Ellis is a typical 19-year-old. On the cusp of manhood, he’s blind to the privilege with which he was raised and often at odds with his father. But his mother’s violent death—whether a murder or suicide is unclear—throws his family into turmoil and sets Ellis on the path to replacing his own father in the shadowy cult he once served.
J.R. Izquierdo’s INVOLUNTARIUS is set in a richly imagined alternate history of the 1980s, rendered with pointillist specificity through call-outs to period-appropriate music, or make and model of particular vehicles. The elaborate organization of the Involuntarius cult is also vividly displayed, with obvious care taken to build out both a power structure and a dramatic secret history. Unfortunately, the details of backstory and worldbuilding entirely drown out any attempt at plot or character. At its core, INVOLUNTARIUS is a soap opera: across multiple generations, a large cast of characters tied together by love, hate, and greed all jockey for power within a religious organization. Although the text suggests there’s a plot—leading with the death of Ellis’s mother suggests a mystery driven by grief and revenge—most of the book is given over to exposition, of either the labyrinthine corporate structure of Involuntarius or the petty personal histories of the characters. In addition to multiple scenes in which nothing happens except for rote discussion of ranks and duties within the cult, the book relies conspicuously on actual charts and graphs dotting the text—and to such a high degree that it’s unclear why there isn’t just one comprehensive org chart and one complete family tree, which would convey all the relevant information without the dressing of a flimsy plot. At one point, Ellis complains, “What are we fighting for? Who are we fighting? I don’t see the meaning behind all this…” By the end of the text, it’s still not clear that these questions have been answered.
The complexity and obscurity of the backstory aren’t helped by the prose. Too much of the text is given over to insignificant description. Sometimes it’s a garble of Latinate names and titles (“The Matrigna is an order within Involuntarius called Domus de Matrigna. We follow the teachings of Vehemens’ daughter, Goddess Vis Ocula”). Other times, it’s repetitive and unnecessary description of every character’s complexion, build, hair, hair color, eye color, and nose shape, regardless of that character’s importance to the story. Or it’s oddly stilted specificity in unnecessary details, like cars (“a dark olive-green 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback entered through the house gates”) or diegetic music (“James placed a vinyl on the record player, and ‘Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, BWV 1041: I through III’ by Johann Sebastian Bach played”). Often, the phrasing is simply awkward (“We sat in the living room where a glossy dark cherry colored Steinway and Sons grand piano was.”), crammed with lists of adjectives that need punctuation and fail to respect the order force rule (“Old majestic paintings lined the walls”). INVOLUNTARIUS’ prose is constantly struggling to both maximize detail and elaborate its backstory, but it needs serious editing to accomplish either.
Ultimately, the biggest problem is pervasive misogyny. There are some small quirks in the style—female characters, and only female characters, frequently “giggle” their dialogue instead of saying it—but it’s hard to miss the consistent objectification given the aforementioned physical descriptions of every single character (from which even “a robust well-endowed white lady in her late 70’s” is not spared). There are a handful of explicit scenes in the book, and nearly every one degrades its female participants; an excessive number of these scenes portray sexual violence. Ellis is the primary protagonist, but he’s both stupid and cruel, playing strongly into this strain of sexual violence. When he’s first given a shred of power by the Involuntarius organization, one of his first actions is to try and rape two women who work in their headquarters. Yet, despite its lavish attention to degrading women, INVOLUNTARIUS is simultaneously too cowardly to own up to it: women have “slopes” instead of breasts, “peaks” instead of nipples, and so on. Though the scenes themselves are revolting, the language is laughable.
INVOLUNTARIUS is eager to build a deep, complex world, and to tell an interesting story about two ideological factions vying for power, but it needs top-to-bottom editing and an entirely new vision of what story it’s telling (and why) in order to succeed.
Heavy on exposition and backstory but light on plot or character, J.R. Izquierdo’s INVOLUNTARIUS needs thorough line-editing and a whole-cloth change of vision.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader
