"Stranger Than Fiction" is a hell of a promise to make, at least with a straight face, and particularly when the fiction being referenced is Chuck Palahniuk's. He wrote Fight Club, remember, and "Guts," a short story about a man forced to chew through his own large intestine. So when he titles his first collection of essays and journalism Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, you're like, Whoa, because this guy is always straight-faced.
The subjects are promising: pockets of the culture where dreams are cultivated or manipulated or strangled or left for dead; Palahniuk territory. The bawdy "Testicle Festival" in outback Montana; amateur wrestling; demolition derbies.
But if there's nothing wrong with the ideas, there's often something screwy with the stories. Piece after piece gasps for air in the grip of Palahniuk's pitiless minimalism. His style is so pared down, so intent on shedding needless affect, so determined to maintain a nonjudgmental distance, that it often fails to be moving. He accomplishes the singular trick of making the Testicle Festival's displays of public sex seem mundane, which is fine if that's what he was going for, but it begs the question: Why bother? He could have devoted that typing to his next novel. That thought arises too often, in his unconvincing homage to workshop minimalist Amy Hempel, in his story about walking around Seattle in a giant dog suit, a piece that's an object lesson in how to drain the humor from a possibly fun premise.
"Where Meat Comes From," about his visit to an amateur wrestling tournament in Iowa, nearly works anyway. It's about love, faith and dedication in the absence of glory, torn cartilage. Palahniuk territory, for sure. But he implements several writing strategies that undercut our interest. Curiously, he chooses to paraphrase some of the really good stuff he learned—tales of wrestlers so fanatically devoted that they jog in the aisles on airplanes—and instead fills the mouths of his subjects with such boilerplate quotespeak as this: "I think wrestlers are misjudged a lot ... it's really a classy sport." That denies the people he writes about the idiosyncrasies that might've given them more convincing dimensions. Combined with the flattening effect of his prose—not for Palahniuk the effusions of joy, heartbreak, exertion and pain—the piece needs every one of its 19 pages to establish an emotional connection with the reader.
Ditto the piece on gonzo farmhands who play demolition derby with old crop-harvesting equipment in "Demolition." Again, Palahniuk's brick-and-mortar prose keeps the farce at bay, and all we're left are descriptions of ancient combines bumping into each other. It might be titillation for the Monster Garage crowd, but the rest of us wonder why the writer didn't bother to at least climb into a cockpit himself.
That's not to say Palahniuk can't coax a laugh from a throwaway piece combining Brad Pitt and lip-enhancing devices—in unguarded moments, when there doesn't seem to be much on the line, Palahniuk can be funny.
Because minimalism is better suited to the depiction of sadness and desperation, a piece like "You Are Here" works a lot better. It's ostensibly about those grim cattle-call conventions where would-be writers and screenwriters pay to pitch episodes of their pathetic lives as movie material. Here, Palahniuk's formal agenda serves the cheerless subject perfectly.
But it soon becomes clear that what he's really getting at is the commodification of storytelling, the way the urge to peddle our life stories as films or crisis memoirs is making us emphasize the stories instead of the life. "Our technology for telling stories becomes our language for remembering our lives. For understanding ourselves," he writes. If he's not—by far—the first to suggest "our hunger for stories might reduce our awareness of the actual experience" (life is becoming more like the movies!), he is the first writer I've read who's suggested that this might, in fact, be a good thing; that trying to experience better stories might make us lead better lives. "Instead of letting life just happen, we can outline our personal plots." And then he speculates on the larger, political implications—"Maybe our sense of 'been there, done that' will save us from declaring the next war. If war won't 'play,' then why bother? ... If we see that war 'tanks' after opening weekend, then no one will green-light another one."
The book is a mixed bag, is what I'm saying.
In February, during a rollicking reading in Vegas, Palahniuk, in reference to "Guts," said something like, I only have 11 pages to make you laugh and break your heart, to yank us through an entire mutilayered emotional experience. And in "Guts," it worked to spectacular effect. It's too bad his fiction is so much stranger than his true stories.