05.15.07
Chuck
When you first meet Chuck Palahniuk, you’re not sure that it’s him. He’s slender, with big ears and a quick smile. Is this the same guy who wrote about a psychic death poem, the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival, and a split-personality terrorist who was just looking for love? He doesn’t speak like he writes, either. He’s mannered, and he considers his words before he speaks. He doesn’t curse.
Listen to him long enough, though, and his authorial voice comes through, as if his characters are really a way of amplifying aspects of himself. The gleeful way that he recounts stories (he once got an American executive hopped up on pain pills and scotch), and his stirring recollections of finding meaning in unexpected places bring to mind the best parts of his prolific collection (he’s written ten books in ten years). His taste for the macabre didn’t start to come out until later in the talk, when he told a series of severed finger stories and began tossing fake limbs into the audience.
The crowd at a Palahniuk talk is different from most ‘meet-the-author’ crowds. A man who was there with his daughter observed that “it’s heartwarming to see so many young people reading.” It seems, though, that many of the attendees would rather be the tragic accidents of characters that inhabit a Palahniuk novel than learn the lessons that his characters ignore. His main characters do have a fatalistic allure, but one can only hope that the youth are savvy to the lesson and not just the surface glitz.
What great surface glitz it is, though, and Chuck Palahniuk brought plenty of it to Alverno tonight. He read two unpublished stories, “Cold Calling” and “Love Nest.” The former story showcases his all his strenghts: an alienated hero in a dead-end job makes an improper but meaningful connection with somebody, then helps it all unravel as he discovers the artifice that holds the relationship together. It’s really a powerful one, and I hope that we’ll eventually get to see it in published form.
yahooyahoo said,
February 20, 2008 at 3:38 am
managed were called natural with whatever still there. to dine I still spent days reaction pruning