No one would call Chuck Palahniuk a writer’s writer. He isn’t even, strictly speaking, a reader’s writer. He’s the sort of author who’s admired by people who don’t usually care for literature, and correspondingly scorned by those who do.
In his new collection of stories, there are grounds for both the admiration and the scorn. The characters are one-dimensional throughout. The style can be lucid and fine, but also flat-footed, even sub-literate. All the stories are straining to be transgressive. Some of these transgressions are genuinely startling; some are at the level of schoolboys shouting swear words at a passing girl. The great strength is the storytelling: some plots are wildly implausible, but Palahniuk has an astounding talent for creating a gripping yarn that also has folkloric weight.
Even the worst stories in Make Something Up have their share of this power – and some are so bad that reading them aloud could make flies fall dead from the air. “Torcher”, set at a Burning Man-like festival, is a seemingly endless series of worn-out hippy jokes, embellished with even older jokes about wee and breasts. “Expedition” is written in quasi-Victorian English, in which, for no apparent reason, Palahniuk misuses three words on every page and contorts phrases until their sense is lost. Phrases such as “To perpetrate such a coup, the possibility beguiled him” and “Piqued was Felix’s interest” are so awful as to be puzzling. If it is pastiche, of what and why?Is Palahniuk assuming his fans won’t notice the errors? Is the joke on them? Is it a joke on anyone with an ear for language, a way of telling them they don’t belong here? Is it genuine illiteracy that outraged his editors so much they refused to fix it, preferring instead to expose it to the world? What it certainly isn’t, is funny.
Palahniuk also leans heavily on gross-out humour; at some point in each story, some character or other will be drenched in urine. If you don’t find the word “foreskin” funny in itself, a lot of this will grate. Readers who find misogyny hard to take should also stay away. The misogyny is so pervasive that it not only affects depictions of women, but slops over on to men, cats, dogs and household appliances. If men are shamed, it’s for a failure of masculinity. Pets eat human placentas and vomit them unerringly into a woman’s lap. Even when Palahniuk humiliates a robotic vacuum cleaner, it feels as if he’s targeting it for being a woman.
Finally, the far-fetched plots can be wearying. Most adults aren’t in the market for a story that brings together male strippers, incontinence and circus freaks (“Mister Elegant”); or one that depends on the premise that, if a boy were to contract every disease from every prostitute in town, the resulting warts would make his penis grow to be 8ft tall (“The Toad Prince”). These concoctions are hard to swallow but mercifully easy to forget.
But in the best stories, a conjunction of zaniness, horror and sentiment propels you beyond disbelief into the space inhabited by good comic books, or by authors such as Rabelais and Burroughs. “Knock-Knock” is made up of offensive jokes that are revealed at the end to be a particularly insidious form of child abuse. “Inclinations” takes place in a camp where homosexual boys are scared straight, but where all the inmates are actually straight kids pretending to be gay to extort money from their conservative parents. Five plot twists later, it’s a prison break story, then suddenly it’s about the redemptive power of love, then it does a final back-flip and ties everything together with an act of bloody retribution. It shouldn’t work – I didn’t want it to work – but, believe it or not, it works. In stories like this, the prose is spare and clean, and there are moments of acute perception, such as this from “Phoenix”: “Somehow it seems wrong to photograph a blind person. It’s like stealing something valuable they don’t even know they own.”
In Palahniuk, we have a writer at the height of his powers, but who refuses to use those powers for good, and sometimes refuses to use them at all; who would rather soak his powers in urine, then eat them and vomit them into your lap. It’s a performance that can be exhilarating when graceful, but simply painful when it is not. He is an enfant terrible in desperate need of adult supervision, and one wishes Palahniuk’s editors would convince him not to publish his flimsiest tantrums. I would love to read his next “Knock-Knock”, but not at the risk of reading his next “Torcher”.
• Sandra Newman’s The Country of Ice Cream Star is published by Vintage. To order Make Something Up for £13.59 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
