Diary
By Chuck Palahniuk, Doubleday, 2003

Lately, the old writing workshop advice - Write What You Know - is the subject of a bit of a backlash, and rightly so. A talented writer, after having conducted a substantial amount of research, should be able to create convincing and interesting fiction purely from imagination. A writer of modest talent and ambition, on the other hand, would be well advised to stick to what the workshop facilitators suggest. Chuck Palahniuk definitely fits into the latter category, and his latest novel, Diary, is remarkably removed from his own experience - and handled so ineptly - that I did not, for one sentence, believe that he had any insight into his thin characters or any compelling reason for writing this book.

Diary is, ostensibly, the diary of Misty Kleinman, a young painter whose husband, Peter Wilmot, is in a coma after a botched suicide attempt. At the suggestion of her mother-in-law, Misty begins the diary so that Peter, should he awake, will be able to learn how life went on without him. As the diary progresses, Misty begins to learn sinister secrets about Peter, his family and the eastern resort island on which they live. The permanent residents, as opposed to the tourists who regularly flood Waytansea Island (the ordeal of having to read that pun on nearly every page is one of the most excruiating experiences of the novel) are not, it seems, what they seem.

Misty, the narrator of the novel, is a singularly unappealing character. Palahniuk draws her by beginning with a tired stereotype - the whitetrash trailer park girl - and then adds a huge helping of unsympathetic misanthropy to make her both one-dimensional and distasteful. Although she claims to love her husband, her one-sided dialogue with him is so saturated in self-pitying vitriol that I wished, after only a few pages, that she were the one in the coma.

Peter, as described by Misty, is odd and malevolent, a sadomasochistic curmudgeon who somehow managed to seduce her by praising her artwork. He is typical of the pointlessly deviant characters of novel, who, for some reason, like to stick pins into themselves and each other. Another character, the irritatingly named Angel Delaporte is, I think supposed to provide some sexual tension in Misty’s life, but here, also Palahniuk shows an unfamiliarity with traditional sexual attraction. Angel appears first to Misty “wearing a white terry cloth robe with ‘Angel’ stiched on the lapel ... a gold chain tangled in his gray chest hair. His eyebrows are bleached or plucked until they are almost not there.” Would any woman really find any of that attractive? Palahniuk wants us to find fascination in the conventionally unattractive, but only the most immature and/or maladjusted reader will be entertained by his scatological obsessions. Everything in his novel smells of urine (literally, not just figuratively; he writes a lot about the scent of bodily excretions), and we are asked to care about characters who engage in various forms of self-mutilation and torture.

By choosing the diary gimmick, Palahniuk writes himself into a corner. In order to provide the reader with the characters’ histories and the crucial setup to the novel’s climax, Misty is forced to write in Peter’s coma diary page after page of description of events that Peter would, of course, already know. “On their tenth date,” she writes, “Misty asked Peter if he’d messed with her birth control pills.” This clumsy exposition is hidden behind the even clumsier construction of the gimmick - Misty has to tell Peter these things because he might not remember them when he wakes up. She also uses her verbal flashbacks as opportunities for ironic jabs at her husband, so her hatred for him could conceivably be listed as an excuse for her dwelling on the past. The result, however, does not seem clever or complex; it comes off instead like the unconvincing dialogue in a bad sitcom, where the characters say improbable things simply and obviously for the benefit of the audience.

The diary conceit disintegrates even more horribly late in the novel when Misty is apparently incapacitated and unable to write, yet her diary somehow continues. Intentionally or not, Palahniuk mangles the novel’s point of view in a way that is exasperating. This tinkering with authorship culminates in the book’s final page, where the author (the real one: Chuck Palahniuk) tosses out a cheap trick that is so pathetic and unnecessary that I was embarrassed for him. How could his editor not have convinced him to delete this single page which turns his entire novel into an amateurish joke?

Indeed, Palahniuk seems to have no firm hold on any aspect of his novel. He’s not well acquainted with his characters (rich or poor, male or female), the relationships between them, or the world in which they live. One gets the impression that he might have wanted to make a point with his book, but precisely what that point might be remains murky. Is it a comment on our consumer culture? Is it an environmental parable? Is it an indictment of the institution of marriage? Is it an examination of the conflict between postmodern and academic art? It could be any of these, but it is not clearly any of them. I don’t believe that Palahniuk knew himself what he was trying to say, and worst of all, his prose gives me no desire to dig deeply in order to figure any of it out.

Copyright 2004 Ad Media Inc.