THE INACTIVIST
By Chris Eaton
One of the most common lines drawn between art and advertising (and its
political counterpart, propaganda), is the one between a passive and an active
response. We engage with art; we merely accept what the ad has to say. This
doesn't mean we accept its claims as being true (art is sincere,
commercial/political speech is a lie), only that we let its message wash over
us. It is opium. Marshall McLuhan once observed that the point of advertising
wasn't to make us want to buy a product, but to make us feel good about
ourselves and the product we've already bought. Advertisers want us to feel good
about ourselves. A happy, fulfilled and comfortable life only costs a bit of
money.
Chris Eaton's The Inactivist is a short, sharply-written satire on the
culture of the ad. Its hero is Kitchen, a copywriter for an ad agency in the City. Very
little happens in the book. Kitchen breaks up with one girlfriend, gets another,
and breaks up with her. Kitchen fails at relationships with women because he
fails at relating to reality. Like his co-workers, he is so engrossed in his own
life that he has "no time for anything external."
The advertising world is an alternative reality,
wonderfully evoked in an opening prologue that has the Michelin Man, Grimace,
and the Great Root Bear in a weight-loss competition. This disengagement leaves
him essentially inactive despite his hustling lifestyle, and impotent despite
his lusty libido (references to masturbation run throughout the book like a
leitmotif). The women he meets want to change the world. Kitchen can't
understand why they don't want to just feel good about themselves. As his guru
puts it, "If we're not happy, Kitchen, we're just not trying hard
enough."
Eaton's style is a perfect fit to his subject, which is to say it is almost
all style. His word-painting is Dali-esque: striking, precisely rendered, and at
times even surreal:
His wardrobe seemed burned to his skin by a nuclear blast, futuristic and
tight. His eyes were a pigsty, strapped with haphazardly tossed veins and
mucousy debris.
She kissed him as if he were a shot glass, throwing her head back and
breathing in fits.
Trapeza was more than a woman. She was a mobile news unit. Her hair required
careful editing, or else it went off in all directions like rumour. Her mouth
seemed built only for the proper distillation of coffee. And she'd been working
in radio journalism so long she'd grown a signal tower from the tip of her
forehead, which she plucked each morning with vetting tweezers so that it was
nearly unnoticeable. Through that satellite receptor she'd developed
several beliefs and idiosyncrasies: her sentences were short and
constructed mostly of verbs; nothing seemed important unless it involved
citizens; she'd adopted a logic based on the Truth of deep, ovary-tickling
voices.
In that last passage you see the tendency of Eaton's imagination to just take off,
taking its metaphors literally and building an
alternative sur-reality. The dustjacket mentions Coupland and
Palahniuk as models, but the real influence seems to be Nathanael West and William
S. Burroughs. You can't read a passage like this without hearing them:
The mock-homeless kids - just bored snots from the burbs - descended on the
flaming bills, peeing on the oxidating gifts from above, and ran off with their
pockets full of the charred, stomach-wrenching stuff, chased for blocks by a
pack of territorial gutter dogs driven wild by the stench of hot piss. The
casually dressed execs - ties balled in their pockets, dates hanging off them
with Windsor knot fingers - let their crumpled parking tickets carom off the
lemon-jellied curb and climb into their SUVs for the short drive home. And
Kitchen made off with a stray murder of coins, ducking through the crawling
traffic to the waterfront, where he might at least find some semblance of home.
Peace. A grey-yellow foam was eating slowly at the boardwalk supports. Someone
had thankfully smashed most of the lamps by whipping their empties at them, and
the white and brown glass scattered the grass like wild rice. A couple of men
were fucking inside the large, hollow, iron head meant to commemorate something
forgotten, and although Kitchen couldn't see them, their moans echoes out of the
cavernous eyes and nostrils, as if the giant goddess of the City were
masturbating so slowly, so internally, so deeply, that it was imperceptible to
human eyes. Kitchen used the change to buy a sausage, then was reminded with the
first bite why he never bought them. He split the meat and bread evenly between
the pigeons and the invisible beasts that roiled the lake's surface so close to
land.
This is an informal, visionary voice we don't hear enough of in CanLit, and it helps explain why
the city is the City and not Toronto. Kitchen is living next door to Interzone.
And why does the giant goddess of the City masturbate? Because the City
itself is impotent. Nothing ever happens in the City (just as nothing much happens in
the novel). Creative energy either slides into apathy or is absorbed into the
culture of advertising. Kitchen's office mate Miter opts out of the work world
to form the Inactivist movement, a group dedicated to doing nothing and caring
less. Anti-globalization protesters are co-opted into a Pepsi commercial.
The Inactivist is like West and Burroughs too in being more of a
nightmare sketch than a novel. Its hallucinatory prophecy of a future where
advertising is the all-in-all spins along without the help (or hindrance) of
developed structure, plot or character.
No matter. Eaton has more than enough sizzle in his language to make up for
their absence. And his subject is the sizzle, not the steak.
Notes:
Review first published online February 18, 2004.
BACK
