Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
The wildly popular "Fight Club" novelist Chuck Palahniuk is back with more fodder for his army of disenfranchised Everymen, delivered with all the grace and poetry of a blunt object.
Aug 20, 2003 | Imagine some crappy novels. Imagine that they're all written in the same phony, repetitive, bombastic style as this paragraph, all hopped-up imperatives and posturing one-liners. Imagine that they're sloppily put together. Imagine that everything even remotely clever in them has been done before and better by someone else. Imagine that each one flaunts the kind of "research" that can be achieved by leafing through a trade magazine for 30 minutes and is riddled with grating errors. Imagine that these books traffic in the half-baked nihilism of a stoned high school student who has just discovered Nietzsche and Nine-Inch Nails. Does it hurt yet? Now, imagine that every five pages or so the author of these novels will describe something as smelling like shit or piss because the TRUTH is fucking ugly, man. Imagine that he affects to attack the shallow, simplistic, dehumanizing culture of commodity capitalism by writing shallow, simplistic, dehumanized fiction.
But, heck, why go to all the effort of imagining any of this when a new Chuck Palahniuk novel arrives at your local bookstore annually?
The latest is "Diary," the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, who works as a waitress on a tourist-plagued island off the New England coast. Peter, her building-contractor husband, lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Early on, it's fairly obvious that Misty's 13-year-old daughter and mother-in-law are colluding with the rest of the island's old-family residents in a homicidal plot to drive the tourists away by forcing Misty to become a painter. Misty, however, remains clueless about this despite everyone's egregiously suspicious, "Rosemary's Baby"-style behavior and despite the fact that shortly before Peter shut himself up in the garage with the car motor running, he went around scrawling graffiti about the plot in the houses of his clients, then walling off the vandalized rooms to make it look as if they'd never existed. (By the way, the car now smells like urine.)
If this sounds like an incoherent mess, it is. The gimmick of "Diary" is that it's supposed to be a journal Misty is writing for Peter should he ever emerge from his coma. Employing that kind of ventriloquism in a suspense novel would be a tricky thing to pull off for even an accomplished and careful writer, and since Palahniuk is neither, he makes a real hash of it. The narrative wobbles between an unlikely but probably easy-to-write third-person, an aggrieved second-person addressed to Peter, and another second-person narrative addressed, bafflingly, to Misty herself. Eventually, when Misty is kept imprisoned and blindfolded by the townsfolk, it's not clear who's writing it. In any event, at no point does the novel resemble a diary, nor does it sound or feel like the voice or thoughts of an overworked, grief-stricken single mother. Alice never lived here.
A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly. Reading Palahniuk is a revelation of sorts because it shows that bad fiction works exactly the same way: It's execrable on a sentence-by-sentence basis as well as in overall form and theme. The bad writer, it turns out, picks exactly the wrong detail, flubs it, and then tosses it like a stink bomb in the path of the reader dutifully struggling to follow him. This is a signature Palahniuk technique. In "Diary" there's everything from a glass of "bright orange" wine (when was the last time you saw wine the color of Tang?) to summer homeowners whose initial failure to notice that one of their rooms is missing is shrugged off as a result of too much familiarity -- "After you live anywhere long enough ... it just seems too small" -- even though a paragraph later it says they inhabit these houses only "two weeks each year."
In a typically calculating bit of Palahniukian grotesquerie, we are told that in Peter's "kind of coma ... all the muscles contract ... they shrink and pull your head back until it's almost touching your ass," and, who knows, perhaps this really does happen -- though you'd think the also-shrinking abdominal muscles (not to mention the spine) would prevent such contortions. But as for the bit where the comatose person's "fingers curl under with the fingernails cutting the inside of each wrist," well, gentle reader, I invite you to try that one right now. Perhaps if you're an exceptionally limber concert pianist you might manage to press your nails against the "inside of each wrist," but not by curling your fingers.
But wait, there's more.
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