What Happens When Fiction Removes the Guardrails
I've always had a soft spot for books that make me slightly uncomfortable. Not so much in the sense that they're shocking for the sake of being shocking; anyone can write something offensive, grotesque, or taboo and call it edgy. Most of the time, that's boring.
The books I keep coming back to force me to spend time with people I wouldn't want to be. They drag me into mindsets I'd rather avoid. They ask questions that don't have clean answers.
Growing up, I didn't have a name for this type of fiction. I just knew that some books felt alive in a way others didn't.
They were often messy. Morally complicated. Occasionally disturbing. Funny in f*cked up kind of ways. The protagonists weren't heroes. In fact, in many cases, they weren't even particularly good people. Yet I found myself unable to stop reading (if you’re not much of a reader, I’m sure you’ve watched Breaking Bad or The Sopranos or any other number of popular TV shows that feature anti-heroes that you just can’t get enough of).
Most fiction allows readers to maintain a comfortable distance from its characters so as to easily bucketize and compartmentalize the entire arc: the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, the lessons are obvious, and you know who deserves your sympathy and who doesn't.
Transgressive fiction tends to remove those guardrails because, as old Blue Eyes used to croon, “That’s Life!”
This messier, somehow more real type of fiction asks you to spend hundreds of pages inside the head of someone who may be selfish, obsessive, manipulative, narcissistic, delusional, or all of the above. Sometimes you agree with them. Sometimes you catch yourself rooting for them. Sometimes you realize, uncomfortably, that you understand them.
That's where the interesting stuff happens.
Most people aren't villains. Most people aren't saints. They're collections of contradictions trying to justify themselves as they move through the world (aren’t we all?). The stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we're doing often differ dramatically from reality.
That gap has always fascinated me.
It's probably why books by authors like Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho), Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) stuck with me long after I finished them. The surface-level controversy around those books often overshadowed what they were actually doing. Beneath the violence, addiction, consumerism, sex, or nihilism was usually a deeper question about identity, alienation, and the strange ways people construct meaning.
When I sat down to write [un]civilized, I wasn't consciously trying to write a transgressive novel, but looking back, I can see the influence. If you’ve read it, oh boy, I’m sure you can, too.
The book follows a protagonist who isn't always easy to like. He’s callous. He’s calculated. He thinks he’s better than others, yet he wants to matter to them. Despite the awful things he does throughout the story, you may just catch yourself feeling for him or rooting for him or…(gulp) identifying with him.
Because the story isn’t about the transgressions themselves, but what lies beneath them. The humanity of it all. These are the moments - in books, and movies, and even in life - where people cross lines they once thought were immovable; these uncomfortable moments of realization that under slightly different circumstances, we might not be as different from these characters as we'd like to believe.
