Chuck Palahniuk Sucks

Posted at 3:12 PM Dec 04, 2008

By Andy Beckerman



Why must we be punished for our love? What crimes are these? The world rejects the blissful critic and instead demands biomechanical contraptions dripping acid-like acrimony. As it is our duty to kvetch instead of kvell, we are forced by the stinky dick of Fate herself to dwell on the dreary, to pull up a loose floorboard and find beneath it a withered mappa mundi detailing shitty celebs and cultural albatrosses, or even to create our own, cartographers of pestilent and venal art.

And thus Chuck. Charles. Chester. Chuck. Palahniuk. A sin, no soul. Pah-lah-nee-yuck: three plus one segments that trip down the tongue; a torpid, fat and uncouth gent, spilling down a stairwell, laid out splayed at the foot, neck snapped. A prose style so sterile, its reproductive parts are dust. Barren of ideas, as of competence, for Chuck, words fill a quota, bereft of all craft and grace, simply soldiers taking orders. Well, welcome to Nuremburg.

If there is one thing to be grateful for though, it's that Chuck himself is a sign, more symbol, but almost literally, a blazing, neon sign in the crepuscule of existence buzzing: "If someone says they think I'm a good author or they like my books, you can pretty much ignore anything else they have to say." Palahniuk: time-saver. A writer whose films, like the most recent Choke, not even the likes of Ed Norton, Sam Rockwell and Helena Bonham Carter can save.

And what is the problem, besides sheer artlessness? It is his lineage, or his alignment with a certain tradition that is loathsome. Transgressional fiction; fiction that transgresses: disfigured beauty queens, confidence men, street fighters... this is the legacy of the Decadents? That the tradition of truly fucked-up fiction of Marquis de Sade and Comte de Lautremont, people who really were rebelling against a repressive moral code and would write genuinely horrifying and transgressive prose, would end up in the drainage ditch of Fight Club, where rebellion is merely alpha male pugnacity. Chuck's work is an affront to all that is decent, or rather, indecent, in the world.