Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories by Chuck Palahniuk
Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories: Chuck Palahniuk’s world has been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Stranger Than Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar life of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father’s murder and the trial of his killer – each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America’s most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.
The Palahniuk binge continues, this time branching out to his non-fiction work in the collection Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. Like much of his fiction, here Palahniuk is interested in the strange, the weird, the off-beat, from Olympic wrestling try-outs to life on a submarine to events of his personal life during the production of the film adaptation of Fight Club. The book is divided into three sections, People Together – brief glimpses into how people congregate and form community around different activities and interests, Portraits – interviews and monologues with famous, or not so famous but nonetheless worthy individuals, and Personal – brief sketches of small moments in the authors life.
“This is your life, but processed. Hammered into the mold of a good screenplay. Interpreted according to the model of a successful box-office hit. It’s no surprise you’ve started seeing every day in terms of another plot point. Music becomes your soundtrack. Clothing becomes costume. Conversation, dialogue. Our technology for telling stories becomes our language for remembering our lives. For understanding ourselves. Our framework for perceiving the world.”
- from “You Are Here”, about writers pitching their story ideas to film producers at conventions.
The quality of the pieces is uneven, ranging from the mildly intriguing, to the downright boring, and toward the end, humourous and touching. Palahniuk’s strong narrative voice seems to be largely absent here, except in the more personal essays. Many of them read like magazine fodder, spat out just before deadline. While the subject may well be interesting, there is little effort made to engage the reader. Some commentary from Palahniuk, some attempt at insight would have been effective. The fascinating, sometimes outrageous nature of the material is supposed to speak for itself, but for the most part, it does not. My favourite pieces were of Palahniuk’s experimentation with anabolic steroids in “Frontiers”, the hosting of a party of psychics and skeptics in a haunted house in “The Lady” and a tender portrait of a woman and her dog who search for dead bodies in disaster areas in “Bodhisattvas.”
When Palahniuk tears down the façade of controversial, transgressive author tough guy and is open about himself and how he views life is where the articles become truly engaging. Unfortunately, these are limited to the final thirty pages of the book. More of this, letting his personality and unique perspective on the oddities of modern life, could have created a work of non-fiction equally as engaging and entertaining as his fiction work.