Monster Party

MONSTER PARTY (Lizzy Acker, small desk press 2010, 80 pages)
A Book Review by Riley Michael Parker

Monster Party, Lizzy Acker

PROLOGUE

This is a book review and not a book review, much the way that Lizzy Acker’s MONSTER PARTY is a novel and not a novel, a collection of stories and so much more/so much less, fiction and non fiction all at once, but practically almost none of that. To tell you too much is to ruin everything, but I will say that the book is a beautiful, disarming, and well-constructed narrative about being young, at least in years, and hopeful/confused.

I. A CHILD IS ALWAYS A PERSON, BUT A PERSON IS NOT ALWAYS A CHILD

How long do we get to be children? How long do we want to be? I remember being a child only briefly, and the whole time I was I wanted to be an adult instead, to know why whispered words would make people laugh, why bitter beverages were an announcement of elegance or seriousness or the coming of bright red faces. I wanted to drive. I wanted to wear thin black ties and read the newspaper. And then the adult world ravaged my life far too soon with knowledge of sex and drugs and spoiled marriages and falling asleep at the wheel, metaphorically and not-so-metaphorically, and I began instead to wonder about the way that some of us get to stay innocent and clueless for years and years and what that must be like. Knowledge attacked me when I was seven, but Lizzy got her first taste at just a little over four and a quarter years old, in a basement, with some friends. The sad fact is that while nearly all of us eventually become adults, or teenagers at the very least, precious few of us ever get to be children for all that long. These things always get stolen away us, often times by someone we consider a “friend”, and the funny thing is that we thank them.

II. A GIRL IS NOT A WOMAN, BUT A WOMAN IS A GIRL

Kissing someone at a party, laughing, climbing into a shower fully clothed, driving or being driven drunk. This is romance for the youth, yes? It is part of it at least, or perhaps things like this. Imagine being a woman, an adult of some sort, and having all of what I just described with your best friend, but only for a night. How would you feel? You might love it, love him, ache for him, want him in every facet of your life. You might look at him and see yourself, like your reflection in a mirror but slightly taller, larger in most places, bigger arms, bigger calves, bigger glasses, like an exaggerated version of yourself, what a child might remember of you if you were at all intimidating. You might see him and see happiness. Other people want someone who is different, someone not like them, someone to balance them, to counter them. They are not interested in extremes, no, they want to end up in the middle, aim for mediocre, but you, you want someone you can just look at and know how they think, someone with whom you only speak to confirm things, to build each other, to laugh and be elated that someone like you exists. You could want this, might feel this way, but maybe not. Maybe, like the boy, you think “How fun!” and then move on and never speak of it again, even when you find yourself together once more, this time in a motel, kissing and so on, oral sex going one way and one way only, and then, the next morning, it’s all thank you, so long, out to the parking lot, while the other one watches television (you, you watch television because he left, he left you, he always leaves, that’s what he’s good at, but what if he didn’t, you wonder out loud in the form of a statement, what if he stayed and watched TV, what if you broke up with your boyfriend, what if you lived a life that made sense for once, all of this in the form of statements, all of it out loud, none of it in quotations).

III. SELFISH MEN AND COWARDLY MEN ARE OFTEN ONE AND THE SAME, BUT SOMETIMES THESE TRAITS ARE SPLIT BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE AND ONE OF THEM IS A WOMAN, AND WHEN THIS HAPPENS IT IS LIKELY THAT BOTH OF THESE PEOPLE ARE DISCONTENT AT BEST

Let’s assume that we can never be blood brothers, because you are a girl and I am a boy, but I want to cut you and I want to be cut, want to see blood on the both of us. This is the same logic that led to us not being voted “most alike” in the yearbook, this me being a boy and you being a girl thing, but also, apart from the gender stuff, I don’t want to mix my blood with yours because I don’t think it’s healthy. Also, I just don’t want to. I am against it. The television is on, and the channel is QVC. There is something about the show that I can’t quit looking at, even though we should be focusing on each other. Spit brothers, you should push for that. It could possibly lead to kisses, you know. You are a fool every day you don’t kiss me, and vice versa. The television is on, we change the channels, end up back on QVC. You want to be blood siblings and I want to cut you. Maybe I mean penetrate, I don’t even know anymore, but I do know that I want both of us to leave this room slightly wounded and forever changed. Perhaps, and this isn’t likely, we will learn one day to hate television and love each other, but really, I doubt it.

EPILOGUE

MONSTER PARTY is about being a girl, and then a woman, but always a person. Men should read this book too, but warning fellas, it will make you sad. Remember when you were young and worried and trying so hard to be so many great things and to fall in love and be loved but all you had was loneliness? There were girls just like you, in your classrooms, on your bus, in your homeroom, at the coffee shop, in your friends dormitory, all around you the whole time, your whole life, waiting, like you were, just to be found. Happiness is not gifted to cowards. Why doesn’t anyone of merit ever say this to us as children? Why do we have to find out by accident?

A SECOND EPILOGUE

Sometimes things are wrong that can’t be fixed. In fact, a lot of the time things are wrong that can’t be fixed. And sometimes we try and fix it and make it worse. Sometimes we kill a possum when we shouldn’t, and by that I mean we think that we are doing it a favor, that it is on the verge of death instead of simply playing possum, and so we kill it to be nice. If left alone this thing would just shake it off and walk away, alive and free and running to the future, but instead, in the name of mercy, we end something we saw as painful (and maybe it was, but so what?) that could have potentially gone on for years and years and been beautiful and joyous and full of love. This is what MONSTER PARTY is about (well, sort of, but only parts of it).

88/100

Buy this book now: MONSTER PARTY, by LIZZY ACKER on small desk press, 2010.

Read more about MONSTER PARTY on Goodreads.

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Posted by Riley Michael Parker on July 25 2011. Filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry