The Bogeyman

[September 18th, 2002]

---

Web Extra: 20 BONUS QUESTIONS WITH CHUCK PALAHNIUK

---

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. A Portlander since 1980 ("I can't leave! All my stuff and friends are here!"), 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.

While the book delivers some laugh-wrenching one-liners and unabashedly cinematic imagery, I felt the premise and characters fell short of credibility, and I was prepared to tell the author so. Which, again, is why I was hoping I'd hate him. But Palahniuk is thoroughly unhateable. As we chatted, sitting Indian-style at CoffeeTime, he disarmed me so thoroughly, I forgot I had issues with his book. Then I remembered. I fought it, his spell, his Chuck-Charm, and pressed on.

Willamette Week: Your publicity pack calls Lullaby a "supernatural thriller," but it didn't scare me. It's more funny than spooky.

Chuck Palahniuk: 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.

Your style--the run-ons, the recurring phrases, the short-story structure of each chapter--is really distinctive, but lately I get the feeling you're working from the same bag of tricks. Is every novel we get from you going to have this same voice?

You want your style to evolve, if nothing else to make it interesting for yourself. You want to mix it up some. But you know that if you change too abruptly, people will be put off. I don't want to alienate my fans, but I don't want to pander to them, either. It's a balance. And there's a reason they liked my stuff in the first place.

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 any more.

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.

There's only one scene in Lullaby that's romantic in the sense I'm talking about, where Streator and Helen make love while they're floating up by this glittering chandelier. It was atypical for you, and I found it really lovely.

Yes, but I don't want to go there very often.

I can tell! Because there's a ton of gross-out imagery in this book: diarrhea, vomit, necrophilia, "rectal itching," infected feet, "stinking ooze," a body-cavity search where the officer sniffs his fingers afterward...

Right, because you have to involve people on a physical level. You can't just state something on a cognitive level. You have to involve the reader's body in the story as well as their mind. It's a big part of what Tom Spanbauer teaches. He calls it "on the body," and in minimalism, you have to create the story such that the characters have a physicality. The reader sympathizes with and begins to feel that physicality.

Yes, but what about the physicality of pleasure? The sun on your skin, the endorphin rush, the wine buzz, the orgasm? It seems to me you're fixated on the foul, the scatological.

You know, it's really much harder for me to write about the pleasurable side of things. If I can come down on a small bright note at the end of a book, after all of the misery that came before, then I'm happy. But I just find that if I concentrate on the good stuff too much, it becomes disempowered. It's no longer effective.

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, then I bury myself in the craft process. It's a way to sedate myself.

---

hiss@wweek.com.