9 - Make Something Up

I would think the vast majority of people are only familiar with the works of the Seattle writer Chuck Palahniuk through the film adaptation of his first novel, Fight Club. And still more who do count themselves as fans will have been introduced to him by that film.

My path was slightly different - when reading an article about the most famous bodies of water in literature (must have been a slow news day), I learned of Palahniuk's short story Guts, a tale supposedly so shocking it caused people to faint at live readings. I was intrigued, but ultimately forgot about it. And then I saw Fight Club.

In fairness, the film's success is well deserved, and it is thanks in no small part to Palahniuk's writing which transposes perfectly to the interior monologue of Edward Norton's narrator, itself broken down into convenient soundbites to spawn a million anti-consumerist tweets sent from a million iPhones. Not long after I decided to hunt down Guts and read it as part of the short story anthology mashed together into a meandering novel titled Haunted. I didn't pass out, but Guts certainly hit home, a shocking tale of the depravity and subversion simmering literally just below the surface of American suburbia. The other stories were somewhat inconsistent but there were still a few gems - most notably Obsolete and Foot Work, both of which deserve big-screen adaptations of their own.

Make Something Up is Palahniuk's second collection of short stories, and ultimately the same appraisal can be made. While it drops the overall plot that weaved in and out of Haunted, there are still a few subtle connections between the 24 pieces that form the whole. This is most obvious in a triptych of stories featuring anthropomorphised animals loosely resembling Aesop's fables but with moral conclusions so brutally mean-spirited they leave a sour aftertaste. Similar in nature are the likes of Cannibal, Zombies and Tunnel of Love, three tales in keeping with the general theme of the grim reality of American society. These are hardly enjoyable reading and ultimately I failed to see the point, unless there was no point other than to show that, a lot of the time, life is arbitrary and unfair.

Equally hard to get on with were the more experimental stories. The dense word-fog of Smoke and the endless malapropisms shoved into Eleanor result in prose that is borderline unreadable, and while they undoubtedly took a lot skill to write, there is not much enjoyment to be gleaned. It's akin to listening to a world-class musician practicing scales for hours on end. Slightly more successful was Liturgy, an exercise in the art of the euphemism of upper-middle class society.

But as with Haunted, there are more than a few stories here that just work. Essentially a shaggy dog story told in stream of consciousness style, The Facts of Life is perhaps the most shocking of the bunch, but also the funniest in my opinion. Torcher cleverly doubles up as a murder mystery caper and a savage satire of the trust fund hippie culture; Expedition mixes Kafka and de Sade into a foreshadowing of a possible Fight Club sequel. And call me soft, but while Fetch and Mister Elegant may seem incongruous with their happy endings, they stand out as the two most enjoyable stories here.

Objectively the best, however, would have to be Inclinations. Being the longest story in the book, it has room to develop its characters, lurch from ironic to funny to terrifying to foul and back again, and deliver plenty of twists along the way. Again, while I am perhaps not quite tuned into its portrayal of the unique pressures and intricacies of American life, it does deliver a sensitive look at the teenage experience that is not often seen in literature.

Overall, I found the quality of these stories to vary immensely. While all were shocking in their own way, it is what Palahniuk actually does with that shock value that means at least a few of them go above and beyond that basic level. One thing is for sure - the collection's subtitle, Stories You Can't Unread is more than suitable.

2.5/5

Undoubtedly, this is a pretty punk form of writing, but that's another area I'm not particularly attuned to. In the end, while I'm sure there are plenty more out there, the best act I could think of to blend punk aesthetic with a certain level of technical ability is Pixies. Oh, and their song Where is my Mind plays over the closing credits of Fight Club, so that'll do.