Review: QWP's type A+
It was said that James Joyce was distinct from any other author in that he only published masterpieces: not anymore. Literary genius, thy name is Pu.
Using her instantly clear-voiced narcissistic prose, Pu takes us through a wonderfully concussed melange of racism, religious bigotry, homophobia, stereotyping, eating disorders and assorted judgments, creating a vivid world of amoral realism lending itself to such giants as Easton Ellis. Along the way, even with postmodernism veritably saturating the wealth of literary techniques, qwp manages to invent her own: in the very act of passing this work of cutthroat social commentary as a memoir at the laughable age of 23 or whatever, she makes the statement that her ideas are her own, and proclaims a bravely self-named protagonist to be her Nabokovian slave, her own unreliable narrator grinning from the very cover in an act of narcissism even before the words begin, an easily-overlooked act of true artistry unseen in any other contemporary work. But enough: let us now deconstruct the utterly dustless mirror of life, the diamond-cutter’s lens into a true sliver of reality: type A+.
Nowhere in a work have I ever seen such vivid appropriation of the single-page hypocrisy. We hear Pu boldly state ‘I try to see the good in people and ignore blemishes’, and later on that same page describes a head triage nurse as ‘”WT with a degree,” with the abbreviation standing for “white trash”.’ In a later example, she bravely denounces the lecturers of her Caribbean author class as ‘idiotic people in academia that want so badly for dead white males to be chauvinists, imperialists, racists etc.,’ and not 500 words later describe a woman as a ‘Washed-up child actress (intense Southern accent, general disdain for anyone that is not Caucasian)’ so wide is the bore on Pu’s slanderous shotgun that once you enter her twisted world, no one is safe. And of course there is the most famous of her gratuitous Mean Girls references (bar the time she tries to pass the “like seeing dogs walk on their hind legs” joke as her own as an obvious commentary on contemporary reappropriation of other sources, or “plagiarism”):
‘She was a complete stranger to me, and everyone in the lineup looked confused as to who this weirdo was. I was waiting for Damian from Mean Girls to jump up and say, “She doesn’t even go here!”’
And later on the same page:
‘What the heck kind of scholarship pageant references pop culture to measure a woman’s grace!?’
And as the novel continues, the effects of the protagonist’s personality disorder escalate into an almost surreal horror to which she is oblivious, most evident in the scene where she pays a homeless man 20 dollars- and a bottle of prescription painkillers that she has stolen from her work- to wash her car, and like the most masterful of auteurs has clearly pained herself at the writing desk for that extra detail, in this case a touching monologue of how selfless this act is, a perfectly-crafted bathetic stanza of purest dramatic irony: her narrator is lost, cut-off from the world around her, all her connections to society plugged with self-delusion. And towards the end the characters around her begin to dissolve, total strangers giving her only the advice she wants to hear and the words that she herself gives them, such as in this example, where she crashes into the car of a man, then inexplicably has coffee with him:
‘”Don’t do it.”
Okay, thanks jerk. First, your car positions itself to get hit by my car, and now you’re telling me to ditch the only honourable intention in my life. You should probably be the next Oprah.
“You obviously don’t want to be in medicine. Let me guess: everyone has already told you this is what you should do. You’re smart, so you could do it, and now you’re too proud to walk away after you’ve got all your plans lined up.”
Wow. Adam’s words hit me like a brick wall.’
Pu is clearly a disciple of another American great: her protagonist is much like Wallace’s Hideous Men, but instead of internalising all the questions she is asked, she fills the mouths of the people she meets with answers to questions that never existed. This is used to heartbreaking effect.
Now in a work as dense as this, there are obviously a plethora of new meanings that arise from further readings (for example, I haven’t yet deciphered the purpose of her change of present to past tense for the last few chapters). I mean, consider such subtleties as her insane spending but meagre pay, and relentless bashing of her father? A lazy reader may not connect the almost Eva Smith-like significance of her father, working his way through her life, paying for everything but going unseen. It is these subtle tragedies with which type A+ is enriched. I’m afraid all that can follow from this interpreter’s humble offering are some scattered analyses of other quotes from within.
‘There are a few substantive [e-mails], like my mom telling me she paid my credit card bill, and it was $6000 and she doesn’t know how I spend that much money, or my ex-boyf asking me what I want for our anniversary, which actually won’t be our anniversary but obviously I’ll be wanting the standard strand of pearls in some sort of fancy arrangement that I don’t yet have.’ Her protagonist is a voracious man-eater, from whom no man is freed even in the act of relationship dissolution. This is an obvious reference to the timelessness of our age upon the advent of online communication and social media, where past, present and future horrifyingly collide. In fact, to all owners of this work she has given a permanent record of her protagonist’s shamelessness, and since this was her obvious intent, I have to commend her.
‘It’s about Shakespeare, and we’re reading Macbeth, which I’ve read maybe 30 times… I just wish I had a mimosa to make my crazy headache go away. Out, damn hangover!’ Here we see how her deliberately limited writing abilities demonstrate how reading does not mean understanding, and in this, she may be directly voicing her complaint to us book reviewers. She then couples this with her sentence-long assumption of the role of Lady Macbeth in a bold juxtaposition of the beauty of Shakespeare’s words with the triviality of popular culture. And Shakespeare comes back into play in the most unlikely of places: ‘Thankfully, by early afternoon, most of the hives have started subsiding. In case you’ve never had hives, they do this weird thing where they kind of fuse back into your body, like when you take cooked ground beef out of the fridge and the layer of fat reabsorbs as it comes to room temp, or like that part in Hamlet when the Melancholy Dane talks about his “too, too, solid flesh” that “would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.”’ While these two sections are spread far apart in the novel, there may well be deeper Shakespearian analogies lurking beneath, which would most likely reveal themselves in a second reading. Indeed, she has created a Shakespearian immortal, but with all the love that he so beautifully documented in his sonnets reflected inward upon herself.
And her meticulous conjuring of a young homophobe:
‘[My 40-year-old date] also turned out to be surprisingly spry on the dancefloor, which is important because I want my daughters to take ballet and jazz. I prefer to have no sons and only five girls, but in case I do have sons, I’ll stick to my plan of leaving them in the wilderness for 48 hours at the ripe age of six years old, to make sure they don’t turn out gay.’
‘UM. Homosexual-says what?! That was it. I cannot take a man seriously when he says “breasts.” Unless we’re talking about something serious, like chicken breasts or breast cancer, there is no way that this person is going to know how to change my tire or build my white picket fence. Douglass was already skating on thin heterosexuality ice, but now he had cracked it and was probably disappointed he couldn’t do more perfect figure eights or triple lutzes in a leotard adorned with sequins, feathers, and those rubies from the next room over.’
Her OCD cost-calculating and status-evaluating:
‘I’ve determined a simple formula for calculating the real cost of any item for which someone may mention a specific dollar amount:
Actual Cost = (n*1.5)/2, where n Is the claimed dollar value.
In this case, it is very obvious that the actual cost of these “$800 boots” is:
(800*1.5)/2, or $600. Casual $200 mark-up. Idiot.
(and yes, I realize the equation could be simplified to Actual cost = 0.75n. I’m not an idiot, but I like using fancy algebra, okay).’
‘He bought me some beers, which I threw away half-drunk, just so he would understand that I’m a little high maintenance. This seemed to really piss him off, so I immediately concluded: 1) he probably only makes $60,000/year, 2) he was too pretty and therefore doesn’t understand the concept of women being high main, and 3) we could therefore never get married.’ We must be thankful for these regions of greater narcissistic transparency which aid in finding this similar style in subtler regions of the text- I can only assume this was totally intentional on Pu’s part.
In the incessant “I am snapped out of my reverie” and mentions of her hatred of tequila (every time she drinks it), bizarre calorie counting and fat-and-skinny shaming alike contrasted with binge drinking, qwp’s protagonist is, in essence, all the problems of superficial culture in one. Every possible positive trait is applied to her, even when they start to contradict, and every negative trait is projected outwards likewise. I can only imagine with her protagonist working in a clinic that Pu herself (the author, not the character) spent many tiresome hours in all kinds of medical facilities and conducting endless interviews to really get to the heart of a narcissist as she does so successfully in this short work, creating a true original who sees beyond the peroxide blonde hair of the heroin-addicted single mother who enters her clinic to the stunning brunette beneath (sorry I didn’t mark a quotation there).
Reading type A+ is in many ways like reading Delany's Hogg again, except while Hogg revealed a brooding evil in all of us, type A+ is much kinder, and reveals a kaleidoscope of hideous traits we can hopefully find lacking in ourselves, at least to this same degree: in this, I believe that the concepts tackled here have benefitted from a female touch, and allow Pu to show us how drained a person’s words can make us feel even when she refrains from frequent swearing.
As Jonathan Franzen stated, something which is autobiographical requires pure invention, and in this way the author made absolutely sure that this work was completely 100% Pu. This guerrilla-published objet is available to one and all, and is absolutely essential reading to those of you bamboozled by the perma-positively reinforcing mindtraps of the narcissistic zeitgeist.
Of course, if this was serious in any way, I may lose sleep to think that such a person exists.
Luckily it’s not!
5 ‘Pu’s out of Pu.
