The cover to the left of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest Tell-All doesn’t look like it contains a story about the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood, does it? When I first saw it online I thought it looked too blank but when I picked up a copy from the library I was surprised to discover that the cover is actually covered in GLITTER! Far removed from the typical hyper-masculinity we’ve come to expect from Chuck Palahniuk.

Alas, as those much wiser than I have said, all that glitters is not gold.

Hazie Coogan is the live-in maid, confidante and assistant to fading, aging Hollywood actress Katherine Kenton. Despite Hazie’s careful methods of preventing her Miss Kathie’s heart being broken by yet another man, their lives are interrupted by the arrival of Webster Carlton Westward III who quickly wins the heart of the tired and lonely actress. When Hazie and Kathie find a tell all memoir manuscript in Webb’s suitcase foretelling the star’s imminent death, they set out to thwart the attempts on her life that come with each new draft.

Katherine Kenton remains among the generation of women who feel that the most sincere form of flattery is the male erection. Nowadays, I tell her that erections are less likely a compliment than they are the result of some medical breakthrough. Transplanted monkey glands or one of those new miracle pills.
As if human beings – men in particular – need yet another way to lie.

Before the narrative starts there are eighty pages of incessant name-dropping of celebrities from the golden years of Hollywood – this in a novel of only 179 pages. Eighty pages of repetitive, shallow hints at the social circles Kathie once moved in, as if to show us the stature that she once held. It repeats that Kathie is desperate for the love of any man, and that Hazie is just as weirdly possessive of Kathie as the suitors she tries to protect her from. The writing follows a stilted style supposed to mimic screenplay directions which comes across as awkward and clumsy. The lack of adequate scene setting or relevance to the story that is to come smacks of disrespect for Palahniuk’s readers – the same readers he trusted would be willing and able to decipher the pidgin language in 2009′s Pygmy.

The repetition doesn’t end with the lacklustre scene setting, as the methods of execution found in Webb’s manuscripts and Kathie’s evasion of these elaborately planned deaths repeat. Over and over again. She overcomes the prediction that she will be mauled by bears only to be faced with potentially falling from a high-rise balcony, and overcoming that too. Is this constant repetition somehow supposed to show us lowly minions the tedium of fame? Endless parties and award ceremonies surely cannot be as boring as the scenario Palahniuk presents us in Tell-All. The Chuck Palahniuk Twist Ending™ is as weak and watered down as the vodka in my parents liquor cabinet when I was 15. Like my parents, I’m not easily fooled by a story that is lacking structure, relevance or humour.

I know it may be difficult to believe, but I write this as a Palahniuk fan. I don’t open his books expecting enlightenment and breathtaking literary writing, but I do expect dissatisfaction with contemporary life to be twisted into darkly funny prose. I resent being treated like a dumb Palahniuk disciple who is willing to lap up any poorly written dross that is dished up to me. No matter how much glitter is thrown on the cover, Tell-All is still a dud.