Palahniuk's STRANGER THAN FICTION

         

          In his essay “Monkey See, Monkey Do”, Chuck Palahniuk confesses (as he does in many essays) the source of his anti-establishment inspiration for his first novel, Fight Club. Waiter friends pissing or blowing their noses into customers’ food. Projectionist friends splicing pornography into feature films. Literary fans fighting temptation to open emergency doors on in-flight airplanes. Pyromaniacs in Portland filling tennis balls with matchheads, binding them in tape, and leaving them on the street or sidewalks for unsuspecting pedestrians to stumble upon. “So far, a man’s lost a foot; a dog, its head.” Palahniuk, whose fiction appears sympathetic to such antics, follows his listing of extremist behaviors with a challenge to readers: “All of this reaction, as if we can protect ourselves against everything.” Waiters raging against wealth and luxury. Projectionists revolting against family dynamics. Passengers ravaged by the thought of killing them all. Assholes in Portland simply bent on destruction. Palahniuk calls them out, calls us all out, and asks us what we’re so afraid of. “What’s coming is a million new reasons not to live your life. You can deny your possibility to succeed and blame it on something else. You can fight against everything . . . you pretend keeps you down.” It’s an unexpected sentiment from the man who blew up Portland’s skyline in the end.

          This was an unexpected sentiment to encounter until I read more of Palahniuk. And what I’ve learned about Palahniuk is that he writes to abate two primary fears: the first being a fear of death. Half the essays in Stranger In Fiction amplify Palahniuk’s carpe diembattle-cry. Pieces like “Brinkmanship”, another listing style story of family illness and personal tragedy, carries an apology: “I’m sorry if this seems a little rushed and desperate. It is.” In “You Are Here”, the most poignant piece in the collection, Palahniuk speaks to would-be writers, challenging them to live lives worth writing about: “Instead of modeling our lives after brave, smart fictional characters – maybe we’ll lead brave, smart lives to base our own fictional characters on.” In his interview with Marilyn Manson, “Reading Yourself”, Manson attempts to read his own Tarot cards, beginning with a possible lack of wisdom and ending with, what Manson hopes, is happiness and great achievement. Palaniuk writes transparently, infusing even his oddest stories - such as “My Life As A Dog”, which tells of Palahniuk and a friend skirting a crowded Portland shopping center in dog costumes – with a sense of urgency, as if the bottom is about to drop out at any minute, our lives instantly swallowed by time, capturing us in our most honest, telling behaviors.  

          Palahniuk’s second fear is named immediately in the introduction: “all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.” His essays are no exception. Whether Palahniuk is reporting combine racing in Washington (“Demolition”), submarine life (“The People Can”), Olympic wrestling tryouts (“Where Meat Comes From”), castle building (“Confessions in Stone”), or the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival (“Testy Festy”), Palahniuk assures readers, “Every story in this book is about being with other people. Me being with people. Or people being together.” Palahniuk writes extensively about his attempts to combat the solitude of writing with community game nights, writers’ workshops, and volunteer work. He speaks passionately about close friends, and his tones drop regretfully when recalling past relationships. In a personal interview (“In Her Own Words”), Juliette Lewis walks Palahniuk through a list of questions she wrote to learn more about a friend, only to admit “[t]hese questions are more telling about me than anything I could write in a diary.” The same can be said of Palahniuk’s story telling: readers learn more about the writer than the subject if they read closely enough.

         And it’s in this close reading that one might notice, possibly, Palahniuk’s greatest fear. The final essays of Stranger Than Fiction explore, recall, and re-retell the circumstances surrounding his father’s death as well as Palahniuk’s fear of not winning his father’s approval. Palahniuk’s tone while confessing his excessive steroid use (“Frontiers”) is gravely apologetic to his father. In a story about haunted houses (“The Lady”), Palahniuk strikes out at his dead father for visiting the entire family in dreams the night he died, everybody except Chuck. In the closing essay, an uneven piece about the success of Fight Club the film (“Consolation Prizes”), Palahniuk fondly remembers his final conversations with his father and walks readers through pivotal moments in his father’s life. It’s a bitterly sad piece, but Palahniuk declares, half way through his final essay, that “[e]verything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away.”         

          If Palahniuk’s laughing at anything in his fiction, even his nonfiction, he’s laughing at fear. Charging forward with new titles and new ideas, he’s laughing at death. Openly cherishing (in words at least) friendships and professional connections, he laughs at loneliness. And it appears that in his own odd way he’s laughing at himself. The consummate orphan. The fatherless son clawing the walls for one last message of “good job, kid.” This is the one thing Palahniuk can’t have, the one thing he can’t change, so he writes it over and over and over, keeping those wounds fresh as blistered reminders to tend to life and love while you still can. “It’s hard to call any of my novels fiction,” he says in the introduction. With a writer as transparent as Palahniuk, the reading of his novels blurs our own boundaries between fictions and nonfictions. And that might be a sign of a writer worth reading: one who calls us into and out of silences with hunger for more of each.