DIARY, by Chuck Palahniuk: A Review
Ever since I saw the movie, Fight Club, I’ve been a fan of Chuck Palahniuk’s work. I read the book version of Fight Club, after seeing the move, and would agree with Chuck’s own assessment that the movie was better than his book. Nonetheless, Fight Club still remains his best novel. More recently, I’ve read Surivivor and Choke. Today I finally finished his latest novel, Diary. I say finally because even though it’s only 260 pages long, it was one of the most tedious, painful reading experiences I have ever endured. It is easily the worst thing I’ve read by Chuck; it is possibly the worst novel I’ve ever read by anybody, save maybe some of those “classics” we all have to read in high school.
During the past six months, I’ve met Chuck a couple of times at book signings in the Seattle area. He said that one of his goals as a writer was to make reading fun again. He also said that he had found a way to make the writing process fun for himself and would do it even if he wasn’t making any money. I was not present during the writing of Dairy, so I can’t say whether had did or did not have fun. I can only say that it was no fun at all for me to read it. It’s almost completely devoid of that wonderful Palahniuk humor; there is nothing about this book that I found funny or enjoyable.
The characters are tissue thin and universally unlikable. It plays out like a very poorly scripted soap opera, full of gimmicks and tangents that are distracting and do nothing to propel the story forward because, sadly, there really is no story, just a bunch of ideas thrown together for their shock or surprise value. The plot has all the lasting interest and integrity of a children’s Halloween party, and the characters are little more than cheap five-and-dime caricatures of self-contempt. In keeping with that tone, Palahniuk goes off on a philosophical tangent at the end that is based on notions of past lives and collective consciousnesses.
The main character is little more than an overweight, self-pitying, drunk who never rises above bitching about her plight, her husband, the in-laws, and everybody else. In the end, she becomes something else, but not of her own choosing.
Just for the record, this book is only 260 pages long, short for a novel, and the typeface is larger than in many books. The chapers are often 2, 3, maybe 4 pages long and every chapter begins about halfway down a new page after the previous chapter ended with only a partially full page. Many paragraphs are only one sentence long which adds a lot of blank space to each page. Taking out all the blank space on the 260 pages probably would leave you with about 200 pages, maybe less. If you take into account the number of times that Palahniuk uses the same phrases over and over again, like “just for the record” which is sometimes repeated more than once on the same page, “the weather today is,” “what you don’t understand you can make mean anything,” and “can you feel this?” and the number of times he calls the main character by variations of her full name, Misty Marie Kleinman Wilmot, such as poor little Misty Marie Kleinman, Misty Kleinman, Misty Marie Wilmot, there’s probably no more than 100 pages of real exposition and/or dialogue in this “novel” which is little more than a short story padded to look like a novel.
Though a hardcover, it is not much bigger than a paperback in size. If it were printed on the same paper size as most real novels, using a similar typeface and elminiting all the repetition, this book might only amount to about 50 pages. If IKEA published books, they would be like Diary; sleek, cute, apartment sized and with a core made of recycled sawdust.
Chuck weaves trivia about art, philosophy and psychology into the story; in the end he focuses more on Plato and Carl Jung. He talks about the camera obscura and the way that the great masters used lenses to draw their precise paintings. The camera obscrura, which involves using scientific principles to create an image on canvas is not the same thing as using mytical ideas to distort reality, but Palahniuk seems to be saying that they are related endeavors. At the very end, he reminds us, “Plato was right. We’re all of us immortal. We couldn’t die if we wanted to.” That bad news because rather than reading a book like this again, I think I’d rather be dead. If we can’t die even if we want to, then I think we would be in poor little Misty Maria Kleinman Wilmot’s hell.
But don’t take my word for it; buy some of Chuck’s books at Amazon.com:
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