Exploring Power Dynamics and Fragmentation of the Mind: Boy Parts (2020) by Eliza Clark
When I approached the theme of ‘fragments’, Eliza Clark’s novel immediately came to mind, titled after its obsession with the fragmented body parts of men. Captivating, thrilling, and extremely contemporary, Boy Parts is a rollercoaster of transgression and modern-day mania from start to finish. I was instantly gripped by the protagonist Irina, whose snarling attitude and interactions with men paint her as an emblem of the “angry feminist”; however, as the novel progresses, she plunges into a downward spiral fuelled by excessive drinking and drugs, in conflict with her multiple partners. Whilst her gruesome obsession and seething demeanour combine to make an utterly terrifying narrative, I am still drawn to the way that Irina challenges conventions, including class, gender, sexuality, and art. Above all, she is a defiant symbol of female rage.
The novel begins with an offer for Irina to exhibit her artwork and ends shortly after the event, in a bookending style similar to the party in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. As Irina prepares for this breakthrough experience, the narrative dives into her traumatic past, which is recollected by the photos that she uncovers in her archives and begins to distort her state of mind. Her increasingly violent sexual encounters and fantasies of pain lead to the gory revelation that she once murdered one of her male models. With the sound of her cat’s collar bell diffusing into the pages, and her frequent picturing of glass in people’s faces, Irina’s descent into madness becomes entangled with brutal and bloody depictions that are difficult to forget, culminating in her deluded moment of reflection (or perhaps a contemplation of suicide) when she wades into a pond and appears to see dismembered boy parts floating around her. Her mania is difficult to comply with, but it serves to convey an almost fantastical side of the modern day in its grappling with sexual desire and ideas about the human body.
The power dynamics and physicality are interesting in relation to how gender and sexuality are treated in this novel. Irina is threatening and dominant towards her male models, who she chooses for their features; she describes flab, dad bods, and skinny ribcages, which portray a highly tactile sense of voyeurism. She is hungry for their flesh and even blood, generating a rough and visceral lens through which these men are seen, as she bends their bodies “like dolls” and makes them do what she wants. This presents a grotesque and yet mesmerising image of female authority, which is all recorded and captured on camera. Transgressive though it may be, the graphic and potentially cinematic presentation of Irina’s explicit photography is simultaneously intriguing and revolting.
Irina seems vile, possibly the cruellest, smarmiest, and most egotistical protagonist I have ever come across. She is in no way likeable, especially with how she treats her friends and family, her unhealthy lifestyle of booze and cocaine, and her short temper. She is incredibly self-centred and uses her looks to her advantage, a conceit which is even more concentrated on her artwork, as she insists that it is “transgressive” and better than what anyone else is trying to achieve. However, it is hard to dislike Irina completely because she owns up to these flaws—she knows that she is manipulative and she embraces it. She is honest, at least. Perhaps it is her power that makes her so admirable, in her refusal to obey social constructs and in her sly playing’s-up to men for their money and compliments. Even the other characters, Flo and Eddie, cannot understand why they are obsessed with someone so snide and ridiculing, and yet they are. In this way, the power struggles and gory perversions introduce an entirely alien state of mind. In retaliation for her childhood trauma, Irina’s brutality towards men demonstrates an outburst: she uses, manipulates, sleeps with, steals from, abuses, murders, and destroys men who dream of and desire her. In an evocatively cruel eruption against male control and consent, Clarke suggests that this woman is abusing men like they have abused her in the past.
The increasing roughness and bloodshed align with Irina’s gradually fragmenting state of mind. The shocking murder scene reminded me of The Bell Jar, connecting the novels by their imagery of bodies and the unflinching descriptions of death and violence. However, this novel does not possess the cold and detached voice of Sylvia Plath’s narrative; Clark is certainly cruel, but the feelings of authority, sexual pleasure, and even joy erupt from the same vile concerns that fail to repulse Plath’s protagonist Esther. Rather than feeling nothing, Irina feels everything, squirming to poke and prod the bodies that she photographs. They are both careless characters but in different ways, because each contemplates and yearns for suicide, has sexual relationships or flirtations with their closest female friends, and both reject society’s painting of motherhood as the ideal purpose for a woman.
Overall, Clark’s disturbingly dark comedy is as blood-curdling as it is gripping. I could hardly stop reading this graphic contemplation—or, more accurately, interrogation—of contemporary gender concepts and power dynamics. Its brutal indication of non-conformity, by exposing questions of sexuality, passion, and consent, was met with a vicious lens through which the male body is savaged by an angry and abusive “reptile”, whose distorted hallucination of physically fragmented men will not be easy to forget.