October 7–14, 1999

books

Bookshorts

Altar Ego

By Kathy Lette

William Morrow, 353 p., $23

Rebecca Steele, 32, is beautiful, shallow and suffering from a nasty case of marital cold feet. The scene opens outside of a church, as two sexy but slightly varicose legs and a rumpled wedding dress wriggle out a first-floor window. Steele is walking out on the dashing but dull Julian Blake-Bovington-Smythe, a human-rights lawyer trying to free interchangeably oppressed sods. After 12 years of debauched freedom and another five years with Julian, Rebecca wants to be reckless and have despicably good sex every night. So, when the rock star and "mammary achingly, take-me-now-you-brute, drop-dead dreamy hunk of spunk" Zachary Phoenix Burne gives her the best oral of her life, she’s in love. The tedious Julian and his boring sexual repertoire are tossed in favor of this luscious leather-clad god — and they rut like studded bunnies for days on end. But there is one teensy problem: 32 is just too old for a rock star’s girlfriend. The cellulite-paranoid, musically ignorant, fashionably disabled ex-bride has plenty of competition, and her work and friendships are starting to fall apart. Australian Kathy Lette’s spoof of the pre-middle age crisis of this damsel-without-her-knight falls short of immortality. But overlook the goofiness and the dated Americanized references (Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky pop up a lot), and Lette’s abundant wit and wackiness satisfy a guilt-free low-fat pleasure pursuit.

—Kristin Keith

Invisible Monsters

By Chuck Palahniuk

W.W. Norton, 297 p., $13

Since Palahniuk’s novel The Fight Club has been filmed with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton in the leads, I’ll indulge in a couple of make-believe Hollywood blurbs for Invisible Monsters, just in case it too reaches the screen. "The cartoonish excess of Ab Fab meets the feel-good drag adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert!" "Do your tastes run to the sweet, surprising plot twists of Tales of the City, or do you prefer the sexualized body alteration of Crash?"

This is the first-person narrative of an infomercial model whose face is shot off and eaten by birds. (The book deals graphically with the mechanics of disfigurement and reconstruction). She is adopted by super drag queen Brandy Alexander, who leads her and a mysterious male accomplice on a cross-continental expedition financed by selling stolen drugs. "What happens here will have more of that fashion magazine feel, a Vogue or Glamour magazine chaos with page numbers on every second or fifth or third page… " we’re told. "This will be ten thousand fashion separates that mix and match to create maybe five tasteful outfits." In reality, the warning of non-linearity is disingenuous: While it does flash back and forth, Palahniuk’s plot structure has no loose ends. Crimes of beauty and rage and the characters’ apotheoses come fast and furious — and you start turning pages at the same spastic pace as the story’s.

—Scott Shrake

Celebration, U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town

By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins

Henry Holt, 342 p., $25

You may like Disney World, but would you move in? When Frantz and Collins — a married couple who’ve written for the New York Times — heard about the Disney Corporation’s Floridian planned community, they knew they had to live there and write a book about it. The result, written in a creepy unified voice (Hi! My Name Is: Doug and Cathy), reads like the longest Times feature ever written. While Frantz and Collins lament their inability to find good wine in Florida, they come dangerously close to succumbing to Disneytown’s charm.

The imperfect "realities" which poke holes in Disney's utopia assume Amityville-ish proportions for of the authors and their Disney-lovin' neighbors. Steaming toilets, frozen air conditioners, alligators, oh my! And Stepford, anyone? A neighbor says of her husband, "He's never happier than when he is in an air force uniform or walking on Disney property."

Not surprisingly, in the town of Celebration, the line between fiction and real life is blurry: "My front porch is my movie screen," giggles one Celebrationite, while others complain that roving tourists stare into their houses, assuming it’s a movie set. The neighbors’ fantasies and delusions of community are familiar, but their solution — moving to a fake small town — is crazy. "All of us are creating traditions as we go, and it’s scary," says the town’s Protestant preacher. Yes, it is. Traditions are evolved, not contrived. However far into the "exburbs" I would have to move to avoid these neotraditionalists, I’d do it.

—Scott Shrake