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.

Well, it appears after last week’s overload of links the internet has dried up this week. It’s good, in a way, as I seem to have been a lot more productive this week. Thanks boring internet, but please don’t always be this way. Oh look! Here’s Ernest Hemingway with a buffalo!

• Book recommendations from Yoko Ono anyone?
• Oh my, the MS Readathon for adults in the form of the Novel Challenge.
• Read the first two chapters of Chuck Palahniuk‘s new novel Tell-All on the A.V. Club.
• I’m sure everyone and their dog saw this during the week, but I’m going to link to it anyway: Ghostbusters recreated by an improv group in the New York Public Library’s main reading room.
• I’ve just finished reading Rachel Trezise’s latest novel Sixteen Shades of Crazy, and at The Guardian she offers her top 10 Welsh underground novels.
• Book spotting in Williamsburg‘s McCarren Park.
• Thanks to the eagle-eyed Steph from My Girl Friday: John Waters talks about six of his favourite books, suicides in the entertainment and speed-freak memoirs included.
• The new Bret Easton Ellis web site is pretty ace, including a length excerpt from Imperial Bedrooms – Clay analyzes how the novel written about them was adapted into a lacklustre movie (!), and reveals how one major character is murdered.
• And more Bret Easton Ellis with a series of interviews from Movieline about the film adaptations of his novels: On Less Than Zero, on American Psycho, on The Rules of Attraction, on The Informers, and on his future film project The Golden Suicides.
• The Columbus State University’s Carson McCullers Center had a Carson themed feast at the beginning of May. New project? I still haven’t gotten around to making ‘Spuds Carson’ as discussed in Illumination & Night Glare.
• You all probably heard the “news” that Carson McCullers is Robert Pattinson’s favourite writer, yeah? He recently gave Oprah a copy of The Ballad of the Sad Café. I respectfully decline to comment.
• And, just in case you need a laugh and a reason to never have children: Shit My Kids Ruined.

Photo credit: Ernest Hemingway poses with a water buffalo while on safari in Africa, 1953-1954. Photograph in the Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.

A few more of my Fitzgerald set have been arriving this week, only a couple more due in and then I’ve completed my whole set and sense of fulfillment and happiness will surely follow.

• The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Lost Decade by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Pat Hobby Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

And, a whole bunch of links of good reading for you all.

• Did you know that there is no historical marker in the house in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Carson McCullers wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter?
• A look at Mad Men‘s Don Draper’s bookshelf.
• On the Meaning of Making Time to Read by Nymeth from Things Mean A Lot.
• A visit to Carson McCullers’ childhood home in Columbus.
• On books and reading – how the very act of reading must be considered before we can adequately engage in a discussion of “the future of fiction”; some interesting thoughts on the agency of reading as well.
• Chuck Palahniuk on reading Judy Blume and his latest novel Tell-All.
• The 1996 Details profile of David Foster Wallace; that the author of the article couldn’t easily access the profile online speaks volumes about how far digitization still has to go.
• Truth: I was that creepy kid at high school that spent lunchtimes in the library reading true crime. Here’s a short list of the best true crime books.
• This isn’t book related at all, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. Phillipe Halsman was a photographer in the 1950s and would ask his subjects to “jump” for a photo.
• I’m almost finished with my last Nathanael West novel, and The New York Times published a review of a new biography of him and his wife, Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney by Marion Meade.
• Ben Myers is releasing a fictional account of the life of missing pop lyricist Richey Edwards – a profound influence on my teenage self – in October, Richard: A Novel. The cover looks good, but the blurb seems a bit underwhelming, I mean:  “one man’s battle with his worst enemy. Himself.” Hopefully that’s just publishing copy and  in no way reflects the quality of the writing inside? I remain very wary. I feel like this has the potential to be gobsmackingly good or just abysmally train-wreck awful. Either way, I’ll likely be buying and reading it and expect a review come October.

Picture credit: The Debutantes by Marta Aronssohn-Danzig (c1889); nothing to do with anything, really, I just like the look on their faces: “really Jess?, you’re talking about Carson McCullers again? Sigh.”

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Cassie Wright is a pornstar past her prime. In order to go out with a bang (ahem!) she plans to film her attempt to break the world record for serial fornication. Six hundred men.

Snuff zooms in by giving us the perspective of four individuals involved in the proceedings: Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600; and Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and the mastermind behind the project. It takes a while for the book to really distinguish the voices of the three men, whereas Sheila’s voice is always clearly defined. The three men start as a blur – minor representations of the collective jerk jockeys (Sheila’s term, but her constant use of similar slang terms is amazing.) – but through their interactions with one another they do steadily reveal their personalities. This could potentially make a great play; a character study of three men and a woman in a green room for a pornography film.

Cassie knew Marilyn’s secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That’s who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.

It is Chuck Palahniuk, so it is coarse, aspects of the pornography business are explained in great detail. There is an undeniably adolescent fascination with the flesh and all things bodily. By writing about the contentious subject of pornography there was an opportunity to explore some of the finer arguments surrounding it – briefly mentioned through Sheila’s point of view, but that all falls by the wayside very quickly in favour of advancing the story. The plot makes you think you know where it is going, proves you correct, but then twists things so suddenly that you almost feel naïve for believing you knew what was going to happen.

Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.
Didn’t one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie.

But, that is what also makes it so much, dare I say it, fun to read. Things don’t go exactly as you imagined them, but then there is that horrifying realization when you see where it is actually headed. To reveal too much would be to ruin the enjoyment offered by Snuff.

(Also, it introduced me to the exploits of Roman empress Valeria Messalina. I do enjoy the way that Palahniuk weaves together moments and figures of history into his narratives.)

Brace yourself, dear readers.

I didn’t buy any books (gasp! shock! horror!) so I have nothing to report on the rabid book-buyer front this week. Instead, seeing it feels as though it has been a while between reviews, I’ll quickly chat about what I have been reading. I’m working my way through Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar, which, despite it’s heavy use of a Scottish accented prose and slang and a generally downbeat demeanour, is keeping my attention. That is, when that attention isn’t being distracted by Hunter S. Thompson with Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. H.S.T. is managing to captivate me and get me involved in the American politics of 37 years ago with his outlandish wit and fierce mockery of the system. I’ve still got some Chuck Palahniuk books to read, but I think maybe the Palahniuk wave has crashed and I might be a bit over it? I’ll see how I feel when I finish these two books.

I started watching the first season of Mad Men this week, and the incredibly handsome Jon Hamm has me really wanting to read/reread some Jack Kerouac. Anyone else think Hamm would make a great Kerouac if someone had the lack of decency to make a film version of his life? Speaking of Mad Men, here’s me and Don Draper at an after-work rendezvous via the way too much fun on a boring Sunday afternoon at work Mad Men Yourself:

So, Don, what have you been reading?

Ahem. Cartoon vanity and daydreams of meeting some dashing Don Draper look-a-like over a cocktail or two aside, here are some bookish articles that I found interesting this week. Douglas Coupland writing for the Guardian on his personal circumstances while he wrote Generation X:

“And so I started to write the book. I remember spending my days almost dizzy with loneliness and feeling like I’d sold the family cow for three beans. I suppose it was this crippling loneliness that gave Gen X its bite. I was trying to imagine a life for myself on paper that certainly wasn’t happening in reality. In the book there was the idea that people marooned in life could unmaroon themselves by telling stories to each other. That still seems to me to be a valid way of seeing the world. There was also the notion that telling stories was a way of coping with information overload – hence the book’s subtitle, Tales for an Accelerated Culture. In 1989, information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of 10, as well as push-button phones instead of rotary dial phones – quaint now, but back then it felt real. What was really going on with the writing of X was, I suspect, the use of storytelling as a form of creative pattern recognition from which clues to psychic survival might erupt. That’s possibly what storytelling is in a large sense, and it’s what I do for a living, the most recent evidence of which is Generation A, a follow-up to X where the cultural acceleration experienced by the characters is palpable rather than theoretical.”

Heather Dent over at PopMatters writes a reflective eulogy for Hunter S. Thompson:

“For generation after generation, Thompson rocked/rocks/will rock the dominant paradigm, describes our national character; corruption, inequality, mediocrity, freedom and fun, Fear and Loathing. His words, all the more relevant today, continue to delight and rattle us.”

Over at the New York Times, Arthur Krystal contemplates writers who appear to be terrible conversationalists.

And, finally, in my constant search for news, articles and basically anything of interest regarding Carson McCullers, Google News search turned up a review of a bar in Portland, The Press Club, which has a selection of crêpes named after authors. It appears that the owners have some good taste in literature as one of the crêpes is named after McCullers and I’m curious about how they decided that this particular combination of ingredients – “mozzarella, mushrooms, red peppers, and spinach” – represented Carson McCullers? In lieu of a ticket to Portland, I’m tempted to try and create my own version of crêpe à la Carson and report back on my findings.

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.

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Pygmy: “Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight ___. Date ___. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operative Havoc.” Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughle indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. It’s a comedy. And a romance.

Chuck Palahniuk. Always attempting to push the boundaries of what society deems acceptable, forever willing to explore and expose the dark, the macabre, the unmentionables hiding in the undergrowth of contemporary society. From masculine rage against the capitalist machine, to travelogues of the weird and wonderful in Portland, Oregon, to that horrifying moment of realization in “Guts“, he always manages to deliver an engrossing – heavy emphasis on the gross – highly enjoyable read. I wouldn’t claim him as one of my favourite authors, but I have enjoyed everything of his that I have read. I am in the middle of a Palahniuk binge, catching up on his books that I’ve missed out on over the years.

The first stop on this binge of the perverse is his most recent release, Pygmy. A thirteen year old unnamed operative agent from an unnamed totalitarian state is sent to the United States under the guise of being an exchange student. Through a series of dispatches told in unique pidgin English, he unveils his state sanctioned purpose of unleashing Operation Havoc upon America. The voice may be seen as a gimmick or distraction, but I found it rhythmic and managed to adapt to it quicker than expected. It is like reading an awkward Babelfish translation from English to another language and then spat back out in a mangled form of what only vaguely resembles English. There were some moments where I had to go back reread sentences once I had grasped what exactly Pygmy was talking about – that moment of illumination once it becomes clearer is satisfying.

“Along returning journey, encounter frequent memorial honoring American battle warrior, great officer similar Lenin. Many vast mural depicting most savvy United State war hero. Rotating statue. Looming visage noble American colonel. Courageous, renown of history, Colonel Sanders, image forever accompanied odor of sacrificial meat. Eternal flame offering wind savory perfume roasted flesh.”

Pygmy is incorporated into the decidedly American routines of the host family – those of the religious-like shopping experience, of the reproductive rituals of teen dating, of the consumption of religious values in church and school – and by showing these regular events through outsider eyes and language, Palahniuk makes them unusual, surreal occurrences that do not make much sense, highlighting just how meaning is arbitrary and culturally defined. Here, Pygmy takes part in a game of dodgeball:

“Immediate all student bidding for this agent warrior among team, beseeching accompany into battle of inflated latex bladders. Forced settle dispute using traditional ritual hurtling monetary coin at roof, allow final position of tumbling coin to decide: heads or tails. In capitalist nation, all is decided by money. Beyond this agent, each army assembled conscripting best physical specimen. Armies take position opposite walls gymnasium. Provisioned equal quantity inflated bladder.”

There is always the undercurrent of Palahniukian terror, violence and destruction but it is made comical and ridiculous by the bizarre and creative language. At the dénouement, there is a strong link to be made between Pygmy’s newfound attachment to his host family and country and the speech he delivers to Trevor, the bully who falls in love with Pygmy after he has violently attacked him. “No able accept how possessed of no power, helpless, so reaction bonded alliance with aggressor. Form identity with oppressor. Typical victim psychology mechanism. […] Cruel thrash become replace genuine gesture of familial affection. Violence synonymous love.” Politically controversial, of course, but an interesting consideration.

Throughout Pygmy, Palahniuk presents an indictment of capitalism through the eyes of those positioned outside of it, but simultaneously offers a celebration of the inherent weirdness and contradictions evident in such a society.