This dude’s a storyteller
Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock
Sunday, Nov. 7, 2004: This is a book report on "Diary" by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s not a book review, which I do occasionally for pay. So, it’s a report, like back in school, except written by someone who thinks a lot about reading and writing.
Just read the last 20 pages of "Diary" by Chuck Palahniuk (a blog opening). I liked it a lot. I know there are faults, but I can’t quite pinpoint them at the moment. It certainly is a page-turner. I had been taking it in as a book on CD while commuting, but I wanted to finish it this weekend badly enough to pick up the conventional book.
Chuck and his publisher were right to get a blurb from Ira Levin. At first I thought it would be a "Rosemary’s Baby," but it’s nothing like that modern urban gothic classic chiller, except for being a successfully suspenseful tale of the supernatural (more ghost story or cursed land shake-out than satanic parable). Yet it’s also a satire, actually a double satire, meaning of two targets. These should be separated from another novelistic layer, social commentary, because a true satire tells its message totally opposite and utterly straightforward. Chuck gets the satires true, and the social commentary dead-on yet not repetitive (quite a trick in the long form of a book as opposed to an essay), to my taste.
This needs elaboration. (What won’t get elaboration is the plot; please go to Amazon or something for that; this is already fixing to be long.)
Satire 1 is about greed, over and above the consumerism that Chuck mocks directly in the social commentary layer. Protagonist Misty in her diary — and how did she write when more drugged than usual and with her eyes taped shut? — mocks the dieting modern woman and the overall patronizing attitude of hotel and restaurant customers.
Greed is behind the book’s overall plot of reincarnation, dynasty, sacrifice (is self-sacrifice always martyrdom?) and murder (or is that "conventional" human sacrifice, rather gory recognition of the costs of what some call the greater social good?). Because of course human nature cannot change, or it wouldn’t be human nature. This is pessimistic, but satire is pessimistic, though if successfully morbidly cheerfully so. You — Chuck or me or anyone — wouldn’t bother to write satire if you didn’t think it would influence others (true pessimism), but then aren’t we screwed anyway when it comes to human nature?
Satire 2 is about artistic creativity — Yours, divine, innate, pre-ordained? All these, and more. This novel’s subtitle is "Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?" That often is asked by non-artists of artists. It’s also asked by new or young or struggling artists of their betters.
Misty in her diary of increasing madness and excruciating passivity — but not that passive or she wouldn’t recognize the motives of others or dare write about them (and this is where Palahniuk’s direct social criticism appears as well) also charts her growth and increasingly sophisticated self-doubts as an artist. Does the last show that she’s a true artist with true modestly, or a lousy artist being honest with herself?
At the beginning and very end of the book, Chuck addresses the creative worker’s inspiration and toil that begins (and in most of us ends) in the stereotypical child’s picture of a house, always with clouds, chimney, window and door. Children obsess on getting the details right. A realistic, true adult creator knows the joy of the work on good days and the frustration of committing to paper, canvas, loom or monitor anything on all the other days. And that good work and lousy work can come from either (so if you create every day you even the odds of producing decent work).
My guess is that the subtitle was Chuck’s starting point for his first draft. Maybe he had been asked that question one time too many. "Diary" gives all the shades of all the answers, taken to an absurd yet logical plateau. That is, a tale that’s as close to believable as a ghost story can be in the 21st century.
Heck, the main character even grows and changes, the hallmark of modern literature, not moved mechanically through a thriller/chiller plot, though "Diary" would have been nearly as fun as a potboiler, too.
Chuck not only therefore is technically adept but also a true artist. His sentences flow; they’re lyrical. Yet they stay true to the characters and story. Chuck uses his ear for the music of the words: smooth mostly for the singsong of the airheaded or drunk and gloomy (thwarted neo-feminist?) Misty, yet sometimes staccato when life surprises her.
This is why "Diary" is worthwhile. And why I no longer care if Chuck acts or is an asshole in interviews or otherwise. He’s a Writer.
Postscript. I told my wife all this, as she had finished "Diary" a day before me (I got the book for her on the basis of my hearing half of the Disc 1) and we were discussing it. She liked the story and thought Misty was realistic, though overall the book is not her preferred style. She wondered if for me a truly good novel needed all these layers to be judged quality. I said not at all. This is the second-best novel I’ve read this year. The first is "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" by Michael Chabon, which though much longer than "Diary" is a straightforward, focused narrative. "K&C" is pure story, though complex being about those two men. And it’s a great book, moving, and months later I think about the tales it told. -30-
