I Read ‘Diary of an Oxygen Thief’.
There is something so adventurous about reading a novel written from a place of hate. I embrace it. I love anger and its overflowing rivulets. I love the feeling of blindness you get when you let the lizard brain take over, and if you’re not acting on it, you’re thinking on it. Writing on it. Creating on it. You are leaving burn marks where the things have hurt.
This novel, however, felt like the most whining, kicking and thrashing reaction to one’s own karmic undertow that none of it felt like I could connect with it. Instead, most of this feels like you’re standing in an elevator next to a teenager who is on the phone with another teenager who simply can’t believe that (A) their S/O would not drop down to love them despite their saying ‘i love them’ and (B) they have to go to their <i>boring job</i> and work their <i>boring job</i>. Emotional maturity placed in a box and kicked down the stairs, we don’t even have any mental maturity, any worldly maturity after all. We instead have dense and plummed protesting and grumbling.
Something of a spoiler here, though much of the book is written in a conversational tone (which is one of the things I appreciated about the novel overall) which is always defining the furthest wall from which it will echo before screaming at it. The plot of the book is as follows: man gets off on emotionally hurting women, man flashes back to the time he wanted to hurt his first woman, man lives an average life that he doesn’t think he deserves to live because he believes he towers above all other men/women both living and dead, man gets hurt. We see no climax, we see no relief, we see no narrative, we see no arc. This is just misery free from salt, free from spice; a spelunking into a cave where there is no tunnel from which to find light. If you want to be exposed to abject misery, go on and read twitter. There’s a lot of damage there to oversee. Some of it at least might make you laugh.
And it isn’t that I don’t also appreciate misery. I would douse myself in the oil of depression and light myself with a match of hopelessness any time. But for this, it would require a measure of artfulness. A sense of sacrifice or digging up a gem of world’s lowest form of thought and putting it on display to affect all that stand around it. Collateral grief. I’ve listened to albums that are only about the death of one’s wife with no answer or relief. I’ve read books and poems that glorify solitude, loneliness, self-embattlement. We see someone at the core of these emotions and through this we see ourselves. We taste the drug that we wish to never touch.
This book, instead, starts a sentence with “Ya wanna know what sucks?” and proceeds to tell us about stuff that sucks. And then gets off the fucking bus.
The biggest gripe I have about this book is in its third act. I’ll try to be brief so as not to deeply spoil this, as I do truly believe that if you want to read this, <b>you should</b>. Read everything. Reviews are hollow garbage heaps, just ways to filter out the thoughts that “critics” (and in my case reviewers/reactors) had to filter out as an audience member before moving on to the next piece. The biggest reflection point of this third act is his own personal heartache, an encounter he has to move through that involves his own heart being broken in many places, all of which involve several brief encounters which he believes would end in sex. He does tease at the idea of love (actually, big L Love) but never shows the nuance which one would find the need to engage with. The only metric we are found to believe would break his heart is the end-game of -fucking-. I’m finding it difficult to break down exactly what I want to break down without giving specific plot examples. I will say though, it sets such a strange standard, that if you cannot FUCK someone that you have found in the world that you find beautiful, interesting, intelligent, engaging, wonderful and captivating, that you then must write them off for good. That a friendship, a bond, cannot be formed because your little sex-ego got dunked in a bucket of water.
Get over it, man.
