Word: palahniuk
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...organization at the Graduate School of Design, screens Fight Club on Thursday as part of its series “Real/Reel: The Fashioning of Reality.” Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and Helena Bonham Carter star in this 1999 film based on the best-selling novel by Chuck Palahniuk that acts as a modern-day morality tale warning of the decay of society. It tells of one man’s (Norton) life full of single serving dinners, cheap furniture catalogs and self-help meetings for illnesses he doesn’t have. He finds salvation...
...been six years since Fight Club, his first novel, made him a cult figure. It's been one year since Choke made him a best seller. But Chuck Palahniuk is still inconsolable. The sheer, emasculating plenty of bourgeois life, all that stuff you can buy--it still sends him into an angry funk. In his new book he is also consumed by a world burdened with radio personalities, invasive kudzu, tormented anchovies and boring, phony jobs. There are writers who have a signature mood. What Palahniuk has is a signature posture: recoil...
...matter of time before you produce a novel about serial killers. Not that the offhand killings in Lullaby (Doubleday; 260 pages) involve anything so blunt as a hatchet. The murder weapons here are words. At fortysomething, Carl Streator has been a widower for 20 years. He is a recognizable Palahniuk character, the kind who deals with grief by building small scale models of churches, factories and houses, then stomping them to splinters until his feet bleed. Carl is a newspaper reporter working on a series about sudden infant death syndrome. Along the way he discovers a children's book containing...
Dark riffing on modernity is the reason people read Palahniuk. His books are not so much novels as jagged fables, cautionary tales about the creeping peril represented by almost everything. It's a world so attracted to death that, as one character says, reincarnation seems like just a form of procrastination. If Palahniuk wears his spleen on his sleeve, for a lot of Lullaby he wears it well. Too bad that in the final stretch he steers into some demented supernatural gore, and you recall that the publisher is billing this book as Palahniuk's first attempt at a thriller...
...both Faludi and Palahniuk have it wrong. Pity is over. Oprah's national hugs have been replaced by Jerry Springer's mocking chants for fisticuffs. Men are fine. We don't want to go back to construction work with other men, mostly because construction is hard and screaming "Nice ass" never seems to work. No, we're not men like our fathers: confident, stern and single-handedly supporting a family. But we're happier and more pleasant in our permanent adolescence reading Maxim and watching The Man Show. It definitely beats going...