12 entry (p. 188):

He talks about right brain-left brain stuff and the fact that suppression of the rational mind is source of inspiration. Congratulations to us weird computer blogger/social network people who spend our time doing nothing purposive or meaninful by spending our time on our computers. Yeah, perhaps we are addicted but perhaps we just want to get the creative side out a little more. The greatest times in my life have been those times when I could get together with other people and plan programs and worships because I would insist that we find ways to use our imaginations, to think the unthinkable, to go way outside the box. And sometimes we even succeeded at presenting that creativity in artform!

The other day I was watching my daughter perform in The Nutcracker. My daughter's lyrical dance coach is particularly creative and she and two other women did this incredibly eclectic dance performance in The Nutcracker. After the show I told her that I knew it was hers because it was so creative. She told me that it was actually quite collaborative. Later on I came back to her and reminded her that the truly creative is TRULY collaborative. What could be more collaborative then a situation where a group of people leave their pretensions behind to create?!? Those moments are truly living for me. Again, caring about nothing...

August 21 entry (p. 207):

I'm beginning to think that the subtext to this novel is about living out the patterns of life versus true creativity. Misty, the artist, believes that she is being truly creative not only with her artwork but also with her life choices. She comes to find out that she is not creative at all. She is repeating a pattern. She is being captured by a pattern. Back to the beginning of the book: Which is worse? It is to consciously live out the same pattern over and over again--take a drink, take two drinks--or is it repeating the same pattern over and over without knowing it. Is it conscious suicide or unconscious suicice?

This aspect of the story reminds me very much of a great book turned movie. The book was A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving and the movie was Simon Birch. The young, ugly hero in that book knew he was born to be a hero and he died the death of a martyr/hero. He stepped into the pattern for his life while others were resisting the patterns for their lives. If it is true that anything taken to its ultimate conclusion is excessive, is idolatrous, then could the same be said for our American worship of freedom? Are we so much into freedom that we deny ourselves who we are called to be? Do we see life as just boring if we step into our fates? What about the life patterns that we don't see? How are we stuck?

Entry August 28 (p. 252):

"According to Plat, we live chained inside a dark cave. We're chained so all we can see is the back wall of the cave. All we can see are the shadows that move there. They could be the shadows of something moving outside the cave. They could be the shadows of people chained next to us.

"Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow.

"Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Proections. Our associations.

"The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight.

"The camera obscura.

"Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down. Distored by the mirror or the lens it comes through. Our limited personal perception. Our tiny body of experience. Our half-assed education.

"How the viewer controls the view. How the artist is dead. We see what we want. We see how we want. We only see ourselves. All the artist can do is give us something to look at."

Wow. This always amazes me. Is there really a world out there that we can see and touch? Are the external and the internal related or are they almost completely unrelated? I can look at a picture of myself and see who is on the inside because I know the picture to me. I can also look at a picture of myself, however, and see someone that I could never possibly be and wonder how this soul or spirit or geist got stuck inside that person and his world. I realize this as a white male. I remember a friend who was a strong feminist. It took us awhile to become friends because she did not see me for who I was but as a white male. She was right in the sense that white males get treated a certain way (including the way that she was treating me) but she was also wrong to assume that all white males react and respond the same way to the stimuli of being treated this way.

I have a confession to make. It's still true that when I see a beautiful woman, I want to enter into the beautiful world that this beautiful woman must inhabit. I guess my latest is Natasha Bedingfield. She is absolutely gorgeous and about as poetic and creative and artistic as anybody I've ever had a chance to observe. I would love to enter into her world and have her world become mine. It's not so much that I want to possess her, not that at all. I want to be possessed by the imaginery world that I have created for her. What Carl Jung says, and I think it is truly beautiful, is that everything that we see outside of ourselves is really not outside of ourselves but inside of ourselves. It is as though we are all trapped in our own individual phone booths that are completely mirror on all sides (does everybody still remember what a phone booth looks like?). We keep thinking that we are looking outside of ourselves but we keep merely projecting out other parts of ourselves. When I see Natasha Bedingfield I make her into that Natasha Bedinfield that is within me (oh, come on you people...don't go there).

I remember that I used to be envious of anyone who experienced the sixties from the inside. What I was really seeing, according to Jung, was the part of me that was captured by my image of the sixties. By the way, when I saw Across the Universe recently, my image of the sixties began to change. This was a hard, hard time. Not a beautiful time at all. And yet I still see why some are captured by its images.

Final page:

"What she's learned is what she always learns. Plato was right. We're all of us immortal. We couldn't die if we wanted to.

"Every day of her life, every minutes of her life, if she could just remember that."

I believe that he is saying that living into our patterns makes us a part of the immortal story itself.

Wow, I need to think about this alot more. So often I am troubled by the patterns that I am a part of. My wife wants me to pick something up off the floor or gives me a chore to do or criticizes the way in which I handled some other chore. I respond defensively, crossly. I realize in the midst of this that I feel like a fourth grader again speaking with my mother. The pattern has repeated itself. Aren't we supposed to break these habits? Aren't we supposed to become empowered, to go on to new levels? Are we destined to repeat the same patterns? If so, then is there freedom in accepting the pattern and moving on? Is that, in a sense, a way of breaking the pattern? Is there resolution in acceptance?