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Words
The Chuck-ness of it all
By Richard
Speer
"To
Mick and Chick and Chimp," reads the dedication to Chuck
Palahniuk's latest book. Even though you've just cracked the
spine, the monosyllables rhyme and alliterate in a way that
already conjures in your imagination the question of who,
exactly, these Micks and Chicks and Chimps are and what manner
of misadventure they must have hatched with Portland's
baddest-ass literary export. Did this foursome maybe
bungee-jump together off the Las Vegas Stratosphere tower
while tripping, dressed as Easter Bunnies and armed with
paintball guns, shooting and splattering each other in mid-air
and seriously cracking up at the outrageous Chuck-ness of it
all? It's a truly Chuckalicious dedication page. What a shame
that the book goes downhill from there.
In Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, Palahniuk
seems set on proving that he's contemporary letters' answer to
Howard Stern. In Palahniuk's collection of nonfiction essays,
many of them reprints of magazine pieces, the author sends
himself on extreme-sport, reality-TV-style stunts that share
with Stern's radio show a penchant for populist-geared
scatology and gross-out imagery. Anal dildos, waiters who blow
various wads onto customers' meals, men afflicted with
"cauliflower ear," cadaver dogs who sniff death scents--you
get the picture.
If spending 233 pages immersed in a cesspool is your idea
of smart, snappy summer reading, Stranger Than Fiction
is for you. Likewise, if you're one of those Chuckophiles
who's convinced that every zany thing the author does is way
totally cool. But if these sundry charms fail to amuse you,
like me, you'll quickly conclude that Chuck is no Hunter S.
Thompson and that the act of his doing something allegedly
wild 'n' crazy does not, by virtue of sheer Chuckitude,
necessarily make for fascinating reading.
Nor will you happily endure his obsession with his
ever-receding claim to fame and favorite topic, the 1996 novel
Fight Club. In one chapter, he mentions the book three
times within four paragraphs in completely unrelated contexts.
Palahniuk also loves to talk about Brad Pitt, the star of said
movie: Brad's lips, Brad's teeth and the things Brad said to
him on the film set. In other chapters, the star-struck author
interviews actress Juliette Lewis, cultural commentator Andrew
Sullivan and singer Marilyn Manson, letting his subjects hold
vapidly forth and making no effort to edit their stultifying
digressions. It's the interviewer as transcriber.
This is not to say there aren't passages in which Palahniuk
drops the fawning and the posturing and actually expresses
keen thoughts and real pain. In the book's introduction, he
speaks with some wisdom and candor to the bipolarities of
loneliness and sociability in the writer's life. In "The
People Can," he offers an insightful look at life aboard a
nuclear submarine. Occasionally, he sprinkles illuminating
references to Carl Jung, Søren Kierkegaard and Martin
Heidegger into otherwise sophomoric prose, and he concludes
the book with an affecting account of his father's murder. But
even these victories are held hostage to Palahniuk's
minimalist mannerisms, which had a novel ring eight years ago
but have since threaded bare.
It's telling, finally, when Palahniuk interviews Manson,
that it's the eccentric singer who confesses, "The only fear I
have left is the fear of not being able to create, of not
having inspiration." With nothing to prove, the androgynous
rocker drops his guard and yearns for a muse, while the
pseudo-macho man of letters, his notebook full of fragments,
longs for simple inspiration.
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