Nice work if you can get it
June 4, 2006 | 12:00am
Non-Fiction
By Chuck Palahniuk
Vintage UK, -233 pages
Available at National Book Stores
Chuck Palahniuk doesn’t dig ditches for a living. Nor does he lift heavy objects. He’s a novelist, the American who wrote Fight Club, among other pieces of testosterone-driven fiction. But he’s attracted to odd jobs, and odd vocations.
That’s why Non-Fiction, his collection of (mostly) magazine pieces, takes him across America to places where people do things that, well, other people don’t do.
In this role, he somewhat resembles John Steinbeck, the American writer who made his camp with migrant workers and Dust Bowl families and Cannery Row denizens in Monterey. Steinbeck knew his turf, which was working-class America.
Palahniuk has a more offbeat reputation, taking as his subject the American male psyche and its various permutations in the modern age. Scour his novels, and you’ll find odd jobs aplenty, from the narrator of Fight Club who hangs out at terminal illness support groups to fit in (Palahniuk himself volunteered at a charity hospice one summer, which he writes about here). The male narrator in Choke works at one of those authentic Colonial village theme parks, dressed like a pilgrim. People on the fringes of his books are waiters, movie projectionists, flight attendants, auto mechanics, sexaholics and fashion models.
All this makes Palahniuk, as he acknowledges in his introduction, a people person. He likes having the input of the friends and strangers in his life. Community is something he believes in – not least of all because it provides him with plenty of material.
Midwest America fascinates him, because it’s the place where people gather for strange public rituals. There’s the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Montana, where people are encouraged to go on various stages and perform sexual acts to the wild cheers of drunken audiences. Often the audience members go onstage, too.
Palahniuk takes the position of a non-judging observer, writing about it all in the clipped, unfussy manner that he uses in his novels. He is equally unfazed by a "Co-Ed Body Painting Contest" as he is watching a USA Amateur Wrestling match in Dallas. Or rather, he is equally sympathetic to what often seem to be dangerous or useless advocacies.
He follows the amateur wrestlers across America, these damaged dreamers who wear their cauliflower ears and broken bones like badges. (Anyone who thinks wrestlers don’t actually hurt each other should read Palahniuk’s essay, "Where Meat Comes From.")
He attends the Lind Combine Demolition Derby in Lind, Washington, where dozens of combine tractors thrash it out in elimination rounds held in a dirt ring. The object is to tear apart all the other combines using your scoops and thrashers and wheels. Metal on metal, it’s about as pointless as it seems fun. You’re left reflecting that people in the boonies have at least come up with creative ways to fill their free time.
Another of Palahniuk’s parachute jumps takes him to an Airport Sheraton outside Hollywood, where eager people sign up to pitch their scripts and novels to "insiders." The hopeful pay good money for the chance to turn their personal traumas and nightmares into a possible screen deal. They each are given seven minutes to make their pitch.
It’s an interesting take on the Hollywood factory, especially since Palahniuk’s own career was said to be launched after actor Brad Pitt took a shine to his out-of-nowhere novel, Fight Club. That book still haunts Palahniuk, but it has also been his bread and butter, and his Hollywood opening. It captured a zeitgeist moment for American males, when feminism seemed to be receding and male awareness retreats were big news. Then metrosexuality came along and washed all that away.
But Palahniuk soldiers on. He may be writing his best fiction these days, though nothing lately has sold like Fight Club and he seems to have a stronger following in England (where this collection was published) than America. He still places a bit too much stress on being male, as if someone were actively challenging his very manhood. One essay deals with his summer of steroid use, a time when he hung out at gyms with his buds and worshipped at the temple of ripped pecs and biceps. But that’s all in the past, he maintains.
Fame is another pet subject for Palahniuk. After having had his taste of it, he tried an interesting experiment: he and a friend put on rubber dog masks and wandered around Seattle in disguise (in the essay "My Life as a Dog"). He wasn’t prepared for the snide remarks and wrath routinely directed his way:
As a white man, you can live your whole life never not fitting in. You never walk into a jewelry store that sees only your black skin. You never walk into a bar that sees only your boobs. To be Whitie is to be wallpaper. You don’t draw attention, good or bad. Still, what would it be like, to live with attention? To just let people stare. To let them fill in the blank, and assume what they will. To let people project some aspect of themselves on you for a whole day.
A neat experiment, but he could have accomplished the same thing by visiting Manila for a day.
Palahniuk also pulls off a few interesting profiles, one on feral Scientologist and actress Juliette Lewis, who he manages to make seem both intuitively bright and dangerously dumb. And his take on Marilyn Manson reveals the shock rocker beneath the scary makeup to be the high school geek you always imagined he was.
Other times, Palahniuk is content to marvel at the weird stuff that people do, like the people in Washington and Oregon who, for no big reason, just one day decide to build their own castles. They just draw up the blueprints, start buying plenty of stones, make sure they comply with local zoning laws and begin constructing castles.
Why they do this is often more interesting than the end result. Two of the castle builders admit that their efforts are plagued by problems: mildew, drafts and such. Stones don’t insulate heat very well, and they tend to get damp and moldy. Palahniuk spends too many pages exploring the do’s and don’ts of the subject, as if this were Modern Castle Building magazine and not a human interest essay. And you end up, after a while, being convinced that the novelist prefers tracking subjects that affirm his own male-building agenda ("A man’s home is his castle" might be a good title for the essay).
But it’s also peculiar that people actually do build castles in this day and age, and what it says about what may be lacking in our modern lives. Palahniuk is a keen observer of this, though he never probes too deeply or reaches any earth-shattering conclusions. Leave that to the wonks over at The New Republic. Or Modern Castle Building.
By Chuck Palahniuk
Vintage UK, -233 pages
Available at National Book Stores
Chuck Palahniuk doesn’t dig ditches for a living. Nor does he lift heavy objects. He’s a novelist, the American who wrote Fight Club, among other pieces of testosterone-driven fiction. But he’s attracted to odd jobs, and odd vocations.
That’s why Non-Fiction, his collection of (mostly) magazine pieces, takes him across America to places where people do things that, well, other people don’t do.
In this role, he somewhat resembles John Steinbeck, the American writer who made his camp with migrant workers and Dust Bowl families and Cannery Row denizens in Monterey. Steinbeck knew his turf, which was working-class America.
Palahniuk has a more offbeat reputation, taking as his subject the American male psyche and its various permutations in the modern age. Scour his novels, and you’ll find odd jobs aplenty, from the narrator of Fight Club who hangs out at terminal illness support groups to fit in (Palahniuk himself volunteered at a charity hospice one summer, which he writes about here). The male narrator in Choke works at one of those authentic Colonial village theme parks, dressed like a pilgrim. People on the fringes of his books are waiters, movie projectionists, flight attendants, auto mechanics, sexaholics and fashion models.
All this makes Palahniuk, as he acknowledges in his introduction, a people person. He likes having the input of the friends and strangers in his life. Community is something he believes in – not least of all because it provides him with plenty of material.
Midwest America fascinates him, because it’s the place where people gather for strange public rituals. There’s the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Montana, where people are encouraged to go on various stages and perform sexual acts to the wild cheers of drunken audiences. Often the audience members go onstage, too.
Palahniuk takes the position of a non-judging observer, writing about it all in the clipped, unfussy manner that he uses in his novels. He is equally unfazed by a "Co-Ed Body Painting Contest" as he is watching a USA Amateur Wrestling match in Dallas. Or rather, he is equally sympathetic to what often seem to be dangerous or useless advocacies.
He follows the amateur wrestlers across America, these damaged dreamers who wear their cauliflower ears and broken bones like badges. (Anyone who thinks wrestlers don’t actually hurt each other should read Palahniuk’s essay, "Where Meat Comes From.")
He attends the Lind Combine Demolition Derby in Lind, Washington, where dozens of combine tractors thrash it out in elimination rounds held in a dirt ring. The object is to tear apart all the other combines using your scoops and thrashers and wheels. Metal on metal, it’s about as pointless as it seems fun. You’re left reflecting that people in the boonies have at least come up with creative ways to fill their free time.
Another of Palahniuk’s parachute jumps takes him to an Airport Sheraton outside Hollywood, where eager people sign up to pitch their scripts and novels to "insiders." The hopeful pay good money for the chance to turn their personal traumas and nightmares into a possible screen deal. They each are given seven minutes to make their pitch.
It’s an interesting take on the Hollywood factory, especially since Palahniuk’s own career was said to be launched after actor Brad Pitt took a shine to his out-of-nowhere novel, Fight Club. That book still haunts Palahniuk, but it has also been his bread and butter, and his Hollywood opening. It captured a zeitgeist moment for American males, when feminism seemed to be receding and male awareness retreats were big news. Then metrosexuality came along and washed all that away.
But Palahniuk soldiers on. He may be writing his best fiction these days, though nothing lately has sold like Fight Club and he seems to have a stronger following in England (where this collection was published) than America. He still places a bit too much stress on being male, as if someone were actively challenging his very manhood. One essay deals with his summer of steroid use, a time when he hung out at gyms with his buds and worshipped at the temple of ripped pecs and biceps. But that’s all in the past, he maintains.
Fame is another pet subject for Palahniuk. After having had his taste of it, he tried an interesting experiment: he and a friend put on rubber dog masks and wandered around Seattle in disguise (in the essay "My Life as a Dog"). He wasn’t prepared for the snide remarks and wrath routinely directed his way:
As a white man, you can live your whole life never not fitting in. You never walk into a jewelry store that sees only your black skin. You never walk into a bar that sees only your boobs. To be Whitie is to be wallpaper. You don’t draw attention, good or bad. Still, what would it be like, to live with attention? To just let people stare. To let them fill in the blank, and assume what they will. To let people project some aspect of themselves on you for a whole day.
A neat experiment, but he could have accomplished the same thing by visiting Manila for a day.
Palahniuk also pulls off a few interesting profiles, one on feral Scientologist and actress Juliette Lewis, who he manages to make seem both intuitively bright and dangerously dumb. And his take on Marilyn Manson reveals the shock rocker beneath the scary makeup to be the high school geek you always imagined he was.
Other times, Palahniuk is content to marvel at the weird stuff that people do, like the people in Washington and Oregon who, for no big reason, just one day decide to build their own castles. They just draw up the blueprints, start buying plenty of stones, make sure they comply with local zoning laws and begin constructing castles.
Why they do this is often more interesting than the end result. Two of the castle builders admit that their efforts are plagued by problems: mildew, drafts and such. Stones don’t insulate heat very well, and they tend to get damp and moldy. Palahniuk spends too many pages exploring the do’s and don’ts of the subject, as if this were Modern Castle Building magazine and not a human interest essay. And you end up, after a while, being convinced that the novelist prefers tracking subjects that affirm his own male-building agenda ("A man’s home is his castle" might be a good title for the essay).
But it’s also peculiar that people actually do build castles in this day and age, and what it says about what may be lacking in our modern lives. Palahniuk is a keen observer of this, though he never probes too deeply or reaches any earth-shattering conclusions. Leave that to the wonks over at The New Republic. Or Modern Castle Building.
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