Reprined without permission
Invisible Man
Time Out New York
October 14-21, 1999
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After writing his most recent novel, the things Chuck Palahniuk
know the most about are cancellous bone pulp, veins, anti-androgens,
to say "ffff" if most of your mouth is missing, pedicles, Percodan,
Darvocet, inverted sentences (indirect object, prepositional phrase,
noun, verb), nonlinear storytelling, concentrated estrogens, Valium,
removing scrotal hair, felching, fletching, bowel evacuants, changing
names, changing eyeshadow names, changing eyeshadow. Rhythm. Starting
from scratch.
So now is the time for the public to know more about Chuck
Palaniuk. This week, the 37-year-old author gets to see his first book,
Fight Club, dressed in celluloid. David Fincher (Seven)
has translated Palahniuk's dark millennial work into a feature film
starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter. The
writer's third novel, Invisible Monsters, appeared on
bookshelves September 13, following just six months on the heels of his
second novel, Survivor, about a media-created religious
celebrity. But what should be an triumphant time for him is also a
season of unspeakable tragedcy: This summer, Palaniuk's father was
murdered in the Idaho mountains. There are still no leads.
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The author lives outside the mainstream - on Sauvie's Island, a
crumb of land off the lip of Portland, Oregon. He doesn't have cable.
He doesn't even have a television. The two local radio stations fade
in and out restlessly. But every day, Palahniuk is listening closely.
All day long, the odd things people say, funny phrases - these morsels
make their way, in ink and graphite, onto scraps. Drive to the library.
Scribble on scraps. Drive to the gym. Scribble. Drive home. Read a
mountain of borrowed library books. Repeat.
All those library books have worked like illegal hormones on
Palahniuk's imagination. For 13 years, he was a diesel
mechanic-cum-technical writer who read Sartre and felt a little giddy
after the occasional fistfight. On an assembly line, he crawled into
the dark belly of trucks. Some days, while bent over an engine block,
he wrote stories on a clipboard illuminated by the narrow beam of a
flashlight. And the other guys thought he was fixing a transmission.
Palaniuk's plots are so dense and unpredictable that it would be
pointless to try to outline them here; focusing on the outcomes,
instead of the processes, of his stories would also be beside the
point. In broad strokes, Monsters takes readers on a road trip
with former supermodel Shannon McFarland, after a bullet has torn
away half her face, leaving her so disfigured that people take pains to
avoid looking at her. On the bright side, she begins to recognize that
there's more power in being an eyedore than there is in being eye
candy. "Once you get to that existential place where you realize
nothing matters and nothing has any meaning," says Palaniuk, "then
you're free to invent the world as something really grand and amazing."
Palaniuk wrote the flamboyant Monsters two years before the
brusing Fight Club. But like Fight Club, Monsters
is luridly violent. Palahniuk has been accused of making destruction
(and self-destruction) as hip as power beads, of selling emotionally
bankrupt characters the way the Gap sells khakis. Readers can't
decide if this novelist is a nihilist or just insightful. Declares the
author, "There are valuable things that can be got, there are ways of
improving yourself through things that we see as destructive like
violence, or terminally illness and confronting death."
At Portland writing workshopd in the early '90s, Palahniuk
experimented with the minimalist techniques espoused by longtime
Esquire fiction editor Gordon Lish. Palahniuk's writing is
percussive. It's the relentless tattoo of terraced, one-sentence
paragraphs cascaing in a staccato down the page: Like a
flashing strobe. Remaking you into a glossy eight by ten. Anno Domini.
The reinvention of the self. Palahniuk writes the way you'd look on
an overdose of Valium, but how you feel on PCP - calm on the
surface and roiling below. Then - Pow!Bam!Kablooey! - seizures in the
pelagic deep blue send tiny shockwaves into the shallows. Wearing away
the sand. Wearing away the shore. Changing the shape of the continental
shelf. Repeat.
Sun rises one morning and there's a new coastline.
There are gimmicks in Palahniuk's writing that feel like finding an
action figure your Happy Meal or decoder ring in your Cracker Jacks:
the esoteric patches of detailed knowledge about cosmetic surgery,
pharmacology and lipstick shades; the hairping whodonit plot twist; the
way humor bird-dogs despair. Palahniuk has clevely patterned
Invisible Monsters after a flighty fashion magazine, the
cultural vehicle that perpetuates myths of both beauty and power. The
glossy-mag structure baits readers, and changes of scene are paced to
suit ADD sufferers (and the ADD sufferer in us all). Some readers have
called it a mess, charging that it's what happens when a writer dusts
off a manuscript to cash in while his movie is in theaters; others
can't put it down.
It's a week after Monsters's release, the first day of autumn
in New York City, and Palahniuk is on a five-city book tour. On the
crimson walls of the KGB Bar hang framed agitprop posters and Lenin
statutettes. Intelligent-looking young women, guys with five o'clock
shadows and older publishing types pack he room. Tan and lean, with
unexpected blue eyes, he has the ability to peel off a funny joke every
few minutes. He writes books about reinventing the world that suggest
destruction but read like sex. Palahniuk is his own best publicity.
Well, okay, after Brad Pitt.
When Palahniuk sits down adter reading for a half hour, young people
queue up to talk with him. This was not true two years ago. This is the
effect of Brad Pitt starring in his movie. First editions of Fight
Club sell for more than $100 apiece. His agent doesn't have to
repackage him. Even though he looks out of place in a blazer and chinos
at a gimmicky bar, he chats warmly. He lowers his voice at the end of
his sentences in a way that seems to say, "I am not a threat to you."
Humble. Closing his eyes and boying his chiseled features in front of
an attacker.
Both Pitt and Norton have gushed about Fincher's film and Palahniuk's
story to the press. While not written by Palahniuk, the screenplay is
said to remain faithful to the book. As with Oliver Stone's Natural
Born Killers, critics may decry the liberating anarchy of the
violence and fail to see Fight Club as a cautionary tale. "I
hope David's movie impresses on people that all the stories haven't
been told," says Palahniuk. "Unique, new things can still be invented."
At any rate, his focus is divided these days. It's on keeping the
appointments, flights and phone interviews set up for him by his agent
and his publicist. It's on his next writing project - reinventing the
horror novel. And it's on his father. In a September article he
wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Palahniuk described how his
publicist broke the news: "This might be some kind of sick joke, but
you need to call a detective in Moscow, Idaho." These days, Palahniuk
stalks his own house at night like a ghost, pops Zoloft and waits for
the police to call. He receives the prizes in the mail from sweepstakes
his dad entered the before his death. Watches made in Taiwan arrive.
Coffee mugs arrive, and pitches from movie producers. A little
heartbreak and a little fame and fortune in the mail. Repeat.
If you have new information on Edward Norton (and you can provide a
verifiable and reputable source), please email me-
Susan
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