I
wanted to hate Chuck Palahniuk. Then, it would be easier to
tell him the things I didn’t like about his new novel,
Lullaby. Palahniuk has crafted a satire-horror hybrid about a
dysfunctional Wiccan family on a cross-country road trip. The
family members--slacking journalist Carl Streator;
haunted-house real-estate agent Helen Hoover Boyle; her
sweet-until-you-cross-her assistant, Mona; and Mona’s
eco-terrorist boyfriend, Oyster--are on a mission. They must
find and destroy all extant copies of a children’s book that
contains a “culling song,” an ancient incantation that, if
recited, will kill whoever hears it.
The book delivers some laugh-wrenching one-liners and
unabashedly cinematic imagery, but I felt the premise and
characters fell short of credibility, and I was prepared to
tell the author of Fight Club so. This, again, is why I was
hoping I’d hate him. But Palahniuk is thoroughly unhateable.
As we chatted, sitting Indian-style at a Portland, Ore.,
coffee shop, he disarmed me so thoroughly that I forgot I had
issues with his book. Then I remembered. I fought it--his
spell, his Chuck charm--and pressed on with my interview.
Your publicity pack calls Lullaby a “supernatural
thriller,” but it didn’t scare me. It’s more funny than
spooky.
It’s really hard for me to stay Stephen King-serious. If
anything, I’d rather people be more afraid after they put the
book down, afraid of the outside world. Sort of a time-delayed
horror.
To me, this book reads like an Anne Rice novel written
by Chuck Palahniuk.
Well, that wasn’t what I was going for. I’ve read Interview
with the Vampire, but not any of her subsequent books, so I
didn’t have that in my head at all.
A line on the dust jacket to Lullaby calls you America’s
“funniest nihilist.” These days, a lot of people are not
finding nihilism terribly funny.
People get nihilism wrong. Kierkegaard said that in the
face of nothingness, you have complete freedom to reinvent
yourself and the world around you. Destroying everything is
only the first step. The second step is building it back up,
which is much harder. Most nihilists don’t think about that
second step.
Oyster in Lullaby and Tyler Durden in Fight
Club are basically terrorists trying to destroy our
culture. Is this something you advocate?
If it means a better world eventually, I would say of
course! Creating something new depends on destroying something
existing.
Are you saying Osama bin Laden has the right idea?
No, I can’t say he’s doing the right thing. He’s not
going about it in a way I condone. I think it’s much better to
deal with these things in the way Michel Foucault would. He
would say, “Laugh at it, disregard it. Then, do something
totally unrelated, something more attractive, and the other
thing will wither and go away.” I tend to divide authors
into two main camps: romantics and naturalists. The romantic
will write about a woman’s gown and the play of light on her
hair; the naturalist will describe the zit on her ass. Are you
the preeminent naturalist?No, I am the preeminent
romantic, entirely. The complete absence of romance makes
romance even more present than stating it outright. It’s the
people who deny romance who are the biggest romantics.
A central motif in Lullaby is the main character
gluing together miniature houses--creating little worlds,
really--and then stomping them to pieces until his foot is
bloody. Is that what Chuck Palahniuk is doing,
artistically?No. What Chuck Palahniuk is doing is killing
time and entertaining himself. That’s what writing is for me,
first and foremost: dealing with the issue du jour and
having fun doing it. I bury myself in research, and then I
bury myself in the craft process. It’s a way to sedate myself.
