JERKING OFF WITH LEMONY SNICKET

ALL THE DIRTY PARTS by Daniel Handler.  134 pp but, I gotta say, a lot of the  white space between the numerous tiny sections could be compacted to take another 20-25 pp off this thing.  $22 list price, tho, so I guess the publishers gotta try to justify that.

And what the hell is this book?  It’s about a self-obsessed teenager, but I found it in the adult section of my library.  It’s one big forward rush of a book, so busy skimming over surfaces that there’s no real time for minor things like character development or growth.  Is it a morality tale?  Something to scare and enrage the Moral Majority (are they even still a thing?).  An attempt by Bloomsbury to cash in on the 50 SHADES OF GREY smut craze, or the JK Rowling sales figures for her grown up literature?  I don’t know.  All I know is, MAN is it poorly thought out and written. 

The characters have names, but who cares?  Mostly they fuck and jerk off and (sometimes) brood.  Usually while fucking or jerking off.  I’ll refer to them anonymously since, even though they have names, they totally lack personalities.

If I may…….

BOY 1 is the narrator and star.  He is pretty much defined by his horniness (a 36 on a scale of 1 to 10).  He’s a high school kid who fucks and jerks off.  Seriously, this is pretty much all we really know about him.  If you left your donut on the table and walked away, he’d fuck the hole.  Twice.

He spends his time finding girls in his school to fuck.  Naturally, many of these girls think this will lead to a relationship, but it never really does because, as we’re told again and again, all Boy 1 wants to do is fuck.  Hurt feelings ensue.  Is BOY 1 crass and hurtful, or just stupid and hurtful?  We never really know.

After Boy 1’s personality is established, we’re introduced to BOY 2.  1 and 2 are best friends.  Why?  We don’t know.  Apparently, it doesn’t matter.  BOY 2 was needed to advance the plot, and so here he is, explanations be damned.  What do these two do together?  Well, BOY 2 doesn’t get it on nearly as much as BOY 1, so he lives vicariously through him.  This involves BOY 1 calling up BOY 2 and reliving his sexual experiences, so BOY 2 can jerk off to them.  When this gets old, they surf porn together in their separate bedrooms and jerk off while talking to each other.  Over and over and over and over.

And then we’re introduced to GIRL 1.  Not unattractive as far as we can tell but, again for reasons that are never explained, she seems to be the only female in the school that BOY 1 doesn’t want to fuck.   Which is odd, because it seems like he’d fuck a goat if it held still for him.  Why does she like BOY 1 as a friend, knowing what everyone does about him?  Again, Handler didn’t think this was important.  GIRL 1 seems to act mainly as the Greek Chorus in this mess.  Her job is to say “You’re getting a reputation” in an ominous tone.  BOY 1 acts with bewilderment, either (again) because he’s deliberately or genuinely obtuse.  I guess.

After GIRL 1’s appearance, BOY 1’s latest sexual conquest gets tired/resentful of him and breaks things off.  He’s at loose ends.  Eventually, he and BOY 2 end up in the same room jerking off to internet porn.  This leads to mutual handjobs and then the revelation that BOY 2 is bi.  Things escalate from here to a full-on homosexual (emphasis on sexual) relationship between the two, although BOY 1 insists on reminding the reader that he isn’t gay or bi, merely horny.  Maybe this is character development?  Probably not.

And what about BOY 2?  Does he have a backstory, a history or any depth at all?  Nope, he just likes to fuck and suck and jerk off.  The present tense is all.  His bisexuality is merely a stated fact, no need to delve any deeper.

And then (drum roll) we meet GIRL 2, an exchange student (it helps limit her backstory) who BOY 1 is immediately smitten with.  Why?  You should know the answer by now.  WE DON’T REALLY KNOW.  The pre-requisite lust is there, but at an even higher level than usual, which seems pretty amazing.  The word “love” is also tossed around but, again, like everything else in the book, this relationship is defined almost 100% by sex, so love might not be quite the word we or the narrator is looking for.

GIRL 2 is essentially the female version of BOY 1.  She lives to fuck, and to do it without the complications of becoming attached.  Why is she attracted to BOY 1?  You need to stop asking questions when you know you won’t get any answers. 

BOY 2 is now hurt since, like many girls before him, he had hoped for a relationship with BOY 1 that went beyond perpetual fucking, but he mostly disappears for the rest of the book, so he’s not our problem.  GIRL 1 pops in a few more times, but not in any truly relevant way.  She does, at one point, seek out BOY 1 to ask him about a male’s perspective of a monogamous relationship (??????), and the correlation between fucking and being in love, so maybe she’s not as bright as we’d like her (or anyone else in this book) to be.  BOY 1 doesn’t disappoint us, though – he tells her that fucking and being in love are pretty much the same thing to guys, and that if her boyfriend has bought her stuff (he has – a ring), he must obviously love her. 

The rest of the book, though, is essentially BOY 1 and GIRL 2 and what becomes of them.  Do you give a damn?  Can you figure it out?  My answers were “no” and “yes”, but I still read on.  I was right on both counts.  No point in giving it away, though, except to let you know that it involves sucking and fucking and jerking off. 

The characters are uniformly shallow and unformed right up to the bitter end.  Sometimes they veer into cliché.  Once, in an incredibly uncharacteristic moment, GIRL 2 actually explodes into self-awareness (if girls who fuck and fuck and fuck are called sluts, why aren’t guys?).  It’s an excellent question, but it comes way too late in the game to make any difference.  I don’t care what happens to these people, because I never care about them as people.  The book seems to deliberately skip all deeper emotion and introspection (I guess the title is a clue), and mostly reads like a lengthy Penthouse letter. 

A bigger problem, I think, is the way that pornography is treated as harmless sexual titillation.  I know the book is about narcissistic kids, but it’s for adults, you know?  It seems like having the first person narrator be a dim-witted cretin is an easy out to avoid having to look at the darker aspects of pornography;  the objectification, racism, abuse, drug addiction, misogyny and dehumanization that are part of the package of internet porn.  Hell, even if the book is supposed to be for youngsters for kids, why not deal with deeper issues than the perpetual hard-on of some teenage boy who treats girls like cum dumpsters?

In any event,.....  This was a pretty sad excuse for a book, and possibly it’s biggest crime was that it actually managed to make sex boring.  Or maybe that was the point?