Reviewed: "Snuff" by Chuck Palahniuk
Full-frontal Palahniuk
Before discussing Palahniuk's ninth novel, "Snuff," it's important to note that while the themes and style of his books are always interesting, sometimes brilliant, sometimes inane and always rightfully controversial, his work is so unendingly gross and explicit that gentle, easily offended souls should be forewarned.
That said, "Snuff" is a spare and effective one-act play; a refreshingly simple tale told start to finish by a writer who often piles on the mind games and reverse chronologies. "Snuff" is not only a comment on the utter unsexiness of the porn industry; it also manages to imply that any culture that produces such an unappealing industry must also be awash in unsexy, mechanical and pointless copulation.
"Snuff" finds aging porn star Cassie Wright choosing to exit her profession by starring in a movie in which she performs sex acts with 600 men consecutively. Her aim is to set the record while setting the bar so high (sort of like Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game) that her legacy will be sealed. Almost the entirety of "Snuff" takes place in the waiting area outside of the soundstage where the 600 men are lined up, cattle-style, with their numbers Magic-Markered onto their arms. Cassie's assistant, Sheila, appears periodically to call three numbers at a time to come through the door to perform. The story is told in the shifting points of view of Sheila, Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and, the caboose, Mr. 600.
At first it seems the three are random numbers, but soon we learn they have deep connections to one another and the day's events. Mr. 72 believes himself to be one of the mythical "porn babies" conceived by Cassie while working; Mr. 137 is a disgraced TV star with nothing to lose and something to prove; and Mr. 600 is the male version of Cassie, an aging porn stud looking for a momentous exit to a storied career.
As usual, Palahniuk's uncomfortably real humans are mercilessly satired. One of the few passages that are printable here concerns the junk food laid out for the waiting performers -- some popping Viagra, some absent-mindedly shaving stray body hair, most dyed brown with fake tan lotion -- to sustain themselves: "Six hundred of us waiting in one room, we're breathing the same air for the third or fourth time. Almost no oxygen left, just the sweet stink of hair spray. Stetson cologne. Old Spice. Polo. The sour smoke of marijuana from little one-hitter pipes. Dudes stand at the buffet, scarfing down the candy smell of powdered doughnuts, chili-cheese nachos, peanut butter. Dudes swallowing and farting at the same time. Belching up gas bubbles of black coffee from their guts. Breathing out through wads of Juicy Fruit gum. Chewed mouthfuls of pink bubble gum or buttered popcorn."
The streamlined structure of "Snuff" allows for Palahniuk to concentrate on his trademark eye for the absurd and also to deftly shift back and forth between morality tale and satire. Even the premise is refreshingly simple: The concept of the novel is so utterly obscene that Palahniuk needn't invent outrageous events in order to wallow within his own profane comfort zone. But perhaps the most satisfying aspect of "Snuff" is how Palahniuk, after moving toward melodrama to address whether Cassie can physically survive such an undertaking, abruptly pulls out the rug for an ending that reminds us why he is the reigning king of satire.
Former Minnesotan Cherie Parker works at Idle Time Books in Washington, D.C. She blogs at thelitlife.com.
Will I Get Beaten Up at a Chuck Palahniuk Reading?
I can't believe the Palahniuk reading is $30. Sure, I can write it off as a work expense, but if Liam (alter-ego: Crazy Bookstore Guy) comes with me, he'll have to eat the cost. Maybe I can write a ticket off for him, too, seeing as conventional wisdom (or urban legends?) suggest the possibility of a mass testosterone surge.
One More Reason to Skip Barnes and Noble
Book Review--"The Outlander" by Gil Adamson
Woman on the run
Gil Adamson starts her debut novel in madness and then pushes the reader headfirst into the torrid Canadian wilderness of 1903. Adamson rolls out luxuriant prose in "The Outlander," dunking in the rivers and rolling in the moss under the forest canopy, all the while chasing her heroine, known for most of the novel simply as "the widow," farther from the scene of her crime and further into the arms of the unforgiving outdoors.
These twin hammers -- insanity and a Cormac McCarthy/Ernest Hemingway style of moving through the harsh natural world -- help make "The Outlander" a heady, adventurous novel. Although the widow remains frustratingly elusive to the reader, Adamson plants a number of charming and chilling characters in the woman's path. Ultimately, "The Outlander" has just enough soul to make the novel satisfying and just enough harshness to make it satisfyingly unsettling.
The widow, Mary Boulton, is fresh from killing her husband when we meet her, but Adamson refrains from laying out the grim details. Instead, she focuses on Mary's flight from justice, doling out details of the killing in teaspoonfuls of flashbacks. It would have been emotionally easy for Adamson to immediately introduce the widow as an abused wife who killed her husband in self-defense, but it soon becomes clear that Adamson is describing a different "women's issue": post-partum psychosis. During her flight, Mary hallucinates haunting people and images, but her mind clears slowly throughout the story, allowing the reader to experience her recovery in a very tangible way.
As the madness wanes, the story moves from dark tragedy to adventure. Mary is alone in the wild and Adamson's prose shimmers: "It was a bright, soft morning. In the sun, the air was warm enough for bare skin, while under the trees the mare's breath blew into vapour. An arctic chill crept the boundaries of each shadow and gusted from the deeps of the woods. The widow rested her feet in front of her and stared down at the white and blue toes."
The starving, nearly dead widow is discovered by William Moreland (based on a real person), a fellow outcast from the civilized world with whom Mary recovers and has a brief, torrid, romance-novelesque relationship. But the Ridgerunner, as Moreland is known, leaves her one day, and Mary is again at the mercy of the forest. Luck and the good graces of an Indian named Henry bring Mary into the town of Frank, a mining village, where she keeps house and chaste company with the warm-hearted Reverend Bonnycastle. Gathering strength both mental and physical, the widow weaves herself into the town's daily life.
But there remains the slow dawning of what she has done, not to mention her husband's creepy twin brothers (giant redheads), who are tracking her like unblinking robots bent on retribution. Before "The Outlander" concludes, the widow will face her brothers-in-law, a catastrophic disaster, the tent- kindled and unfinished passion with the Ridgerunner, and the morbid gravity of womanness as it is expressed in childbirth.
Although this is Canadian writer Adamson's first novel, she has published a wealth of poetry and short stories, and her experience is obvious in the breadth, maturity and scale of "The Outlander." This novel has been rightly compared to the works of McCarthy and Charles Frazier, but the undeniable presence of the female in body and spirit runs through every sentence. Mary is at times a cipher, known mostly through what she has suffered and how she reacts to the people she meets. And though the Ridgerunner is believably sweet and compelling, his appearance, disappearance and reappearance in Mary's life feel a tad contrived for a novel that is otherwise lacking in conventions -- romantic or otherwise.
As a whole, "The Outlander" is a masterwork of precision-crafted prose married to an innovative chronicle of recovered sanity. It's a deep, brilliant and textured work. And while it cribs from the Western-loving boys, it's a story that could be told only by a woman.
Former Minnesotan Cherie Parker works at Idle Time Books in Washington, D.C. She blogs at thelitlife.com.
© 2008 Star Tribune. All rights reserved.
Let Me Now Exorcise the Dirty Words--Part Two
I'm studying the list as a copy editing primer of when and when not to use a hyphen.
Let Me Now Exorcise the Dirty Words--Part One
Am I not making myself clear, though? I have to communicate the meaning and effectiveness of "Snuff" without saying that every page describes the mechanics of ejaculation. And there's a man-hating production assistant who uses about fifty synonyms for "pud-puller" to describe the brainless, pathetic, bottle-tan-smeared men milling around waiting for the turn in the spotlight. (In part two of this post--when I find "Snuff" from under the mountain of weekend laundry from a trip to New York--I'll list as many of those synonyms as I can bear to type) The special twist to the review is that I need to describe this book in such a way that gentle-souled grandmothers will not be confused by my thumbs-up and run out and buy it.
Book Preview--"The Outlander" by Gil Adamson
In short, if you like Ondaatje, you'll like "The Outlander".
The sprawling Canadian wilderness of a hundred years ago is as good a place as any to set a story about a woman with a shitty husband who goes apeshit with post-partum psychosis and Adamson has a nice way of making you feel the craziness as well as the eventual climb back to sanity. But how I much I will like this novel will depend on how Adamson concludes the chase by the twin pursuers of justice and karma that are on our heroine's trail. I will be somehow disappointed if it is Ondaatje-style (foregone, tidy, and devastating). I hope the narrative is driving toward something unexpected.
We shall see. Stay tuned.
Book Preview--"Lady Lazarus" by Andrew Foster Altschul
*Unnecessary footnoted Harcourt ass-kissing: For whatever reason--maybe the staff right now shares my tastes, who knows--Harcourt's "Harcourt Trade" division has been putting out consistently good books for the couple of years I've been following them. Tony D' Souza and Christopher Coake were both debut authors I picked out randomly from the Harcourt catalog and their work remains on my list of personal faves. I also have to further kiss ass** to say that Harcourt books come out solidly edited with gorgeous covers.
**It's important to remember that kissing publishers' asses results in no personal gain for me--book publicists send even the crankiest reviewer everything they want with good manners and alacrity--so you know I must really mean what I'm saying here.
Christopher Hitchen's Banana and...We're Out
Earlier, neighborhood resident Christopher Hitchens was in with a teenage girl I assume is his daughter. I was put on edge by his presence, not because of any pathetic media-celebrity-worship, but because I suddenly worried about becoming fodder for one of his upcoming rants. Maybe "the decline of intellectualism in bookstores" or "you can't get decent customer service in DC anymore" or, perhaps, "white women who look like correctional officers". Any fear of an essay-inducing faux-paus on my part evaporated, however, when he handed me the spent peel from the banana he'd been eating. "Can you throw this away?" He said. "I don't want to litter." There's a big garbage can on the sidewalk outside the store; I think he had at least one other choice beyond handing me his compost or dropping it on the carpeting.
Well, that does it for bookstore tales; tonight is my last shift here. I put in my notice two weeks ago because, as entertaining as this place is, I just don't have enough time to work a low-paying part-time job just for the therapy. I'll miss my book-geek coworkers and the neighborhood nutcases who have given me so many evenings' entertainment. But, on to the next thing...