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In the
spirit of The Jane Austen Book Club, Reading Lolita
in Tehran, and that other very similar book about reading
Hemingway comes Desdemona Arica's bizarre, delightful, and
hilarious The Twinkie Society. After snack foods are
banned from her Chilean boarding school, 16-year old protagonist
Maria Elena forms a secret, rag-tag pleiad of junk food junkies.
This book is much like The Breakfast Club, only if
it had been scripted by Gabriel García Márquez.
One by one during their weekly pig-outs, the characters reveal
the required deep secrets, come to terms with their snack
addictions, and learn to love themselves, each other, and
even the evil nuns—but only a little bit.
The
Twinkie Society's first person narrative specifically
addresses the reader at points, which both removes the reader
from the narrative and allows the reader to feel close to
the story, as if reading a letter from a dear friend. Maria
Elena writes with a combination of self-awareness and cluelessness
only available to teenagers. For example, the logistics of
getting the snacks takes weeks of planning, and Maria Elena
even states, "In a film, these scenes would be condensed to
a montage segment with a suitable indie rock soundtrack—something
slightly emo and almost meaningful, meant to show how our
nascent society is poised on the precipice of Big Adult Truths.
But from me, you get the long version."
She then
launches into pages of clandestine meetings with the school
pothead, Marisol, an intensely beautiful Roberto Bolaño-loving
goth whose poetry worries and shocks the school's dean; Marisol's
dealer Arturo, a young, sexy, rebellious literature teacher;
and a gorgeous, lithe boy from town whose family runs the
only café with an internet connection. This serves to introduce
the main players in an organic fashion, and also allows Maria
Elena to show the reader that, no matter how annoying it may
be, she's going to tell the story her way. Maria Elena also
describes all the girls as beautiful and all the boys as hot,
although she and the literature teacher are the only ones
acknowledged as such by the general population of the school.
Marisol
spreads the word among her friends and the misfits of the
co-ed boarding school—math nerds, comic book geeks, marching
band members—who bond at the weekly clandestine snack
meets. Through their association with Maria Elena, the misfits
slowly come to be accepted by the fashionable and affluent
pretty people of the school. Tensions mount between the group's
two de facto leaders, Marisol and Maria Elena, almost leading
to a disastrous confession to the school's priest.
Obviously
Arica is trying to say something here by naming the two girls
derivatives of Mary, and she seems to be writing a parody
of literary genres—the literature memoir, magic realism.
There is a lot in the book, but it seems to be completely
incidental to the plot. There are also similarities to Marisha
Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics: the attractive,
cooperative, corruptive teacher; the essentially parentless
protagonist; the chapters named after snack foods. But some
recurring symbols seem baffling and confounding. There are
many references to straddling horses, there is a plethora
of guns, and there is a gaggle of girls who carry Hello Kitty
vibrators in their blazers' breast pockets.
But there
is also quite a bit of humor in the book. Marisol, in a school
where English is spoken exclusively, likes to make the devil
sign with her hand and say "seis seis seis, yo." Her constant
non-flirtation with the increasingly love-struck Arturo is
also comedic. Maria Elena's mounting orders for world-wide
snack foods border on the ridiculous, but Arica doesn't let
that running joke get too out of hand. Despite the stereotypical
characters and situations, Arica brings enough original material
along to sway even the bitterest reader.
(April
1, 2008)
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