Word: book
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Chuck Palahniuk’s fourth book in as many years, “Tell-All,” focuses on the mid-twentieth century world of celebrity, as seen through the eyes of an aging star’s personal assistant. The book is one part Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” one part “American Psycho,” and several parts not up to Palahniuk’s usual storytelling ability...
...book is narrated from the point of view of Hazie Coogan, the handler of aging actress and box office gold, Katherine Kenton. Though this pair is fictional, the world they occupy is full of real characters, although at the mercy of Palahniuk’s historical and anachronistic distortions. In the style of Patrick Bateman of “American Psycho,” Coogan’s narration is a constant barrage of brand names, celebrities, and historical references. The narrator self-consciously refers to this multiple times as “name-dropping Tourette’s syndrome...
...frustrating about this is that Palahniuk uses these references as he builds images of scenes and characters. Understanding his references will surely enhance one’s reading of the story, but the amount of research left to the lay reader is simply too daunting for such a short book. One could imagine a future edition containing a compendium of glosses in the back...
...memoir, the “tell-all” of the title. At this point, Palahniuk proves he still has the incredible ability to build suspense and surprise his reader with twists, though the story moves toward a fairly predictable end, given his hints earlier in the novel. The book ends with Palahniuk’s penchant for the macabre, though there is a redeeming twist or two in a fashion typical of his writing...
Henry is artistically stymied: his publishers don't get his new book, which is about the Holocaust, and even he seems a little fuzzy about what its point is. So he bails on writing altogether. He moves to a new city, gets a dog and a cat, gets his wife pregnant and generally forgets about books entirely - until he receives a strange fan letter from an elderly, misanthropic taxidermist who's working on a play and wants Henry's help...