Tag Archives: June 2010

Book Loot: Week Ending July 4th, 2010

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I have to apologize for what is going to be a very brief and image-less post, our broadband bandwidth has run out until Wednesday and trying to do anything without it is tear-inducing. I don’t remember dial-up being this slow. Just another reason to move to Finland, where this week they announced that access to a high speed broadband service is a basic right. Damn right Finland. Hopefully Book Depository still do free shipping there? (I’d check myself, but it would take about three hours to load the page!)

Thankfully I have these new books to keep me company:

In lieu of an array of fantastically interesting links, though I do recommend reading Flavorwire’s list of the 20th Century’s most reclusive authors, I’m going to tell you a story!

I had an interesting encounter with some young readers yesterday. Tired after a long day, I was listening to my ipod but the battery ran out, so I pulled a book out of my bag and started reading that instead. Soon after I did the conversation of the group of teenagers moved toward what they’d been reading. I really loved secretly listening to them talking about books, and convinced myself that it was me that caused the change of topic. Who knows.

So what are teens (male and female) in the North-West of Melbourne reading on their school holidays? A few of the titles that I caught were Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (and they were very insistent about how great it is, reading up on it now it sounds like something I’d be interested in. Anyone read it?), Gone by Michael Grant, Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I couldn’t help but grin to myself when I heard them talking about The Outsiders. No vampires!

The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly (2010)

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The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly (2010)I first took notice of Erin Kelly’s The Poison Tree when I read a write up in the July 2010 issue of Good Reading magazine. Sometimes all it takes to convince me to read something is the mere mention of a decaying mansion being an important part of the plot. Yes, this has something to do with the novel I’ve been carrying around inside me for years now. One day, my friends, one day. But until then, I keep reading other people’s take on the deteriorating house hoping that they haven’t pilfered my idea.

It’s the sweltering summer of 1997, and Karen Clarke, a gifted student of languages is finishing up at university. Unceremoniously dumped by her boyfriend, she uses her new found freedom as an opportunity to extend herself beyond her comfortable friendship group. A chance meeting with the wildly bohemian Biba Capel sees Karen pulled into the inclusive and mysterious world of Biba and her brother, Rex, and their crumbling childhood home in London. By the end of the summer, as the byline goes, two people will be dead and lives changed irrevocably.

She slung an arm around me so that our cheeks were pressed together and mouthed the words as my pencil formed them. Personal space was clearly an alien concept to her. That, coupled with her eccentric clothes and complete lack of self-consciousness meant that by now I was pretty sure I was dealing with a mad person, fascinating and disarmingly different to everything I was used to.

Told in Karen’s perspective between the past and the present, The Poison Tree spends much of its time vaguely hinting at what is to come, and the secrets that are being kept from the other characters and the reader. This attempted build up just wasn’t effective or suspenseful, there are no real hints at what or how things panned out, just the deliberate ambiguity that something did happen. Why not trust the natural dramatic momentum of a story rather than resorting to the tired flashback technique? I had much of the same issue with Rebecca James’ Beautiful Malice, (which is in many ways very similar to The Poison Tree, the secrets and hidden troubled past of a main character, now with child, looking back) so I wonder how much of my impatience with this technique has to do with the genre itself, or my lack of knowledge and awareness of psychological thrillers.

I’m loathe to reveal too much more of the plot, as the unravelling of the secrets is the main point of enjoyment of such a novel. The early days of Rex, Biba and Karen’s friendship doesn’t quite reach those frenetic, heady heights of new and exciting friendships, as I imagine was intended. The last third is a rush of tying up loose ends and revelations, which makes for moderately thrilling reading but the accelerated pace here jars with the slow beginning. An uneven pace and wildly vacillating characterizations prevent The Poison Tree from being truly gripping, but it somehow manages to be passably entertaining.

[Disclaimer: publisher supplied proof copy from work. The Poison Tree was released in Australia by Hachette in June 2010, ISBN:  978-144-470104-3]

Recently Abandoned: June 2010

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This is a new feature on Start Narrative Here for the books I started reading over the past month but gave up on before finishing. Sometimes I worry that my reviews here are too positive, and that it might seem like I’m not objective enough about the books that I read. The fact is, I’m not a professional reviewer with the goal of objective criticism, I’m a reader. For the most part, I can’t see the point in wasting my time and energy on a book that isn’t entertaining or enlightening me in some way. Yet, these abandoned books also have a place in my reading history and I feel like it is necessary to document them.

Thus, Recently Abandoned, a monthly post where I can write about the books that didn’t work for me.

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors by Lisa Appignanesi (2007)Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 by Lisa Appignanesi (2007)

I didn’t seem to take many notes when I was reading this one, so my final thoughts after abandoning it are very brief. It professed to be a history of the relationship between women and mental illness. The first fifty pages seemed to stray from this idea, as though there were no real defining thesis. It wasn’t the straightforward history it appeared it would be, very rambling and perhaps too speculative for what I wanted. I couldn’t imagine pushing myself through another 400 pages so I gave up. May be one to return to in the future, as I think it is a topic I could be very interested in.

Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease by Gary Greenberg (2010)Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease by Gary Greenberg (2010)

So, it would seem that I don’t enjoy reading about depression and mental illness in non-fiction? Or I just keep choosing the wrong books to read about these issues. Manufacturing Depression claimed to be a look at how the pharmaceutical industry has changed the way we look at sadness, pathologizing it as depression and what that means for our society. It wasn’t the author’s scepticism about the pathologization of sadness that put me off, because that is something I tend to agree with it. For a psychotherapist and self proclaimed sufferer of depression he lacked empathy for other sufferers, some of them his own patients, and many who may gain the help they need from the medication he rallies against. Some of his arguments were compelling, such as the idea that if depression is biochemical as we are so fond of claiming these days, then why aren’t the drugs against it more effective? His argument, as far as I got through his book anyway, seemed to be that depression is a necessary form of pessimism and that science and medicine’s intervention into sadness works as a moral judgement of human emotions. His arguments were never quite clear, so it was uncertain where he was going with his mix of scientific history, psychological theory and memoir.

The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan (2009)The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O’Hagan (2009)

Despite most readerly types being avid cat people, I’m cursed with an allergy to cats. I’d resemble a puffer fish if I even got close to one, I’m much happier around dogs and so I expected to really like this one. This book came up a few times in my weekly Carson McCullers alerts as she appears in the novel. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and His Friend Marilyn Monroe is written from the perspective of a philosophically minded dog with an eye for tasteful interior design, who is given as a gift to Marilyn Monroe by Frank Sinatra. Christened Mafia Honey by Marilyn, he accompanies her through the early part of the sixties. I really wanted to like this one, I thought it would be a quirky take on the glamour and illusion of Hollywood – but it just wasn’t. It was tiringly overwritten with too long passages of descriptions of the interiors of rooms Maf finds himself in that reeked of over-research by the author. Rather than giving the reader insight into these celebrities as people, it offers only vague caricatures. Unappealing. I skipped to the sections with Carson, and didn’t find much worthy there either.

Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner (1926)

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Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner (1926)When I first bought the first volume of William Faulkner’s novels from the Library of America series, I was hesitatant to start reading his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, because of a random review that I read on LibraryThing. I was put off for months, despite having absolutely loved As I Lay Dying. When I found myself suffering a bit of reader burnout I decided to finally get stuck into Faulkner. From this I’ve learned a valuable lesson: don’t always trust the reviews of people whose literary taste you’re not familiar with. Soldiers’ Pay may not reach the soaring heights of Faulkner’s later masterpieces, but there is a lot to admire in his debut novel.

Soldiers’ Pay opens with a bunch of drunken soldiers returning home by train after the war. Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe are seated across from the horrifically scarred Donald Mahon and a young woman, Margaret Powers, also finds herself incapable of leaving the injured Mahon to fend for himself. She and Joe prepare to take him home to Georgia, where a flighty and unfaithful fiancée, Cecily Saunders, and worried, oblivious father await him. As they, and other townsfolk, adjust to life touched, broken and irrevocably altered by World War I, Faulkner crafts a commanding meditation on the cycles of sex, death and human relationships.

“It isn’t me that made you lose a night’s sleep. I just happened to be the first woman you ever knew doing something you thought only a man would do. You had nice fixed ideas about women and I upset them. Wasn’t that it?”

The style is undeniably Faulkneresque. The opening chapters have soldier songs interrupted by dreamy descriptions of the landscape, intercut with the drunken dialogue between the characters. It’s an effective technique, intentionally jarring. Characters’ thoughts mix with the words they speak, revealing the contradictions between the two. The style becomes more functional as the story progresses, but does occasionally return to the effectively dramatic style. Admittedly, some passages do read rather awkwardly, perhaps too overwritten and drifting from the focus of the novel. Faulkner convincingly utilizes repetition: the rector father repeating “This was Donald, my son. He is dead.” as he comes to term with the inevitability of his son’s death, and the fixation of certain characters to their memories – Emmy’s recollection of her midnight liaison with Donald, Margaret’s guilt about her dead soldier husband, George’s obsession with Cecily – echoing the inescapable return for these characters to their defining moments. The repetition falters and loses effect as Faulkner chooses to repeat descriptions of landscape, admirable turns of phrase that become tedious with their reiteration.

Like Vardaman in As I Lay Dying, young Robert Saunders’ voice and thoughts express the same youthful inability to comprehend the complexities of the adult world. I am utterly in love with a scene from the novel, relatively inconsequential to the story, of Robert hiding in the bushes listening to Margaret and Joe talk, seeking his revenge for their having spooked him in front of his friends, as he overhears and misinterprets their conversation. Faulkner plays with our awareness of his characters, giving each of them their own unique perspective, slowly revealing their essential core and showing the uselessness of snap judgement. It is quite beautiful. The central relationship between Joe and Margaret is also really tender, very real, complicated by her considered decision to marry Mahon when Cecily cannot go through with marrying the invalid. Their parting scene is, to use a cliched term which doesn’t at all accurately sum up how distraught this scene made me, heart wrenching. Both this and Margaret’s epistolary relationship with Lowe are poignant reflections on the state of flux of human relationships.

In wartime one lives in today. Yesterday is past and tomorrow may never come.

Though showing only hints of Faulkner’s formidable talents, Soldiers’ Pay is a powerful look at the intricacies of human relationships, the breaking of the spirit in the wake of World War I, and the centrality of sex and death to our existence. It manages to be humane, sensitive and with moments of elegantly poetic and perceptive prose. If Soldiers’ Pay is to be considered a minor work in the oeuvre of a master I have a lot to look forward to.

Book Loot: Week Ending June 26th, 2010

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Book Loot: Week Ending June 27th, 2010My orders from The Book Depository have been arriving really quickly lately. Not bad for free shipping.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying – man takes a job in a bookshop but his poverty ends up destroying his creativity and his spirit – sounds like it has the potential to hit a little too close to home. Just kidding, I’m pretty sure my creativity & spirit were broken long before I started working in bookstores. Ah, don’t mind me, it’s just been one of those weeks.

Speaking of bookstores, every single store that sends me an email newsletter seems to be having big end of financial year sales over the next couple of weeks. Lots of very tempting emails about 50%/20% off all stock which are very difficult to ignore. There should be some sort of way to filter such emails, preferably according to my bank balance!

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)Originally published in a serialized form in the late 1920s, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon was a highly influential precursor to the tremendously popular hardboiled fiction. It remains an exciting read with a detached, morally ambiguous detective and all the key elements of a noir mystery to be expected of the genre, but lacks the significant substance to make it truly remarkable.

When his partner is shot while on a stakeout for a new client, detective Sam Spade is drawn into a seedy world of bumbling policemen, beautiful and dangerous women, and treasure hunting criminals – all of them seeking the priceless ornament, the Maltese Falcon. The plot, circuitous as it is, is the supporting player to the noir style that Hammett is renowned for. Like with Chandler’s The Big Sleep, even if the reader becomess lost in the twists and double-crossings it doesn’t pose much of an issue. None of the characters ever seem to really know what is truth, who to believe or what is happening. Hammett is careful to never reveal the inner thoughts of those around Spade, we can only trust Spade’s professional intuition, his simmering violence and distrust of everything.

The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second ‘you.’
‘People lose teeth talking like that.’ Spade’s voice was still amiable though his face had become wooden. ‘If you want to hang around you’ll be polite.’
The boy repeated his two words.

Sam Spade is such a great character, described as “a blond Satan”, his motives are always ambiguous, even in the end, but he is just so effortlessly cool. He knows who to call, when to call, he knows the tricks to get the information he needs. Most importantly, he knows to trust no one. Not even the timid yet beautiful Brigid O’Shaughnessy that seeks his help. Of course, their relationship isn’t strictly business, and there are some tantalizing fade-to-black sex scenes, the saucier details ignored in favour of keeping the plot moving. Even if, at times, it feels like much of the plot involves the characters sitting in offices and apartments, smoking during lengthy discussions.

He shut his eyes and smiled complacently at an inner thought. He opened his eyes and said:  ‘That was seventeen years ago. Well, sir, it took me seventeen years to locate that bird, but I did it. I wanted it, and I’m not a man that’s easily discouraged when he wants something.’ His smile grew broad. ‘I wanted it and I found it. I want it and I’m going to have it.’

It would be impossible for me to review this book without mentioning the iconic film version, the 1941 film directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart – the first major film noir. Reading Joel Cairo’s affected dialogue in the Maltese Falcon, it is impossible to not hear Peter Lorre speaking them, or to picture anyone but Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman. Much of the dialogue was lifted straight from the novel for the screenplay, and it must be one of the more faithful novel-to-film adaptations.

Yet, for all its seedy hardboiled style, whipsmart protagonists, crackling dialogue and swift plotting, I can’t help but feel that The Maltese Falcon is, well, empty. Not quite the fraud the characters in the novel so desperately devote themselves to, but similarly not worth as much as we’re led to believe. A successful innovator of the style, and a cleverly plotted thriller but lacking anything beyond that to really give it any weight. It just does not have the psychological depth to push it beyond being a captivating story. Perhaps this can be attributed to the lack of insight into any of the characters, we are blind to their motives – and pure greed seems too simple an answer – and their futile and ruthless search for something which may not even exist isn’t explored in any great depth. Style is the clear winner in The Maltese Falcon, and Dashiell Hammett is a skilled master of the genre.

Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard (2006)

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Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard (2006)J.G. Ballard’s ideas and nightmarish vision of an all too possible future are often stronger than his characters or plotting. Usually, this would present a problem but as the concepts explored in Kingdom Come still seem so prescient, it is easy to forgive any comparatively minor faults of the narrative. When the novel opens up with a line as commanding as: “The suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world” you are instantly aware of Ballard’s insight into the psychopathology of the suburbs, and what, under extreme circumstances, they could be capable of.

Richard Pearson is returning to the small town Brooklands where his father has been killed by a shooter on the rampage in a shopping centre, the Metro-Centre. As he uneasily descends from London into the outer towns, he sees their culture represented by symbols of consumerism rather than community – no history, no tradition – in part created by advertisers like himself. There are hints of a nationalism in the display of St. George flags, a pride that becomes more dangerous and unsettling as he witnesses Muslim families being evicted from their homes without protest. Arriving in Brooklands, he is unconvinced by the release of the suspected shooter and the witness statements from local authority figures. As he delves deeper into the mystery surrounding his father’s death, he uncovers a local fervour for consumerism and the Metro-Centre that borders on the neo-fascist. Vicious attacks of street violence against minority communities are seemingly orchestrated by prominent authority figures, and Richard is unsure who to trust and the motives of these people, yet determined to discover the truth about his father’s mysterious death.

Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some peculiar reason, they call it shopping. But it’s really the purest kind of politics.

The characters, other than Richard, do seem to blur together. They appear as mere mouthpieces for Ballard’s ideas about the links between consumerism and fascism, Richard is involved in long conversations about the state of society – yet somehow, they work to get Ballard’s point across. Perhaps the narrative itself is also tentatively built around these ideas, but it captures the basic concepts in a way that makes them recognizable and relevant. As Richard befriends the local cable channel figurehead, David Cruise, he begins to use him to express his own ideas about leadership through subtle masochism of the masses. It is here, though Richard refuses to acknowledge his part in it, that the feverish love for the Metro-Centre truly turns primal, even totemistic. What is at heart a social experiment for an advertiser becomes a fascist state driven by consumerism, emotion and violence. Richard seems surprised that his messages of irony have been taken seriously as slogans for a political movement, but he himself was aware of the unquestioning devotion of the Metro-Centre shoppers.

‘Why not? We’re totally degenerate. We lack spine, and any faith in ourselves. We have a tabloid world-view, but no dreams or ideals. We have to be teased with the promise of deviant sex. [...] We’re worth nothing, but we worship our barcodes. We’re the most advanced society our planet has ever seen, but real decadence is far out of our reach. We’re so desperate we have to rely on people like you to spin a new set of fairy tales, cosy little fantasies of alienation and guilt [...]‘

After an attempted assassination attempt on David Cruise’s life, the supporters, authorities and Richard are barracaded in the Metro-Centre for months. Trapped in the revered centre, the religious instinct takes over the shoppers: altars to the sick and the dying, no looting of the worshipped consumer goods, an unofficial power structure begins to establish and finally destroy itself. This section is much shorter compared to the build up, more time spent locked inside the Metro-Centre could have heightened the anxiety, and the inescapable violence.

Despite the possibly intentional blankness of the characters, Ballard extrapolates upon a consumerist culture to create a bleak image of the future that is frighteningly possible, using the motifs and messages we are all familiar with and turning them into something unsettling and disturbing. For a novel written in 2006 Kingdom Come is conspicuously lacking any reference to internet or surveillance technology, though the damning condemnation of our buy any/every thing culture remains startlingly relevant.

Book Loot: Week Ending June 20th, 2010

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Monkey See Monkey ReadMy shelves, floor, bedside table & desk can let out a sigh of relief, there were no new book acquisitions this week.

I did, when digging through our review proof corner during a quiet moment at work, find a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s upcoming Freedom and took it home with me. I was only flicking through it – I’m a pretty strict one book at a time kind of woman – and ending up reading the first 30 pages. And those 30 pages were really good. Have I told you the story about how I found a torn ten dollar note in a $3 copy of The Corrections at Clunes this year? Everyone laughed when I told them you could take fragments of notes to the bank and they would exchange it for the equivalent amount of cash, but I was right. So really, I bought The Corrections and made a profit. And I’m very much looking forward to reading Freedom.

The reading monkey to the left there is a present my Dad bought for me a few weeks ago because it reminded him of me (!). Look at how into his book he is.

This week’s Book Loot links would be a lot longer if I hadn’t been so distracted by vuvuzelas and vuvuzela internet memes during the week:

Sweet Sorrow: A Beginner’s Guide to Death by Mark Wakely (2008)

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Sweet Sorrow: A Beginner's Guide to Death by Mark Wakely (2008)Here comes morbid Jess again, harping on about death. I only picked up Mark Wakely’s Sweet Sorrow: A Beginner’s Guide to Death because the library catalogue suggested it to me when I was looking for something else (although along similar lines, Kenneth McKenzie & Todd Harra’s Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt. Now looking at the Book Depository I realize it hasn’t even been released yet, so it must’ve been one of the titles I came across when going through new release lists at work.) I thought I was in for something appealing with Sweet Sorrow when I saw the epigraph was from a Philip Larkin poem, but this is a brief introductory look at the death care industry and its aims are too broad to explore any of these endlessly fascinating issues in detail. However, if you’re not familiar with what goes on at a funeral home, a morgue or a palliative care unit, Sweet Sorrow is a gentle guide through these industries that care for us before, during and after death.

Motivated by a growing need to confront his own anxieties about death, Mark Wakely sets out to investigate the rituals surrounding mortality. He states from the very beginning that Sweet Sorrow is intended to be read as a personal enquiry rather than a comprehensive report. Between chapters are fictional excerpts about a woman losing her father which I thought I would find grating and unnecessary but added an emotional dimension to Wakely’s investigation. Written in a conversational tone, Wakely guides the reader in an informative, considerate and sensitive manner.

Did you know that until the 1940s and 1950s most people died at home? Compare that to now where 80% of Australians can expect to die in hospital, thus making a look into the palliative care industry necessary. Here he describes the physical deterioration of death, the psychological aspects of a patient’s inevitable death, the impact on families and the ways palliative and hospital staff cope with the constant confrontation with death. Wakely visits a morgue to learn about how autopsies are conducted – for those concerned, this is the most visceral the book gets – and what circumstances require an autopsy. Wakely’s visit to a coffin factory is interesting, seeing how they’re made and the different options available, including decorative designs, custom designed coffins and environmentally friendly coffins. Say, bookworms, how about a bookcase that can be converted into a coffin?:

Just when I was reassuring myself that there would be no space to store a coffin in the small apartment where I live, along comes British designer William Warren with yet another twist to the story of coffin-making. The furniture designer has created a shelving system called ‘Shelves for Life’, a set of floor-standing plywood bookshelves that come apart and can be reconfigured into a coffin. William wrote to me about his design:
“The Shelves for Life are part possession, part preparation. They are not a coffin yet; they simply have the potential to be a coffin in the future. We’re all going to die and we will all need a coffin, so why not make your coffin something you’ve owned and loved for years and save your bereaved family having to choose one for you at an already difficult time?”

Visiting funeral homes Wakely learns about the differences between independent and conglomerate funeral companies, outlines how and why an embalming procedure is completed, and how people express their grief. Other funerary rituals that are discussed are the delivery of the eulogy, choice of flower arrangements and the most popular songs played at funerals – Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” being one of the most popular here in Australia, although Monty Python’s version of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is another popular choice. (Always wanted The Rolling Stones’ “Shine a Light” myself.) The choice between burial and cremation is also explored, however briefly.

It is this brevity that makes Sweet Sorrow an ideal choice for a reader wanting a basic and gentle introduction to the rituals and routines surrounding death in the Western world, particularly in Australia. I would have liked to see more about how different cultures and religions view and treat death but Sweet Sorrow is firmly situated in the traditions of the Western world. For those wanting something more in depth Sweet Sorrow provides a broad overview of our social and cultural rituals but ultimately offers nothing that couldn’t be learned from watching a couple of seasons of Six Feet Under.

Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk (2010)

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Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk (2010)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.