Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

May 23, 2008

“Snuff” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Reviewing Chuck Palahniuk’s ninth novel for a family newspaper is a challenge. Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club,” has written what his publisher describes as a “thoroughly researched” novel that “brings the huge yet under acknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life at last into the realm of literary fiction.”

Is this just what you’ve been waiting for? If so, read on.

Cassie Wright, porn superstar in the twilight of her career, decides to go out with a bang, so to speak, by setting a world record for serial fornication on film.

“Six hundred dudes. One porn Queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.”

Right off we know somebody is going to die in the end, and that this book, like most of Palahniuk’s work, is about sex and death.

For the next 208 pages we learn about Cassie, the men and the porn industry. Our narrators — Mr. 600, a producer who started Cassie’s career; Mr. 137, a television actor hoping to revive his career by marrying Cassie; Mr. 72, one of the young men who claim to be Cassie’s love child; and Sheila, the “talent wrangler” — are brought together in an endeavor Sheila likens to climbing Mount Everest.

“Snuff” actually serves as a history lesson on sexual landmarks. You will learn that at one time the world record for serial intercourse was 251, set by Annabel Chong. You will also learn that Annabel Chong was inspired by Valeria Messalina, the wife of a Roman emperor and a legendary slut. You will further learn that the blowup sex doll was invented by Adolf Hitler.

“To keep the Aryan blood lines pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution. True fact.”

True fact is one of Palahniuk’s refrains here, and whether or not the many true facts about sex and death and pornography are actually true, I don’t know, and it seems beside the point. This is an absurd dark comedy about damaged people and the point, to the extent there is one, seems to be that seeking attention can end badly.

Palahniuk delivers on the “thorough research” his publisher promises, and his descriptive skills, his love of language and his weird humor are in top form.

Incidentally, the best thing about this book are the movie titles: “To Drill a Mockingbird,” “A Separate Piece,” “Gropes of Wrath,” “Snow Falling on Peters,” and many more I can’t list here. I can’t tell which ones are true, and which ones Palahniuk made up, which tells you something.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahnuik

Entertainment & the Arts, Sunday, October 6, 2002

“Lullaby” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Ranting against consumerism and all the noise of the material world may seem passe, but what doesn’t these days?  Chuck Palahniuk’s novels are here to say that alienation and despair and general weirdness are never really out of fashion. 

This is Palahniuk’s fifth novel in six years, and his herky-jerky prose makes Stephen King seem like F. Scott  Fitzgerald, but he knows how to spin together whacked-out stories particular to our times.

Carl Streator, a middle-aged journalist, is researching a story on SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.  He discovers that children are dying when they’re read a bedtime poem, a “culling song” contained in an anthology. 

Streater further learns that this poem is so lethal he can kill people simply by reciting it in his mind. Bodies then start dropping: his boss, a neighbor, a stranger, anyone who annoys him is in danger.

“But, no, I’m never going to use the culling song again.

 “Never again. 

“But even if I did use it, I wouldn’t use it for revenge.

“I wouldn’t use it for convenience.

“I certainly wouldn’t use it for sex.

“No, I’d only use it for good.”

The power of knowing this poem initially appeals to Streater, of course. 

“In a world where vows are worthless.  Where making a pledge means nothing.  Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.

“In a world where the culling song was common knowledge, there would be sound blackouts.  Like during wartime, wardens would patrol.  But instead of hunting for light, they’d listen for noise and tell people to shut up….  It would be a world where each word was worth a thousand pictures…. 

“The upside is maybe our minds would become our own.”

However, he comes to recognize that the poem can’t be controlled and must be wiped out – the survival of civilization depends on it and all that. 

So he teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent with pink fingernails who also knows the secret of the poem. They are joined by her secretary Mona, a Wiccan, and Mona’s idiot eco-terrorist boyfriend.  The four of them embark on a apocalyptic roadtrip, conning and murdering their way through libraries and houses, searching for the remaining copies of the anthologies that include the killing poem.

So there’s the setup for the story, which develops a few nifty twists, but the story line sometimes seems to exist primarily to carry along Palahniuk’s many rants.

“Old George Orwell got it backward.

“Big Brother isn’t watching.  He’s singing and dancing.  He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat.  Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake.  He’s making sure you’re always distracted.  He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed….

“Big Brother filling me with need.

“Do I really want a big house, a fast car, a thousand beautiful sex partners?  Do I really want these things?  Or am I trained to want them?

“Are these things really better then the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?”

Palahniuk also proposes a few pet theories such as “Maybe humans are the pet alligators that God flushed down the toliet,” and “Too many advertising jingles comingling could be behind global warming,” and “Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes.  Cancer.  AIDS.”

Throughout the ranting and theorizing, Palahniuk employs a playfullly perverse wit and a good eye for repellant details. Though the world may be plagued by information overload, as Palahniuk suggests, the richness of his imagination in the face of this proves that the plague isn’t fatal or even debilitating, at least not yet.

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk

April 27, 2007

“Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Journalists often lift technique from novelists, and sometimes novelists return the compliment by imitating the documentary style of nonfiction.

In “Rant,” Chuck Palahniuk adopts the oral biography format used by George Plimpton for “Truman Capote” and Jean Stein for “Edie” in his study of Buster Casey, a “naturopathic serial killer.” This style, you would think, might lend an air of authenticity to the story. Instead, Palahniuk’s eighth novel is a high-minded version of “South Park.”

Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club,” is arguably the most popular underground writer working today, if you can call a best-selling author underground. His fans will no doubt appreciate his latest, which includes all his signature declarations on disease, destruction, sex and death.

Buster “Rant” Casey has died, apparently, and his friends, family, and various unreliable narrators comment in punchy, alternating passages. Slowly we learn about Rant’s weird childhood, his freakish relationship with pain and insects, and how he left his small town and moved to the big city where he hooked up with the Party Crashers — people who ram cars into each other to remind themselves they’re alive.

The book is set in a William Gibson style cyber-fiction future that is fully imagined and designed to reflect the consumerist present. The multiple-narrator format allows Palahniuk to philosophize on nearly every subject that vexes modern life, and he does.

This is what draws fans to Palahniuk. There is nothing exceptional about his prose or plotting, but his voice is truly unique. He writes at the edge of crazy, and you can feel his desperate urge to get at the truth of things, even if he is not sure where the truth lies and it’s making him nuts. As one his characters says, “There’s plenty of folks who find crazy people attractive.”