Art is effective when it admits to the full extent of the human condition, that the something in the air has a name. Keeping this in mind, read a few pages of Chuck Palahniuk in a well-lit and crowded area, and look in the direction of your choice. You will see a girl with good hair and an uneven gait-this girl is always there, appearing less frumpy than she thinks, and she is always a sex addict.
This understanding is the effect of Palahniuk’s writing, a hysterical realism consumed by a taxidermist’s fascination with the jitters of inner life. Choke, written as an exhaustive literary prospectus on the habits and origins of the compulsively erotic, was Palahniuk’s last book before his newly-released Diary, and its brutally forthright treatment of addiction as a messed up answer to a dishonest world drove twenty-nothings everywhere post-nihilistically wild.
Now, in Diary, Palahniuk explores questions of artistic inspiration and the hidden subtexts of behavior from behind the eyes of Misty Marie Kleinman, an ex-art student and waitress on an island overrun by tourists. Her husband, an art school flunky and member of the island’s pedigreed and outnumbered ancien regime, lies in a coma from a suicide attempt, the apparent culmination of months of erratic behavior. As Misty discovers the nature of his madness-his xenophobic graffiti covering the tourists’ dens and breakfast nooks, all sealed away behind the drywall-she finds the island’s old families religiously convinced that her unremarkable artistic talent will save the island from the swarm of outsiders.
The novel is somewhat of a departure for Palahniuk, as the contrived plot of the horror genre could have taken away from his signature-free associations and maniacal spontaneity. These stylistic elements remain intact, however, and serve as consistent road marks holding the author’s divergent philosophies together.
Zingers such as, “Anytime some well-meaning person forces you to demonstrate you have no talent and rubs your nose in the fact you’re a failure at the only dream you ever had, take another drink” or “Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn’t necessarily make you a real artist” come in many incarnations, all following the same few templates, and Palahniuk’s phenomenal talent at juxtaposing the private peculiarities of events with the public way we frame them keeps these repetitions apt each time.
Palahniuk came to the National Press Club last Monday to promote Diary. In an appealing laid-back manner, shoes put aside, he regaled the crowd of mostly college students and scenesters with a new short story and lively humor, summing the new book up as “a look at the things we aren’t aware of that drive us .”
Emphasizing the point, Palahniuk related a story about finding hundreds of rosary beads at a deceased grandmother’s house, and allowing his sister to keep them for lack of a better option. Several weeks later, high and feeling crafty, he commissioned a group of friends to put together necklaces and other tchotchkes to give away during his book tour. A few hours after that, having given explicit instructions as to their design, he unwittingly came home to a hundred crude new rosaries. Furthermore, Palahniuk shared that he recently passed a kidney stone and someone is wearing it now.
Some of Palahniuk’s writing is a sophisticated gimmick, but his interest in his subject is undeniable-the account of Misty discovering the scene of her husband’s suicide attempt unfolds along the lines of her facial muscles, as each aspect of a snarl is documented with greedy anatomical clarity. While Diary lacks the appeal of Fight Club’s instantly reducible premise, his mind is still no place for IKEA-ware. He’s still the Chuck Palahniuk of our generation.
