Are FBBs a Male Obsession?

[hifrommike65]

She claims she has been a high achiever due to her obsession with bodybuilding.

[hifrommike65]

Here is my review of Chemical Pink, by Katie Arnoldi (2001), which I just submitted to Amazon.com:

The world is ugly, and the people are sad.

So states Wallace Stevens. That sentiment fits this novel, written at the end of the dirty realism boom in American narrative. Dirty realism went mainstream in America not in fiction but in film: Midnight Cowboy (1969). The losers, the failures, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore were suddenly central to stories. Elizabeth McNeill eroticized dirty realism in 1978 with her fictionalized memoir of sadomasochism, Nine and a Half Weeks. It is there that Chemical Pink (2001) originates. This novel is not a microcosm of the world of bodybuilding; it is a microcosm of the world, a depressed, obsessed world with no happy people. When I read this book in 2006, I didn't think it quite worked. However, it had one character that stayed with me: the daughter, neglected by her mother to the point of abandonment. I felt so sorry for that girl, who brought me back to this book and made me read it again. This book is not a realistic depiction of the world of bodybuilding. The things the villain in this book does to the female bodybuilder are no more extreme than what Popeye does to Temple Drake in Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931). In both cases, a writer devises a Gothic novel without a castle and a monster. But in Arnoldi's case, the maiden does not flee. She fights back, and it's a pleasure to see her do it.

arnoldi.jpg

[hifrommike65]

https://www.amazon.com/Chemical-Pink...ct_top?ie=UTF8