By Kendra Hibbert
Chuck Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB was one of those extraordinary debuts for a writer that people talk about for years. The book became an "instant classic" (especially after the movie came out) -- a guide to better living for disillusioned men (predominantly) everywhere. Everyone has seen the movie. Anyone who's anyone has read the book. The problem with having such an auspicious first novel is having the talent to follow it up with an even better book and following that with a brilliant career.
Palahniuk followed FIGHT CLUB with SURVIVOR. His newest book is called LULLABY. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at his second and his latest novel to see if this writer has the staying power for a career or whether he'll go the way of Jay McInerney who never survived the critical disappointment in his writing after his debut with BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY.
 |
SURVIVOR is about Tender Branson, a man who begins the novel onboard an empty plane he has just hijacked, talking into the black box recorder, telling the details of "how it all went wrong," trying to get his life story down on tape before the aircraft runs out of fuel and he tumbles toward Earth. Branson is the last survivor of a religious cult called the Creedish, bred to be sold as cheap labor to the outside world and raised to value the joy of a job well done over monetary gains. Now, 10 years after an FBI raid on the cult compound resulted in the mass suicide of the entire Nebraskan home base, the thousands of Creedish workers who were once living in the outside world have one by one been drinking Drano, hanging themselves with dish towels or otherwise going about ending their lives any way they can ... or have they? Tender learns there may be a sly killer out there who has been murdering these survivors one by one and making it look like suicide. Is Tender next? In order to protect himself, he puts his life in the hands of a professional press agent -- a man determined to make Tender the next Jesus Christ. Along the way Tender teams up with Fertility -- a girl he meets at her brother's funeral, who has precognitive dreams and already knows how Tender's life is going to end.
Palahniuk's newest novel, LULLABY, follows a reporter, Carl Streator, who is in the middle of an investigation on crib deaths for his paper when he discovers a "culling song" has been mistakenly printed in a children's nursery-rhyme book. The song brings instant death to any person who happens to be the recipient of the lullaby -- whether intended innocently to put a baby to sleep or malevolently to put an asshole out of their misery -- and has equal toxicity said out loud as it does when repeated in the killer's head. Before he knows it, our fearless anti-hero becomes the unwilling mass murderer of everyone who crosses his path. In order to stop himself and anyone else who might happen upon the poem, Streator teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle, a real-estate agent who makes her money selling haunted houses over and over again, the only other person Carl knows who's aware of the culling song's power. They take Helen's Wiccan assistant Mona and her boyfriend Oyster along with them on a cross country tour to all the libraries and bookstores with the deadly book in stock in order to destroy the "culling song" and prevent mass pandemonium. But, in true Palahniuk style, chaos and bloody deaths soon follow in the wake of their road trip.
However innovative you think Palahniuk's novels have been, thus far he's been basically writing this same book his entire career. This last statement may be broad and simplistic, but it's not off the mark. His writing style hasn't changed since FIGHT CLUB. The narrative is always a poetic almost stream-of-conscious writing style that relies on pacing, repetition and an angry disillusioned voice to create a desolate mood. FIGHT CLUB's "I am Jack's smirking revenge" becomes SURVIVOR's repeating biblical quotes becomes LULLABY's breaking down any given moment/character into a list of details. Then there's always the fascinating trivia Chuck throws into his books -- like how to build homemade napalm in FIGHT CLUB, or SURVIVOR's hints on getting the blood out of silk sheets. LULLABY strays from this pattern slightly with Oyster's catalogue of facts about environmental atrocities (like the introduction of the Gypsy moth to North America by a French painter interested in silk production) but basically it's the same idea. The books may have different stories, but he uses the same devices for telling them, which means if you've read one, the other Palahniuk books always seem predictably familiar.
In SURVIVOR this repetitive style, the helpful hints and the disillusioned narrator are too familiar to his debut novel -- to the point of distraction. There are a few attempts at making this a distinct book -- for example the chapters and pages are numbered backwards as if the narrator is telling his story from end to beginning (which creates a very distinct feeling of impending doom as the reader is always aware of exactly how many pages left in the book) but besides this novelty device, there's nothing notable about SURVIVOR to distinguish it from other books in the Palahniuk library. This book seems "phoned in" or at least less sure, less dynamic than his first book.
 |
LULLABY has the same repetition, characters and a similar "fucked-up" story, but there's more care put into it. Palahniuk may be using the same writing style in his books but at least he's seemed to have mastered it by now. There are moments/chapters in this novel that are the work of sheer brilliance (for instance, a chapter when our trusty narrator loses all control and kills person after person in his way -- his boss, a jerk he sees in a bar, two people at a film shoot who try to stop him from walking through their shot on his way home, and a slew of people in his apartment building who won't turn off their TV, radios or stop stomping on the floor). LULLABY is good. At least as good as FIGHT CLUB - maybe better (though I haven't read that book in a while). But it's still Palahniuk style. If you're bored of reading the same "innovative" poetic technique he uses, you'll still be bored reading this book. However interesting the story may sound from the description, you'll still have to wade through chapter after chapter of the same writing he used in FIGHT CLUB.
How much longer can Palahniuk keep this up? Logically it would seem only a matter of time before people will get bored of him and move on. But who knows? I could be wrong about what people want in a writer. Hemingway had a distinct writing style he more or less repeated in all of his novels -- the same kind of characters, the same stark poetic phrases -- and there are whole university courses dedicated to studying his work. The way I see it, there are two ways Palahniuk's career could go -- to hell or to Hemingway. LULLABY is a good step toward building an interesting career, but he may still have a long way to go before he reaches legendary status.
Next Column: In anticipation for All Hollow's Eve, two books of horror -- FROM A BUICK 8 from Stephen King and something H.P. Lovecraft related -- I haven't decided what yet.
E-MAIL THE AUTHOR |
ARCHIVES
