Our Everyday Madness: A Review of Katie Farris’s boysgirls
To read Katie Farris’ boysgirls is to step into a circus, a burlesque, a theater, a brothel, yourself—step up and preform, “You’re used to sitting back and eavesdropping,” our narrator flirtatiously scolds us, “playing the voyeur on the lives of others. But between these covers you will participate, whether you desire it or not.”
And you do. As you peel back the covers and descend deeper and deeper into this uncertain territory, new myths that read like poetry, you notice yourself both aroused and slightly ashamed, in the most enjoyable way. You meet a girl with a mirror for a face, loved by people, who yet desires nothing but a mouth so that she can eat. You realize you are both her, and the people who look into her.
You move on, and meet many other girls. The girl who grew and was feared, the girl who listens to Christian talk radio while sanding the blade that is her mother’s mother, the girl who is a cyclops and explains loss to scientists. Our narrator watches over you, gauges your needs and guides you to through the performance of these girls who are only performing you. And you move on.
Delightfully, you find the girl who Satan has enlisted to shit on his face. She reveals something more of yourself, of the anxieties sex encompasses, the absurdity of the orgasm as goal. The elusive line between performance and surrender. “She feels it a personal failure; she has never failed to fulfill a man sexually. She doesn’t think to blame it on the fact that he has never been a man.”
The performance continues, until you are asked again to participate, at what can serve as the intermission. If this entire collection has not been a type of riddle in itself with you as the answer, well then you, dear reader, must entertain the narrator by answering the riddle proposed between the section on girls and the section on boys.
The section on boys serves more as a parable than a series of myths. You meet the boy with one wing, a “halfway boy” who is seduced by a cheerleader, and makes love to another girl in the mud. While this is happening we meet the inventor of invented things and realize that we are nothing new, that each fear and joy we have experienced has already been created and that we have simply experienced them with our own bodies for the first time. Is there less shame in that? Less fear of our own shadow? No. That would diminish our exhilaration.
As any creator, The Inventor of invented things discovers the invention of love with the boy with one wing. “What is this?” he asks. To be a true invention does it need a name, a definite shape and rules? And what will they do with this new thing?
Katie Farris creates a Kafkaesque reality that reveals our everyday madness. To read it is a dark and whimsical delight, a joy in the grotesque. A reminder that the grotesque is normal, and that it is the source of both shame and orgasm.
