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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Feature [published November 2002] Chuck Palahniuk: “I Want To Have Your Abortion” Jayne Margetts on the writing of Chuck Palahniuk When Brett Easton Ellis unleashed his novel, American Psycho, with its beautiful 18+ logo scripted on a lurid, Picasso-esque cover, my mind went into overdrive. Ellis’ literary missile was unlike anything written before. Its descriptive prose bled psychosis, its painstaking attention to detail as a Guide Book On How To Become A Serial Killer could only have come from the author pawing over endless (and actual) FBI case files – even if his obsession with detailing designer outfits drove me to insanity. But this man captured the 80s generation with its greed, Darwinian Manifesto and scent of Wall Street’s cold-hearted brutality. Irvine Welsh carved a new language into our consciousness with his ode to heroin, bleak council estates and a dash of nihilism in 1993 with Trainspotting. Clawing through those initial pages with their illegible scrawl and phonetically terrestrial sounds required the tenacity of a saint. Then there was sci-fi maverick, Jeff Noon, much less the enfant terrible than his Scottish cousin. Sci-fi had suddenly become cool again and it was less attributable to the Asimov school-of-thought than a quote concocted BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and within The Mail On Sunday laboratory: “Jeff Noon is the Philip K. Dick for the 90s”, it roared. Noon’s third novel, Automated Alice, was as much a tribute to Lewis Carroll’s original, opiated Alice In Wonderland dream, as it was a journey into Cyberpunk psychedelia gone haywire in contemporary Manchester. Nymphomation (released a year later) polluted the reader’s waking hours with the notion of burbflies, automated advertisements chanting their slogans and a slow, synthetic, evolutionary genocide. The aforementioned authors have all created a new language, so to speak. Sprouted buzzwords like the historians of old and chronicled the social decay of humanity along the way. Ellis paired savage with savvy; Welsh, lower-class narcissism with narcotic decay; and Noon, corporatisation with soulless human existence. They all hacked into the literary, global cog, shunned the sweet smelling pungency of sentimental verse and offered up their own versions of the darker edge of the sword. And then there’s Chuck Palahniuk. Critic Roger Ebert crowned him the godfather of 394 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com “Macho Porn”, while New York Newsday gushed that Palahniuk’s voice “rearranged Vonnegut’s sly humour, DeLillo’s mordant social analysis with Pynchon’s antic surrealism”. In short, the new kid on the block with his swag of arrogance titled Fight Club (1995) struck a subliminal chord. This was an author who was much less concerned with sprouting flowery prose and more preoccupied with stark revelations. Fight Club painted a portrait of humanity drained of colour. It was gritty and hard-boiled, bleak but overflowing with wisdom. Tyler Durden, his protagonist, was a one-man army. He was the insomnia inside us all. The dull, dull thud of an eternal techno beat. A jackhammer spraying cynicism like a sniper on the loose. Out of control! Fight Club finally found its way onto the big-screen (like Ellis’ American Psycho) in 1999, and was directed by the controversial David Fincher (Alien 3, The Game, Seven), and starred Ed Norton and Brad Pitt. The film delivered a fatal blow to the solar plexus. With a deadpan sneer and caustic ambience it hit a raw nerve. Its message? WE HAD ALL BECOME AUTOMATED ZOMBIES. We were now indistinguishable from the dead. ‘Hey, the living dead are populating an Ikea furnished Metropolis.’ Albert Camus had suddenly found a worthy successor. The shock value of Fight Club gave an insight into the deviant corners of Palahniuk’s mind. He would BUY Chuck Palahniuk books online from and continue to shock a readership by churning out a novel every couple of years. Furthermore, if characters getting their kicks by frequenting the local Testicular Cancer Survivors group wasn’t enough to shock a readership ill-prepared for such irreverence, then his next evangelical novel, Survivor (1999) would. Admittedly, his second novel was less punchy, less guttural than the first, but it was truly original in its storyline. So here was yet another misfit, about to hold society to ransom again. Meet Tender Branson, surviving member of a Death Cult hijacking an empty Boeing 747 for the purpose of recording his sordid tale into the jumbo’s black box recorder. This was Reverend Jim Jones on ecstasy with a global score to settle. This was a day-trip into the darker corners of immortality and isolation with a slab of comic humour to boot. Male testosterone took a back seat in 2000 when Palahniuk released Invisible Monsters. It was a grand departure from his previous novels in that it had a female (a severely dysfunctional one, naturally) at its helm. Brandy Alexander was the Catwalk Queen. She had it all. A face that could launch a thousand ships and adored by everyone. But a horrendous car ‘accident’ changes all of that. From beauty queen to hideously disfigured freak, Brandy personifies our preoccupation with skin-deep vanity and proves that hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn. The majority of Palahniuk’s protagonists are mad- 395 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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