Howdy,
So, after finishing Chuck Palahniuk’s newest book, Tell-All, I have to say that he’s been in a bit of a slump. For me. However, after reading some of the reviews online I’ve decided to say what I have to say about the dude in the most public forum I have available, which is something that is at least decorated with shitty snowmen (take that, Amazon reviewer shitheads. By the way, nice fucking stars. Very cute and original).
For the uninitiated, Chuck Palahniuk is most famous for writing the book Fight Club which spawned the movie Fight Club, which is basically a page-to-screen copy of the original source material. Great, funny, dark. It’s one of the few book/movie combos where it’s hard to say which is better because both were excellent. He also wrote the book Choke which was made into a garbage movie by the same title. Choke, in my opinion, is probably his best work. It suits his style, it’s got just enough of his patented craziness, the whole thing is filthy and filled with unlikable characters, yet it still manages to break your heart before the end.
Palahniuk has written a shitload of books, usually cranking out a book every year. Now, this is the kind of thing usually reserved for Danielle Steel and James Patterson, shitmongers who basically whore out their names so that other people can write their books for them. Most of them are very good. Yes, he certainly writes with a similar style most times, and yes, he is certainly trying to be shocking most times, but if you can suspend disbelief enough to watch goddamn Iron Man, a story about a guy who makes a robot suit and flies around killing terrorists and celebs with too much plastic surgery, then you can suspend your disbelief long enough to finish a 200-page book.
So where does this drive come from? Here’s the basic story:
Palahniuk is a dude with a dark family past. He finds himself headed over the hill, working a shit job, and basically bored. He goes to the library a lot, but eventually he finds that there are no books that he really wants to read, nothing that seems catered to his interest. So he decides to just write the books he wants to read. That simple.
He’s like the guy you know from the neighborhood who gets sick of his garage door breaking so he decides to build a new motor himself. EXCEPT, it would be like this guy being required to build a brand new, differently designed motor with new parts every year. Maybe sometimes it’s shittier than others, but it gets the goddamn door up every time.
Which brings us to the newest book, Tell-All. Okay, this is not my favorite book. However, shitheads don’t really know what they’re doing when they pick it up. If you decide to pick it up, let me give you some advice that might help you enjoy it more:
1. Feel free to completey ignore anything in boldface. These will be brand names and names of celebrities. A lot of people complain about this, but I’m not sure why. Chuck Palahniuk does this sort of thing in books, for example, the inclusion of esoteric medical terms in Choke, to slow readers down and make them pay attention to what’s going on. So, don’t get caught up in the names is all I’m saying, don’t let that ruin it for you the way it seems to for so many others. Take the boldface as a sign saying, “You do not need to remember this person.”
2. Accept that this is not Fight Club. Everybody wants Chuck Palahniuk to rewrite Fight Club. Say what you will about his use of forumla, but Palahniuk is a writer who is constantly trying new things. In case you haven’t gotten the message yet: Fight Club II: Durden’s Revenge, is NEVER happening. So get the fuck over it. If you love Fight Club for its testosterone, snappy angry youth one-liners, or ready-for-the-screen action, look to another book.
Let’s address some of the specifically bad reviews and their particular issues with the book, and more importantly, some of the claims people often make about “bad” works:
“And I was hoping for a longer book. My copy clocked in at a lowly 179 pages.”
Okay, you are an asshole. Let me get something straight here, because I think I understand what you’re saying. You are the kind of person who would rather stuff your face with shitty macaroni and cheese and dry chicken wings at Country Buffet than eat a real meal that doesn’t fill you up so much that your head pops off your body, but tastes like human food. Length does not make a great book. It gives a book mystique (see: Moby Dick. see: Ulysses) but I would say that no book which 90% of people haven’t finished is a great book. And if your definition of a great book has anything whatsoever to do with length, I would challenge you to compare the Encyclopedia Britannica with any Raymond Carver story. Read both and tell me which one made you feel anything besides exhaustion and boredom.
3. A book being short does not mean that you are being ripped off. His books tend to be short, faster reads. I like that. I don’t see this as a laziness on the author’s part or a disadvantage. He is a rabid revisionist, and edits each line over and over rather than stuffing a book with crap.
“I tried hard to get through this book. About a quarter of the way through I started skipping ahead to see if it got any better. By three quarters of the way through it hadn’t, and I gave up.”
Okay, you realize that a quarter of the way through represents about 30 minutes of reading time, right? I am a HUGE fan of quitting books. I quit far more books than I finish. I can tell pretty quickly when a book is not for me. However, you should only be pissed at yourself for not having the willpower to quit when you really wanted to. Plus, skipping ahead would be like skipping DVD chapters. Unless you’re trying to see a titty, there’s no point to it. You’re just looking for confirmation that you hate the story anyway, so the odds that you’ll reverse are zero. Be a goddamn grownup and quit bad books.
Finally, one of the most common types of reviews goes something like:
“The book opens with this guy doing that, then this happens, and then this guy reacts, and here are all the plot elements and how they fit together.”
Hey, shitheads! Plot summaries and reviews are not the same thing. God knows why I would scroll to page five and actually read your review, but telling me the plot elements and characters is not a review. A review of this web site could say something like, “Shitty, boring, not amusing, filled with typos,” and so on. Not so much, “He writes about Quiznos. He says they are bad because the people who work there are bad. He then goes on to explain why they are bad.” At that point, people can just read the goddamn text itself rather than the book.
I would never say that Tell-All is Chuck Palahniuk’s best books. I would say that the last three he’s written are my least favorites. But it’s someone’s favorite. Stop romanticizing the past the way you do with old SNL, every band’s first album, and all the other stuff you liked because you were happy at the time you first found it. Believe me, if you go back to the house you grew up in it’s not going to be the same as you remember it.
In junior high I thought Fahrenheit 451 was the most amazing book. I thought it was smart, creepy, and that it had a strong message tied up in a cool storyline. Recently I reread it and I absolutely HATED it. Preachy as hell, slow, and Bradbury bashes you over the head with his message so many times that I think my scalp actually has the cover imprinted on it like Silly Putty on newspaper.
My point here is that Tell-All is not my favorite. Not for me. But somebody likes it. And I am happy that Chuck Palahniuk is at least experimenting, doing things a little differently. If I pick up the next Palahniuk book, maybe he uses some of the same techniques, but I know I’ll walk away with something different, and I think that is what he continues to offer his audiences. Very few writers could pull together a room of a couple hundred people (there could be a period right there. If you ever get a chance to see him, GO! It’s fun.) and have them split all over the map about which book is their favorite.* I like to be surprised. Sometimes the surprise is not what I was hoping for, but fuck it. It’s an hour of your life, maybe two. I guarantee that you will get more out of this than you will from Avatar.
The key to his whole body of work is that it all started with a dude who decided to write the kind of books he wanted to read. And I still believe he is doing that. I think he is writing the sorts of books he wishes were available. I think that his vision of what he wants has changed, as should the taste of any person who is growing. But ultimately, I really do believe that he is still writing the books he wants to read. Say he’s a hack, say he’s lost it, but don’t ignore that this is a guy who is doing what the fuck he wants to.
*intersting sidenote related to popularity:
There’s actually a dude online who has made a name for himself strictly by bashing Palahniuk’s books with long reviews and ending them by promoting his own awful book. It’s kind of a smart idea as it must get him way more web site hits than he would have otherwise, and I suspect that an awful lot of his vitriol is manufactured, sort of like a shitty rapper saying he’s got “beef” with someone about 30x more famous. We’ll just leave his name out here because the last thing that the world needs is someone succeeding with this asinine plot to promote his own shit. However, just to send out the bad internet karma his way: Fuck yourself and try driving your own wagon instead of hitching it to someone else. Oh, and if people have their own blogs, please bash the holy shit out of this web site. Just make sure to include the URL.