600, most of the action takes place in a vast hall where hundreds of men in their underpants plow through junk food and Viagra. Told primarily from the perspective of three participants, Mr. Whatever point Palahniuk meant to make seems to have been lost in a self-induced miasma of meaninglessness onanism of a more dispiriting sort. But his latest novel, “Snuff,” the dry-as-dust tale of people making a documentary about a woman who wants to break (as the promotional copy delicately puts it) “the world record for serial fornication,” is not so much shallow as bitter. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer.Ĭhuck Palahniuk has his uses as a shock jock: 73 people (according to him) have fainted during public readings of his short story “Guts.” A riotous account of some disastrous underwater onanism involving a swimming-pool drain, that story excellently delineates the shallowness of American life. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts.
The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality.
Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk.
0 kommentar(er)
