🔒 Nobody Cares About Truth, Only the Better Story

If you’d asked me at two particular phases of my life, and my maturity, what my favorite book was, I would have told you either Life of Pi or American Psycho. You might think that’s a hell of a swing in literary taste, but then again, both books have basically the same theme. Also, it kinda describes what’s wrong with all of us.

 Let’s talk about that, but be warned that this is all spoilers. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about the books or the film adaptations because the movies both follow the books pretty closely. If you wanted to run off and watch those first then you could call it the weirdest double feature since Barbenheimer.

Anyway, Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure that doesn’t have any elements of that genre for the first full third of it. The protagonist, a young Indian boy named Pi Patel, is the son of a zookeeper, and the entire first act focuses on, well, the life of Pi. His childhood in India, his schooling, and his explorations of philosophy and faith as he learns about the three major religions—Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity.

 But then just as you think you know what you’re getting into, the second act arrives. Pi’s family has sold the zoo and they’re transporting all the animals to Canada by ship. The closing sentence in Part 1 is “This story has a happy ending.” That’s important.

The opening sentence of Part 2 is, of course, “The ship sank.” Pi is marooned on a lifeboat with no human companions. We don’t know the fate of his family. On board with him are a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger. In the ensuing chapters the hyena kills and devours the zebra and the orangutan, before itself being eaten by the tiger, and the bulk of the rest of the book is spent on Pi’s efforts to tame and domesticate a tiger, while stranded with it on the ocean, so that it will come to trust him and thus spare his life.

 American Psycho is a horror comedy about yuppies, set in 1989 and centred on an investment banker named Patrick who narrates the story in manic first person and prattles on for entire chapters about 80s music. He’s also a sadistic serial killer who brutally murders strangers in the most gruesome and specific violence I’ve ever seen described in fiction. In Australia, libraries and bookstores are, by law, only permitted to sell it from behind the counter like a prescription drug and it comes in plain packaging with advisory warnings like cigarettes.

 So, you see how these are pretty much the same book.

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