Style

One aspect of writing that I believe motivates the most competition and distinction among authors is the development of, and use of style. By style, I mean sentence structure, diction, the management of tone-- all of that stuff. It's like voice, but with more attention to the flexibility and capability of the writer.

I bring this up now because I'm ankle-deep in Chuck Palahniuk's newest work Damned. Some of you may know that Chuck Palahniuk is the guy responsible for Fight Club (yes, it was a novel first, as he doggedly tells everyone in the afterward), Choke, Lullaby, and Stranger Than Fiction. He is publicized in Damned as "American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker." This may or may not be true... I'll get into that. First!

Damned is the story of a self-proclaimed fat 13-year-old named Madison, a girl who has not really reached puberty, whose parents are self-absorbed, self-important, and well, the way you'd expect celebrity parents to be: indulging in lavish products, homes everywhere on the planet, and tons of adopted minority kids. Madison has recently died of a marijuana overdose and spends the book describing her journey through Hell-- a place ridden with old candy and popcorn and landmarked by monuments of excrement and other things that ooze out of people-- on her way to tell Satan how he messed up in bringing her there. Apparently, Palahniuk is greatly influenced by The Breakfast Club-- a movie I've never seen, come to think of it-- as she wonders around Hell with a cast of extremely stereotypical high schoolers (the Jock, the Bimbo, the Punk, the Nerd).

Now I've read quite a bit of Palahniuk's works (Lullaby, Fight Club, Diary, Invisible Monsters, and Pygmy); I picked up Damned because I thought it would be a change of pace from the style he uses in almost every one of his novels. (Now we're back up to speed.) Palahniuk has a general pattern: take a sulky, unnoticed, middle-aged protagonist, have them narrate a series of strange events-- often movingly described and mysterious up until the very end-- and then have them realize that they've had a crucial role in all of these things that no one fully understands until the very end. Along the way, the protagonist offers you an initially tantalizing array of satirical statements about where and how they live; they are hopelessly jaded, hate themselves and hate others because of the shallowness of it all, and can't wait to tell you about it in the most intricate language possible. There's probably some anal rape involved, too. Also, parent-hatred; parents are inevitably flawed and selfish and messed up in Palahniuk's works, even if they are the protagonists.

I had stopped reading his work after a while because I was tired of feeling like every one of his protagonists was hateful toward the reader for no particular reason other than that they were the sort of people who would read Palahniuk's books. Damned is narrated by a pre-teen. She is insecure, and surrounded by people her own age who are not the absurdly original characters Palahniuk normally creates. He had to do something new, I thought.

Somehow, he managed to make her almost just as jaded, just as spiteful and whiny and exploding with unprovoked sass. This got me thinking-- well, actually, the thought was simply, "WHAT IS THIS GUY'S PROBLEM?!"

Initially, I had believed that Chuck Palahniuk-- the "troublemaker"-- was only interested in putting his fingers in people's pies. Basically, I thought he just loved to remind the masses why they were boring and terrible people, and do so via characters who represent the sort of people who normally go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things. I thought he liked to have normal people berate other normal people for being too damn normal while thinking that they're (the others) the hot sh*t on toast by using strange and complex bodies of knowledge about the world's strangest trivia in order to reveal how completely mindless society is.

Take, for instance, Chapter 3 of Lullaby: 


"Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead... These people who need their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics. 
         Laughter of the dead comes through every wall."

I literally just flipped to a random page and found that quote. Lullaby is my favorite novel of his, but it's dripping with the same acidic loathing toward fellow man.

Don't get me wrong; I don't disagree when Palahniuk is described as "brilliant." I've been unspeakably moved by some of his works. I've been left in public places at the end of a work, mouth open, eyes wide, heart racing, thinking, "My God...have I been under a spell?"

Nevertheless, it's a bit much to be hit like that by beautiful scenes and words, and then pummeled with hateful remarks about the comforts of living a middle-class life.

So, reading Damned, it occurred to me: what if Palahniuk not only pities the masses? What if he also pities his protagonists? I mean, yes, some of them live in pathetic circumstances or are immoral enough that anyone would have to pity them. But what if he actually doesn't like them? What if they're just as despicable as the people they themselves despise?

Take Madison. She won't shut up about how pathetically fat she is. Which is, in itself, pretty pathetic. Think about it. Most of the time, if someone whines about that sort of thing, we-- the despicable masses-- think, "Well, you got yourself like that." If they deal with it and continue to be cool people anyways, or if they even overcome it, we think, "Wow, that's a cool person." Is Chuck Palahniuk secretly the same as us? Does he think Madison should shut up, too? Honestly,  he makes her seem pretty ordinary, pretty annoying, even, in her stereotypical, whiny, pre-pubescent talk. Even if she continually blurts, "Yes, I know the word gender. Ye gods! I may be pudgy and flat chested and nearsighted and dead, but I am NOT a moron." 

(First off, no one said you were a moron...secondly, no one cares if you're nearsighted, third-- almost EVERYONE knows the word "gender"...*grumblegrumble*)

But we could make this argument with a number of his protagonists. Fight Club's narrator is a guy with a job no one really thinks about, a personality dominated by his hunger for something new, and his bemusement over why he hangs out with such exceptional crazies as Tyler and Marla. The plot unwinds with his realizations of why he does what he does, what his feelings towards his parents have manifested in his pathetic life, that the popular products and brands in his home were meaningless, and that meaning comes from being the absolute lowest you can be. Lullaby's narrator is a guy who goes home alone and empty and angry, who destroys things to feel anything, who eventually experiences magic-- but only after meeting some nudists and a narcissist real-estate agent. Even Pygmy from Pygmy, the most original of the works (it's written entirely in broken English), is an ambiguous minority kid from an ambiguous (probably imaginary) country, who falls in love with a stereotypically snotty teenager but pities and condemns the pathetic American people. The ambivalence between hating and loving the mundane is prevalent in all of those novels, and makes up a good bit of character in each of Palahniuk's protagonists.

Palahniuk's series of patterns in plot and character development, as well as the snarky and defensive language that comprises most of his narration creates a style that is hard to pin down. Is it moving? Is it beautiful? Is it pure satire or some introspection? (Actually, honestly, there is a lot of introspection. Why else are there so many Freudian moments and examples of anal rape?) Is it contemptuous or pitying? Revolting or refreshing?

So the question stands: is Palahniuk's contemptuous attitude toward the everyday schmuck based on a criticism of everyone else, or the criticism of the self within a system of schmucks?

I'm starting to think it's the latter-- which would be pretty impressive-- but I'll get back to this in my next post, hopefully in addition to some other topics.