Dear Chuck Palahniuk,
There is a paragraph very near the beginning of your newest novel,
Snuff, that really identifies the problem I have with your
writing: “You’re on the toilet. You’re not thinking, and you smear shit
on the back of your hanging-down wrinkled ball skin. The more you try
to wipe it clean, the skin stretches and the mess keeps getting bigger.
The thin layer of shit spreads into the hair and down the
thighs.”
I’ll get back to that quote, but listen: I liked your first three
novels quite a bit—Survivor, Fight Club, and
Invisible Monsters, I thought, made kind of a trilogy of
ridiculous, and somehow bighearted, American nihilism—and
while your next novel, Choke, was a misfire akin to other
novelists’ sophomore slump, you were clearly trying to struggle free
from the cynicism that had enveloped your work. You were trying to
grow.
So what was it that irrevocably stunted your growth as a writer? Why
did you start releasing horrible novels with one-word
titles—Haunted, Lullaby, Diary—every
year like clockwork? Those three, the second Palahniuk trilogy, were
generic gross-out thrillers, and they cemented your reputation as
the Jean-Claude Van Damme of novelists; you were a victim of
your own formula.
The last novel, Rant, was as perfunctory as an Elvis movie.
The plot—something to do with car crashes causing people to time
travel—was laughable, and everything that made your first books
so exhilarating was by now the equivalent of a literary
Starbucks. To write a Palahniuk novel, one just needs a taboo
subject, a cast of five main characters who are secretly tied to one
another far beyond the reach of reasonable coincidence, and then a
string of trivia about an obscure topic like how to clean bodily fluids
off of household items.
And here comes Snuff, about five people filming a
gangbang who are tied together through secret connections. There’s
lots of information about porn films. There’s a litany of trivia about
Hollywood actors who nearly died while filming their roles. And there’s
a climax so intentionally outrageous that it couldn’t have been written
with a straight face. No doubt, people will love it because it
is—like Mountain Dew and Dane Cook and various other safe and
overpackaged products—extreme.
But on your website, you’ve already announced your 2009 novel,
called Pygmy, and I can practically read it right now, and
it’s boring me to death. You need to stop producing a sloppy
novel a year. Take an extra year or two to catch your breath. As it is
right now, you’re ruthlessly plumbing the depths of your own
asshole for ideas.
Sincerely,
Paul Constant
Chuck Palahniuk reads Thurs May 29, Town Hall, 7:30 pm,
free.