Beautiful Idolatry

I just finished reading Charles Bock's debute novel Beautiful Children. It's about a whole lot of crazy stuff: runaway kids, strippers, pornographers, marriages falling apart, young boys finding their sexuality, drugs, and a rape. It's certainly difficult to read, in some sense because the subject matter - the Las Vegas that tourists don't see - is difficult. I'm not sure how accurate Las Vegas is in the novel (Bock grew up there), but the world is convincing enough.

I was most struck by one interesting line of imaginative thought. Cheri Blossom is a stripper who's boyfriend (named "Ponyboy") convinced her to get breast implants (she even ends up putting sparklers in her nipples because they are fake), and who also gets her to be in an amateur porn film (although she leaves before everything goes down with "Rod Erectile"). One of the ways she "gets through" the night as a stripper (and in other situations) is to pretend she's in a film. She plays a naughty Catholic School girl, and she has these dialogues with her nun teacher (and sometimes she strips even in the movie), and these conversations act as something like her moral compass (e.g., when she has mercy on Ponyboy in the recognition of his self-destructiveness). It is very interesting that she needs this, and there is something very true in this - how in order to deal with any situation, we as humans create images and narratives, place ourselves in these and attempt to construct some meaning to a horrible situation.

This seems to my mind very similar to Calvin's conception of idolatry: we almost have a compulsion for religion he thinks, and so we end up creating the idols we need to function with. I think there is an analogy here: Cheri's idol isn't a "god" in a sense that we normally understand it. Yet, it is something that has nothing to do with her current situation, a kind of narrative or image that she relies on.

This is a larger point, I suppose: that we are a factory of idols, that in some way we live on images to show us something that is not ourselves precisely so we can be ourselves.