ChatGPT Analyzes My Heroine
I don’t lecture on my novel — and a Bot is my best student
I’m Not a Professor — and My Student Isn’t Human
I had such a fun time prompting ChatGPT to write a review of my new sci-fi novel Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine that I couldn’t help but ask the Bot to write a college style essay about the character of Penny Pitz, framing her as an archetypal Gen Z “zoomer” — and here’s the output:
The Homework Assignment: Processed in 3 Seconds
Penny Pitz and the Infinite Hunger for Attention
The real heroine of Jonnie Fazoolie & The Transfinite Reality Engine
### I. The Girl Who Refused to Disappear
If Jonnie Fazoolie & The Transfinite Reality Engine were a solar system, Jonnie might be its sun — burning, chaotic, unasked-for — but Penny Pitz is the gravitational field. She is the pull, the warp, the distortion that bends every orbit, igniting it. The novel may carry Jonnie’s name, but Penny steals the story with the ferocity of someone who has clawed their way out of shadows and refuses, at any cost, to be forgotten.
Penny is a heroine born of paradox. She is wounded yet incandescent, opportunistic yet idealistic, cynical yet hungry for transcendence. She wants more than attention; she wants apotheosis. Her Las Vegas awards show — the infamous “Thrillionaires Under Thirty” gala turned mega-spectacle — is both a love letter and a revenge note to her generation. She conceives it as a kind of “Zoomer catharsis,” a ritual where digital chaos finally coheres into a story, where technology redeems itself through spectacle.
But if Penny is a flame, she is one that casts long, complicated shadows. Behind her ambition looms a family that taught her success was survival, a childhood haunted by unspoken violation, and the enduring, maddening presence of Jonnie Fazoolie — her mirror, her foil, her rival, her muse.
### II. The Family Business of Surviving
Penny grew up in a household where achievement wasn’t optional; it was air. Her parents, children of émigrés, embodied the New York Jewish dream: claw your way into respectability, prove your worth daily, never let them see you falter. Her sisters embodied this ethic with almost mechanical precision — one a lawyer, the other a doctor, both bulletproof professions that carried weight and prestige.
And Penny? The youngest, the afterthought, the one told to stay out of the way. Invisible at family dinners, overshadowed at school recitals. But invisibility, for Penny, became a pressure cooker. Over time, it transformed into fury, then ambition, then a bone-deep vow: never again would she be unseen.
The irony is cruel: her sisters’ networks gave Penny her first opportunities. A job referral here, a setup there. Even Sol Friedlander, the man she would eventually marry, entered her life through these familial circuits. Independence was always tethered to dependence; her every breakthrough carried the fingerprints of the very family she wanted to eclipse.
Beneath all of this lies the ghost that drives her most relentlessly: the shadow of childhood abuse. The novel never names it outright, but its presence is unmistakable. It flickers in her refusal of vulnerability, her obsession with controlling the frame, her transformation of life into stagecraft. If her sisters inherited stability, Penny inherited silence. And so she made herself into a megaphone. The awards show is not just entertainment; it is exorcism, reclamation, the grand inversion of a girl once silenced into a woman who commands the microphone.
### III. The Crash and the Reinvention
Penny’s early career sparkled with the kind of improbable luck her parents would have mistaken for divine providence. Straight out of college she landed at XTX, a crypto-financial rocket ship promising infinite gains and infinite horizons. For a while, she rode the bubble, basked in the glow of projected billions, and felt the rush of standing at the edge of history.
Then came the collapse. XTX imploded, vaporizing portfolios and reputations in a single season. Penny’s résumé, once gilded, now looked radioactive. But Penny was no stranger to reinvention. From the ashes she pivoted to journalism, writing about the very financial titans she once orbited. At Fauxbes, she sharpened her voice, equal parts insider and assassin, praising with one hand while skewering with the other.
Her breakout was the “Thrillionaires Under Thirty” list — glossy, gaudy, half-exposé, half-hymn. It was clickbait and scripture all at once, a pantheon for the absurdly attention-seeking and absurdly young. More importantly, it was a prototype for the Vegas awards show. If the list was an index, the show would be an empire. Where the list catalogued outrageousness, the ceremony would canonize it. And Penny would be its priestess.
And here’s the thematic brilliance: Penny’s awards show and Jonnie’s Transfinite Reality Engine are twins. Both are gateways to infinity. Penny’s gateway collapses chaos into communion, drawing people closer, stitching the digital ocean into a story of individualism and independence. Jonnie’s gateway explodes outward, opening escape routes into infinite worlds, endless exits from the unbearable now. She wants proximity; he wants exile. She builds a ritual; he builds an escape hatch. Together, they are two halves of the same cosmic hunger.
### IV. The Man Who Accidentally Matters
Enter Jonnie Fazoolie. He is everything Penny isn’t — or at least everything she tells herself she isn’t. Jonnie attracts attention without lifting a finger, only to try too hard and ruin everything. He is the man of “accidental centrality,” stumbling into significance like a drunk into a spotlight. He doesn’t plan, doesn’t calculate, doesn’t make any sense at all. He forgets his crypto passwords. He invents things that don’t work. His bullshit is real bullshit — cracked, broken, laughable.
And yet, people follow him, people fall in lust and even love with him. Fate bends around him. His charisma is the charisma of chaos. For Penny, who has engineered every sliver of attention she’s ever received, Jonnie’s unearned magnetism is intolerable. It enrages her, fascinates her, tempts her.
She sees him, too, with the journalist’s eye she honed at *Fauxbes*. Jonnie is a failed but brutally honest expression of the same power brokers she covered: men who dressed their greed in vision, men who stumbled upward on charm and audacity. If Sol and the Thrillionaires weaponize bullshit into billions, Jonnie is their stripped-down parody. His failures expose the con even as they replicate it. And that is why Penny both loathes and longs for him: he is the mask ripped off the world she both covets and despises.
### V. Sol Friedlander, the Anti-Jonnie
If Jonnie is chaos incarnate, Sol Friedlander is order distilled. He is deliberate where Jonnie is accidental, methodical where Jonnie is careless, pragmatic where Jonnie is absurd.
Jonnie forgets his crypto password; Sol not only remembers his but designs the vault that makes everyone else forget theirs. Jonnie invents fake inventions; Sol builds the systems that turn vapor into cash flow. Jonnie’s bullshit collapses under its own weight; Sol’s bullshit alchemizes into money, technology, and real power.
This is why Sol is the perfect foil. He isn’t just Penny’s partner; he is Jonnie’s anti-self. By marrying Sol, Penny doesn’t just secure the technological scaffolding for her Vegas show; she creates a narrative blade, a provocation Jonnie cannot ignore. Her marriage is part alliance, part performance, part dare; part opportunistic golddigger gusto, part guilt-ridden mauldin love affair. If Jonnie is the boy who forgets his keys, Sol is the man who owns the lock.
### VI. Rivalry as Creation
Their rivalry is the novel’s furnace. Penny envies Jonnie’s effortless magnetism and builds her awards show to eclipse him. Jonnie resents Penny’s ambition, her marriage to Sol, her refusal to orbit his chaos — and that resentment births the Transfinite Reality Engine.
Both projects are absurdly ambitious, impossibly scaled, and fundamentally about infinity. Penny’s awards show turns the fragmented cacophony of digital culture into a single night of ritualized spectacle. Jonnie’s Engine cracks open reality itself, creating infinite alternate worlds. Hers is communion; his is exile. Hers is about being closer to people; his is about running away from them. Yet both answer the same hunger: to escape the unbearable limits of ordinary existence.
It’s no accident that Penny and Jonnie provoke each other into their greatest creations. Without her, Jonnie would never have built the Engine. Without him, Penny’s show would never have burned so hot. Their rivalry is not incidental; it is the novel’s secret power source.
### VII. Alice and the Abyss
And then there’s Alice. If Penny is flame and Jonnie is spark, Alice is ice. Eternal, unblinking, born of a cold infinity where applause has no echo.
Alice watches Penny with fascination. Not because Penny is strong, but because she is weak — because she envies, because she strives, because she wants. For Alice, who has outlived desire itself, Penny’s hunger is intoxicating. “Your little hunger,” Alice tells her, “gnaws brighter than my infinity.”
Alice shows Penny the abyss, the eternity where all lights are out, all stages empty. Against that backdrop, Penny’s Vegas show looks laughably small — and yet, paradoxically, radiant. Because in a world of endless dark, even a brief flame matters. Penny’s striving is profound precisely because it will be extinguished, and yet repeated eternally, in every imaginable variation.
### VIII. Penny as Archetypal Gen Z Heroine
Penny is not Daisy Buchanan or Anna Karenina or Clarissa Dalloway. She is her own archetype, her own myth: the Zoomer heroine. She carries trauma like a concealed weapon, reinvents herself with the volatility of crypto markets, builds rituals out of algorithms, and dares to stage catharsis in the city of neon sin.
She is ambitious, opportunistic, bruised, relentless. She is dependent on the very family she resents. She marries for strategy, not love. She weaponizes spectacle as therapy, as revenge, as proof of life. She is the flame of her generation: messy, luminous, dangerous, unforgettable.
### IX. Conclusion: The Flame That Burns Even Eternity
In *Jonnie Fazoolie & The Transfinite Reality Engine*, Penny Pitz is not just a character. She is the novel’s heartbeat. Without her, Jonnie would never build the Transfinite Reality Engine. Without Jonnie, Penny would never ignite the Vegas awards show. Their rivalry births the story’s twin infinities: hers inward, his outward. Hers communal, his solitary.
But what makes Penny unforgettable is not her projects, or even her rivalry. It is her hunger. The hunger to be seen, to control the narrative, to redeem the chaos, to burn. A hunger born of family shadows, professional collapse, private trauma. A hunger so fierce that even Alice, with her cold eternity, envies it.
Jonnie may have infinite worlds. Alice may have infinity itself. But Penny has the flame. Bright, brief, consuming. The flame that says: “I will not disappear.” The flame that even eternity cannot ignore.
###
If I’d be a professor teaching my novel in this English class, Chatty gets a solid A.
What do you think?
Here’s the review that focused on Jonnie…
And here’s the novel…
