Getting Down with Palahniuk

I picked up a collection of Chuck Palahniuk's essays recently. I didn't know anything about his work, but the buzz in the back of my head was that he's good. Guys like him, I suspected. He wrote Fight Club, which became a movie that became a hit of sorts.

In Stranger Than Fiction, Palahniuk tells the story about the summer he injected himself with anabolic steroids and (for a minute) felt himself to be a super man; the story about his experience on a navy boat where being gay is an invisible elephant; the story about tractors ramming each other mercilessly; and the one about wrestlers all but killing themselves and each other. And that crazy Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, where people get naked and weird. In one story, disquieting psychic friends see through to crisis moments in Palahniuk's and his friends' pasts, but he dismisses their perceptions. There are portraits too of actor Juliette Lewis and others who think they know who they are, but who remain shadowy, in psychic distress.

Like Palahniuk himself.

Chuck Palahniuk's background is ragingly dark. His grandfather shot his wife and would have killed his son, Chuck's father, if he'd seen him, but he was hiding under the bed. The grandfather shot his wife then himself. Chuck's father married and divorced Chuck's mother only to wind up getting killed years later, along with his girlfriend, by her ex. Palahniuk's memories of his father are like a horror show.

He's a brooding minimalist who skims over the surface of things, scrubbing an appearance fairly well with his words, calling it truth. But he's not interested in the truth of truth, but in being cynical and hard, much in the way Hemingway was, or got. He's interested in being manly too, but not so manly that it betrays something too deep in himself. Even though he gives the impression of daring and curiosity on his adventures, he's actually pretty cautious and doesn't dig so deep, but lingers on the periphery charting the course of a ball or a fist or rickocheting time until (you get the impression) he gets the feeling of a thing being done, and closes with a thoughtful epiphany.

The thing is, I don't care if he's good. I can sniff out a good truth teller and a good liar and he's neither, and for me, you have to be one or the other to be a good storyteller. He sees things only partway, offering up only glimpses of himself, doing the best that he can to avoid what a thing is completely, and perhaps who he is too. Even if a great writer never gives details about himself or herself, you know who they are at heart in their work, well enough to like or despise them. I come away with details but no sense of the man save as a shadow like the Hulk.

Anyway, he revels in these worlds of men. There's the story about the summer he injected himself with anabolic steroids and (for a minute) felt himself to be a super man; the story about his experience on a navy boat where being gay is an invisible elephant; the story about tractors ramming each other mercilessly across a vast field; and the one about wrestlers all but killing themselves and each other. And that crazy Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, where people get naked and weird. In one story, disquieting psychic friends see through to crisis moments in Palahniuk's and his friends' pasts, but he dismisses their perceptions. There are portraits too, of actor Juliette Lewis and others who think they know who they are, but who remain shadowy, in psychic distress.

Like Palahniuk.