Review of My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless

Reading My Heart … is a bit like being lovingly mugged by a philosophy major wearing clown shoes. Homeless — the cryptic, multi-published, mononymous author — offers a novel that vibrates on the frequency where abject despair becomes indistinguishable from slapstick. 

The result is a book that lurches, wheezes, and pirouettes through the heart of an America overrun with mediocre lives wasted. The attitude is bleak, but the language seethes with equal measures of resentment, eerie poetry and weaponized sarcasm.

The title encapsulates, with almost obscene precision, the book’s principal thrust — that human emotion is, fundamentally, litter. A beautiful remnant of a warped culture adrift on an infinite sea bottom. The sort of trash that, given enough time and sufficient water pressure, might be transfigured into a diamond, or at least an amusing fossil.

Sentences buckle and grind under the strain of so many run-ons and ricocheting metaphors that reading them aloud feels like trying to chase a greased pig through an obstacle course made of abandoned IKEA furniture. But they can be beautiful in snatches.Unexpected lyricisms punches you squarely in the face: “Loneliness,” the narrator intones at one point, “is just your reflection in the microwave door at 3 AM, asking if you still believe in thermodynamics.”

There is, undeniably, a raw, lurching power to much of the writing. Some paragraphs soar — unkempt angels of longing — and some (alas) crash into the reader’s forehead like particularly ill-mannered pigeons. The book suffers from a tendency toward ornate aimlessness: several chapters feel less like crafted narrative scenes and more like drunken voicemails from a brilliant but wild acquaintance.

Depression runs rampant through our protagonist’s less-than-glamorous life.
The novel’s momentum is like a shopping cart with two broken wheels in the front, careening wildly, requiring undue concentration, capable of horrifying accelerations when you least expect it, but prone to sudden and baffling halts in aisles labeled “Existential Despair” or “Discount Sadness.”

For all its sins, the book manages a battered, unkillable dignity. It gives no quarter to the clean, the tidy, or the easily categorized. Its humor is frequently sublime in grotesquerie.

Endure the main character’s exuberant acts of self-sabotage, and the contempt for conventional structure — and in return, you will gain moments of pure transcendence amid Nihilistic humor.
Emotionally whiplashed into reluctant admiration.