Review by New York Times Review
In Chuck Palahniuk's latest, a porn star wants to perform with 600 men. WHAT the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk. Their subjects? Porn, crime, pop culture and an endless parade of out-of-body experiences. Their methods? Cliché, caricature and proto-Christian morality. Props? Corn chips, corpses, crucifixes. The agenda? Deceit: a dishonest throwing of the reader to the wolves. And the result? Readymade Hollywood scripts. So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer. Chuck Palahniuk has his uses as a shock jock: 73 people (according to him) have fainted during public readings of his short story "Guts." A riotous account of some disastrous underwater onanism involving a swimmirig-pool drain, that story excellently delineates the shallowness of American life. But his latest novel, "Snuff," the dry-as-dust tale of people making a documentary about a woman who wants to break (as the promotional copy delicately puts it) "the world record for serial fornication," is not so much shallow as bitter. Whatever point Palahniuk meant to make seems to have been lost in a self-induced miasma of meaninglessness - onanism of a more dispiriting sort. Told primarily from the perspective of three participants, Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600, most of the action takes place in a vast hall where hundreds of men in their underpants plow through junk food and Viagra. All 600 of them have volunteered to spend the day sharing one woman and one toilet. It sounds like an athlete's foot bonanza! But that's show business. On the plus side, the men have been certified free of venereal disease. Nothing to worry about then - except that this is the bottom of the barrel Palahniuk has chosen to scrape. He even dares to make a Melville-related joke (inevitably, I guess) based on the name of the whale. Not wise: Palahniuk's banality makes the Pequod smell pretty sweet. This novel reeks not of lust but of the lamp, with many a discharge of nerdy info on everything from cyanide poisoning, Claudius' wife Messalina, vibrators, defibrillators, gangsta tattoos and Hitler's inflatable Aryan sex doll to flutters and intercourse-induced embolisms: stuff most 10-year-olds know - or could Google. There is a running gag (to which the reader's response may be to gag and run) about porn film titles, only a few of which - "Gropes of Wrath," "Beat Me in St. Louis," "Lady Windermere's Fanny" - can be mentioned here. Some don't even attempt to be clever. "Inside Miss Jean Brody" sounds like a title suggested by a newly arrived Martian. Is this what passes for invention these days? Do Palahniuk's readers chortle at such things? Have they no pride? There's a glaring absence of finesse. A paragraph-long description of difficulty with excretory hygiene is offered by one "dude" as an analogy for a bad day, then repeated almost word for word at the end of the book. It's not that great an analogy. The telegraphing of the denouement is also out of control, with one allusion after another to genetic links between the star and the people servicing her: a baby was given up for adoption many years before. One possible "son," the confused Mr. 72, has been perving for years all over a pocket-size rubber edition of her vulva. Revulsion is expressed indiscriminately: Palahniuk is contemptuous of everything and everybody! Including, I suspect, us. The people in this novel don't merely speak in clichés, their every action is clichéd. It's as if, like some grumpy groundhog, Palahniuk has come out of his burrow only to tell us he has nothing to say - unless it's that porn has ruined sex. But we knew that already. The floppy plot seeks refuge in cosmetic tips and movie trivia, with a pretty obscene focus on actors who came to grief, if not death, while filming some picture or other. If this catalog of corporeal catastrophe is supposed to justify snuff movies, it fails. The trouble with snuff movies is that the wrong people die. The risk in objecting to all this is that you look like a fuddy-duddy. But the problem is not the moral turpitude that Palahniuk pretends to promote or tolerate; the problem is his lack of artistry. He has allowed the failings of the culture he criticizes to infect his own work. The feeble irony employed here isn't up to the job of processing all the detritus he hurls at us. Who will de-trite us now? Instead of any real creative effort, Palahniuk chucks at us every bit of porno-talk he can muster. But not in a good way. This is no celebration of a field in which America excels - the hatching of new vocabulary - but an exercise in deadening the English language. Johnny One-Note, this book is shooting blanks. Alienation is soooooo 20th century. Lucy Ellmann's most recent novel is "Doctors & Nurses."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Palahniuk has made a career out of exploring alienation and depicting sex addicts, suicides, serial killers, and suffering artists. So it's not surprising to learn that his new novel is set in the sad world of sex cinema. Aging porn legend Cassie Wright is making one last film, a record-setting gang bang in which she will copulate with 600 men. But, as the title foreshadows, the grotesque simulation of love will prove fatal for someone. As with Rant (2007), Palahniuk employs an oral-history format, with the story recollected by three men Messrs. 72, 137, and 600 and Ms. Wright's handler, Sheila. (These passages are obviously very explicit, and not only does the porn not look pretty, the Palahniukian prose may cause readers' interest in all sex to flag for a while.) While Palahniuk's strengths acerbic humor and bold ideas are present here, his weaknesses are, too: indistinct voices and characterizations, repetitiveness, and research that's not integrated but quoted from one character to another. That said, he's an original, and there is something heady about the risks he takes as a writer. But, ultimately, his ideas are more interesting than his writing some readers are bound to ask why they're hanging around someone who keeps beating them up.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Palahniuk delivers another entertaining and cynical social commentary on American materialism and gluttony. In her final pornographic performance, Cassie Wright has decided to be on the receiving end of a 600-man gangbang. Neither Cassie nor the men waiting for their chance with her expect her to survive. But some of the men have very different ideas about what this encounter will mean for them in their personal and professional lives. Todd McLaren does an excellent job voicing the many different first-person accounts. Whether reading the accounts of Cassie's assistant, an aging stud or the Cassie's presumptive abandoned son, McLaren finds a complementary voice for each and keeps them consistent throughout. Given the raunchy discussions of sex and the sinister elements that are often associated with the porn industry, McLaren's gritty voice adds the needed edge to this seedy but interesting novel. A Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 11). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A porn star's endeavor to service 600 men on-camera, as told by (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
