"Making Scenes," the debut novel by hypertext writer Adrienne Eisen, starts out innocently. A quirky but likable heroine is introduced, a seemingly engaging story begins to unfold and a typical feminist coming of age/finding oneself novel is brought into the world.
That's our impression, anyway, in the first few pages. Then we hit the nightmarish self-mutilation, the twisted sex scenes and the disturbing childhood traumas of the narrator - commencing our journey into the whirlwind of horror and depression that the author has created for us.
While the book's style is chic and modern - first person present tense for the duration of the novel - the themes are downright depressing. The narrator suffers from a serious eating disorder and has self-destructive tendencies, especially when choosing her lovers. The book sucks us right in, but it is only the shock value that keeps it in our hands for the duration of its twisted 200 pages.
She is the beautiful athlete with a secret past and a secret life, the gorgeous suntanned volleyball player we've all seen in magazines and wish we could be. She is unnamed throughout the book, but we have a sense that if she had a name it would be Jessica, or Britney, or Veronica. She can get any man she wants, married or not. She lands jobs based purely on her attractiveness.
But her life is not as perfect as it seems. She has a love/hate relationship with food, especially with bagels, which she eats by the dozens only to throw up back home. The novel paints a vivid and often frightening picture of bulimia, truthful but graphic to the point of scaring off readers.
She is likable, sort of. She is believable, maybe. She's unique, at least, with her strange mixture of low self-esteem and cockiness. An admirable touch is her love of literature, which she consumes ravenously and with a touch of the obsessive behavior she displays with food. Ironically, her stance on books is the exact opposite as her stance on food; she keeps every book she has ever read, even steals books on occasion, refusing to discard anything.
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Her simplistic prose is comical at times, heartbreaking at others. She tells us about her nightmarish past with a startling clarity. "When I was twelve I had a walk-in closet, with blue carpet on the floor, and green paint on the ceiling and that's where I would go to kill myself ... Sometimes I'd do it with pills ... I'd imagine myself swallowing them, one by one if it was alphabetically, or one gulp for each color, or altogether if it was a day I did it by weight."
The narrator's interaction with a colorful variety of characters is the novel's only strong point. The scumbag married man, Robert, is believable and utterly despicable. The endearing but sadly plain Andy is the perfect supporting boyfriend. The ex-model Allie is the stereotypical best friend with whom to go shopping and perform radical acts of feminist expression. There are the occasional bombshell lesbians who make appearances in the heroine's vulnerable experimental stages, and some accompanying graphic sex scenes. The book is anything but boring.
But it's also not moving, or insightful. At the end of it all, nothing is resolved and we are left hanging, waiting for the next bit of shock or some sort of closure to the pathetic life we have witnessed. The heroine seems to have learned nothing at the end of the novel, except maybe to harbor her bitterness with renewed intensity.
With its perky white jacket adorned with colorful snapshots, the novel's appearance is a contradiction to its jumbled, dark nature. But don't be fooled by first impressions; "Making Scenes" is no "Bridget Jones' Diary," but a repulsive, failed attempt at something deeper.
