April 28, 2015
Double-entry day. Every time I finish a monsterously long classic, I feel like I'm able to blast through much shorter books. This is the third Palahniuk that I've read, and it had what I would expect: dark humor, controversy, characters of questionable morality. It never got dull, and in the end, I feel like there may be some hope for Victor, the narrator.
Victor's not a bad person, although he doesn't think real highly of himself. He's a sexaholic, but only goes to the meetings for sex. He's a med-school dropout who works as a tour guide at a colonial village-type place. He pretends to choke in restaurants to make people feel heroic...and to scam them out of money by keeping in touch and playing on their sympathies. He's a messed up guy, and judging from the flashbacks about his unstable mother, an Italian immigrant who kidnapped him when he was a baby, it's pretty easy to see why.
Besides the sex (which isn't good or bad on his part, it just is), Victor has good reasons for what he does. He uses the money from his sympathetic heroes to pay for his mother's health care. He allows old women with dementia to use him to come to grips with their own past trauma. For instance, one old woman thinks he's the older brother who molested her when they were kids. So he pretends to be this brother and apologizes, hence helping her to get closure. He does something similar for many of the patients.
Now, the situation with Paige Marshall seemed sketchy from the start, and what is learned about her near the end makes a whole lot of freaking sense. I guess the one thing I don't get is, why did Victor fall for the whole stem cell thing? Being a former medical student, didn't he think that sounded strange? Even if there was something to the concept, it would be highly unprofessional for Paige to produce the fetus herself. The fact that Victor got sucked into her insanity is the one thing that didn't click for me here.
Paige leads Victor to believe that, according to Ida's Italian diary, he was conceived using genetic material from Jesus Christ. This makes him think, eventually, that he could be a good person and lead a significant life. Learning the (much more grounded in reality) truth, and being arrested on the accusation of raping the old woman he'd tried to help, he earnestly tries to choke to death on a bottle cap, and his life is genuinely saved for the first time. After having to face down the many many people he'd conned at restaurants, Victor actually has a feeling of empowerment, thanks to his buddy Denny.
As I said, this is everything I'd expect from Palahniuk. The story is light-hearted yet complex. Victor isn't a perfect person, by a long shot, but you can still sympathize with him. There's even a good message here about taking control of your own destiny, in spite of the past. Perhaps Jean Valjean could have learned a thing or two from Victor Mancini.
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