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Let's get the groans out of the way now, shall we? Yes, Synthetic Bi Products is a book about a bisexual girl. It wouldn't take much effort to spin out a pop-psych explanation of "synthetic", either. Fortunately, the title is one of the book's few weak points.
Orleigh, Patterson's nineteen year-old narrator, isn't an easy woman to like. To most outsiders she's rude, obstinate, selfish, judgmental, capricious and frequently downright hostile. With casual acquaintances -- including a number of her less significant sexual partners -- she is often callously opportunistic, shifting allegiances and affections as her needs evolve. In short, she's not always an easy character to root for.
Fortunately, Synthetic Bi Products is a first-person narrative, so we get to know Orleigh a lot better than most of the people in the book ever do -- better, indeed, than she knows herself. We learn that Orleigh is capable of unswerving loyalty and blind, all-consuming love. Patterson does a marvellous job of conveying Orleigh's deep, unreasoning, messed-up love for her (eventual) boyfriend, Mark; you will want to be loved by someone the way Orleigh loves Mark, and codependence be damned.
We join Orleigh in medias race; she seems to have her life on track, having just finished a summer school class that completes her high school graduation requirements. She's eager to explore her burgeoning crush on her best friend, Heather. She's ready to get out of her Chicago suburb and move on with her life. But Orleigh is not destined for a straightforward existence. Her tenuous relationship with Heather falls prey to shifting romantic allegiances; her loyalty is used and abused. When Heather is placed in a mental institution, Orleigh springs her and they flee -- not to Chicago, which would seem like an obvious choice, but west, to DeKalb, home of Northern Illinois University (and therefore a hotbed of slacker squalor). In DeKalb, Orleigh eventually loses Heather -- but meets Mark, the man who will change her life forever.
In a flashback, we learn that Orleigh is no stranger to DeKalb -- or, as a radio psychologist might put it, to chaos. Her mom is a single parent who has all but given up on her high school dropout daughter. Orleigh maintains a lukewarm relationship with Jason in order to crash at his house, but his parents disapprove, and she is eventually kicked out. We follow her through a series of increasingly squalid living situations, punctuated by bouts of sex and drinking and drugs, until she falls under the spell of bisexual Alyssia and her scary, cultish friends. With Alyssia, Orleigh has her first bi experience, and experiments with group sex. It's only when Alyssia suggests that their odd gestalt has a child -- with Orleigh, the "purest", as mother -- that the spell is broken. Amoral Orleigh, who has spent two hundred pages lying, committing petty crimes, drinking, smoking, using drugs and having indiscriminate sex, knows better than to bring a baby into the world as the fruit of such an obviously fucked-up union. Though this happens months before the story actually begins, it's actually the closest she comes to a turning point.
Orleigh's relationship with Mark takes some odd twists. For a time, it turns into a skewed travelogue, as the pair eke out a marginal existence following the Grateful Dead. As their means decrease, they are forced further and further outside the law, until an unexpected, life-altering development provokes a desperate and foolhardy act.
While Orleigh logs hundreds of miles over the book's 360 pages, her journey is a simple one. She is looking for perfect love -- the pure, unerring, unconditional, passionate love she has never had. And with Mark -- or ultimately, through Mark -- she finds it. The reader probably won't agree that Mark is the best man for Orleigh, particularly in the book's desperate later chapters, but the purity of their love, or at least Orleigh's belief in that love, is undeniable. Patterson triumphs here, portraying Orleigh's need to love, and her willingness to surrender her soul to Mark, with an incandescent fervor that always rings true. And while Mark becomes a darker and more sinister character as the story progresses, his reciprocation always rings true, and his behavior, however wrongheaded, is always rooted in his desire to build a life with Orleigh.
Patterson's narrative flows amazingly well -- which, in tandem with the seamier aspects of Orleigh's life, makes the book difficult to put down. Needless to say, Orleigh's need to connect on an emotional level leads her into a succession of sexual encounters with numerous male and female partners. Patterson describes these with a great deal of detail and enthusiasm -- particularly the über-trendy girl-girl scenes -- though their sheer number and sensationalistic detail cause them to grow old pretty quickly. Likewise, Orleigh's sheer bullheadedness can annoy; there are a number of instances in which she could change her destiny, in which a single, carefully-considered decision could pull her and Mark out of their downward spiral, but she continues doggedly forward, shortsightedly chasing her dream of love. In that, she's a triumph of characterization: her decisions move the plot forward, which plays out far more naturally than any attempt to hammer her square peg life into a round-holed plot. And whether you love her or hate her, you'll find it hard to tear yourself away from her adventures.
Mark, however, doesn't fare as well. While his motivation is usually clear and logical, the plot forces him through a few signficant hoops. Several months pass between Part I and Part III (the flashback fits between them), during which Mark becomes a drug dealer. How and why does the sensitive, caring soul from Part I become Part III's all-purpose criminal? We never find out. Similarly, during the "road trip" portion of the book, Mark finds a geographical source of inner peace -- the hot springs at Camp Verde, Arizona. Why? We're told he loves the place, but he does little to reinforce this; he's actually just setting up the epilogue's big "closure" scene. Then again, Mark isn't the narrator, and we can't expect to know him as well as we know Orleigh. Perhaps if Patterson had written the Camp Verde sequence from Mark's perspective, all would seem clear.
First-time writers are always enjoined to "write what you know", and it's interesting to speculate on how much of Patterson's tale is autobiographical. Some of Orleigh's actions, experiences and feelings are described too vividly, and ring too true, to be the product of mere research. Patterson either is, or knows, Orleigh, give or take a few details; she's either using Synthetic Bi Products to explore a road not taken, or mining a storied life for entertainment's sake. Hmmm...let's see; Orleigh is 18 in 1993, the year in which the story takes place -- so in 2001 she'd be 28, the same age as Patterson. Go figure. At best, it's an excellent example of how to profit on a misspent youth; at worst it means that Patterson remains unproven as a writer of fiction.
Patterson may have lived her story, but I'm not sure it began in Chicago's far western suburbs. If you've ever read a book that takes place in or near your home town, you know that it's impossible not to play location fact-checker. I actually spent quite a bit of time in Orleigh's supposed stomping grounds -- Geneva and St. Charles, IL -- in the early nineties, and I can't help but feel that Patterson sells them short. They're certainly not the dull, desolate, borderline hick towns that she suggests they are, even for a disaffected eighteen year-old. It's the only time that Orleigh's characterization falters; she sounds more like a city-dwelling hipster dismissing dreaded, unseen 'burbs than a bored high-school graduate suffused with wanderlust. To most readers, this won't matter -- the towns are fictional settings that just happen to have the same names as real towns -- but I found myself wondering if Patterson had picked them at random from a map. Likewise, the few scenes set in Portage, Indiana won't ring true to anyone who has been there.
Now -- forget that last paragraph. What I want you to take away from this review is the fact that Synthetic Bi Products is a cracking good read. To those who've led sheltered lives, it'll probably play out like a decadent cautionary tale, minus most of the requisite retribution; as page-turners go, it's unusually lurid and disconcertingly unrepentant, and you'll probably hoover it up faster than Orleigh can do a line of coke. I can only hope that Patterson doesn't really live her stories; if her next book, Diary of a Suicide Queen, is anything like Synthetic Bi Products, I can't see her living past forty.
-- George Zahora
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