Skip to main content"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 mid-air and seriously cracking up at the outrageous Chuck-ness of it all? It's a truly Chuck-a-licious dedication page, the kind that makes your eyes glaze over, your mind wander and wonder. What a shame that the book goes downhill from here.
In Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, Palahniuk proves that he's the aspiring Fear Factor and Howard Stern of contemporary letters. In his 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 that smell like stale shit, waiters who blow various wads onto customers' meals, men afflicted with "cauliflower ear," cadaver dogs who sniff death scents, Honduran girls with staph infections drinking water out of sewage puddles. Oh, and scab-covered, fluid-seeping bald heads riddled with whiteheads, Alan Alda's massive scrotum, cockroaches crawling into beer bottles just before you chug, and a high-school student known as "the Una-Pooper," known for smearing his own shit on bathroom walls in the manner of abstract expressionism.
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-fuckin'-cool, you'll get off on his gonzo adventures at a bull gonad-eating festival in Montana. But dude, you'll friggin' piss yourself when you read about his awesomely rad idea to dress up with a friend in bear and dog costumes and run through the streets of Seattle just to see if the cops will chase 'em.
If these sundry charms fail to amuse you, however, you'll quickly conclude that Chuck is no Hunter S. Thompson, and that the very act of his doing something allegedly wild 'n' crazy does not, by virtue of sheer Chuckitude, make it a fascinating read. 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: first citing a young male fan who pulled him aside in a bookstore; second referencing how Fight Club reminded Hollywood studio execs of things they'd done as teenagers; and lastly placing Fight Club in the tradition of "transgressive novels" like American Psycho and Trainspotting.
Palahniuk also loves to talk about Brad Pitt, star of the Fight Club movie: Brad's lips, Brad's teeth, and the things Brad said to him on the film set. In other chapters, the starstruck 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 transcriptionist.
This is not to say there aren't passages in which Palahniuk drops the fawning and the posturing and actually expresses real thoughts and real pain. In the book's introduction, he speaks with 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. In "The Lady," he gives one of the most succinctly brilliant descriptions ever written of any character by any author: "Ina is German and sensible. Her idea of expressing emotion is to light another cigarette." Occasionally he sprinkles illuminating references to Jung, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger into otherwise sophomoric prose, and he concludes the book with an affecting account of his father's murder.
But even these passages are held hostage to Palahniuk's minimalist mannerisms, which had a novel ring eight years ago but have since threaded bare. In "You Are Here," he repeats a sentence nine times in 12 pages. After about the third repetition, you realize he's going to end the chapter with this sentence, so when he actually does, there's neither drama nor surprise. And his use of introductory fragments to modify pronouns leads to abominations such as "These people, some are here to wrestle," and "Some people, it gives them a big hickey around their mouth."
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, looks for inspiration in a zit, a shit and a bull's balls.
By Chuck Palahniuk(Doubleday, 2004, $23.95)
WWeek 2015