SURVIVOR (BY) CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Published 2000, 289 Pages
Characters: C
Writing: C-

Plot: D
Pacing: B

Poignancy: C-

Chuck Palahnuik wants to write satire.  He wants to be a hybrid of Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo and Napolean Dynamite.  He wants you to think that he's outrageous, shocking and insightful.  His efforts earn him blurbs on the back of his book like this: "A wild amphetamine ride through the vagaries of fame and the nature of belief in America at the close of the twentieth century."  Lots of people tell me how much they love Palahniuk, so he's doing something right, I guess. I hate sounding so negative in reviews for books that aren't, honestly, all that offensively bad or totally without merit, but Survivor is just not a well-constructed book.  It's a clusterfuck of plotting and characterization, it's aimless, cheap satire, and it tries so desperately to be shocking and clever and post-modern that it's nothing but contrived.  But it isn't a difficult read.  It's not painful, and it moves fast.  Even if you're as bored with it as I was, you'll have no problem finishing it.  If you're into Palahniuk, you'll probably enjoy it.  But as far as I'm concerned, Palahniuk's forte is finding a million clever ways to say nothing at all.

I blame his reputation largely on "Fight Club."  Don't get me wrong, "Fight Club" is a great story, and I consider the movie to be one of the better films of the last 20 years.  The book, too, is good.  If the movie had never been made, I would probably hold the book in high esteem.  But David Fincher went ahead and directed a great film, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter were fantastic in it, and as a result, Fight Club is one of the very, very few instances where a book is not as good as the movie based off of it.  It's not worse, per se, it just doesn't add anything to the story — it reads like a novelization of the movie, with no added depth, detail or development.

Survivor takes all the dark quirkiness and zany randomness of Fight Club and wastes it on an aimless story and pointless satire.  That, I think, is my main gripe — Palahniuk is obviously trying to take the piss out of American media, celebrity society, religion, social elitism, economic elitism, our fixation on physical beauty, the superficiality of suburban America, et cetera; he's trying to blow us away with a zany nonstop narrative of flippant satire.  He's not afraid to tackle anything!  He's not afraid to show us how fucked up we really are!  He's not afraid to talk about sex and murder and religion openly, frankly and provocatively!  But it's all so stupidly lightweight and ADD, I'm still not even sure what he was getting at.  Palahniuk has the attention span of a 4 year old, and never settles on any plotline or "hook" long enough to make a single one of them work.  Satire isn't satire if you just take a bunch of exaggerated, wacky situations and throw them together.  You have to actually be saying something.  Palahniuk seems to be writing a different story from one chapter to the next, yet none of them manage to advance the plot naturally or develop Palahniuk's "characters."

The problem isn't that Palahniuk lacks imagination, obviously.  He's just not a strong enough writer for any of his ideas to cohere into something meaningful and interesting.  He writes with the same consistent voice, the same clumsy, contrived gimmicks, the needless post-modern sentence rearrangement that makes his writing read like something from your Junior year fiction workshop.  Even though the novel is supposedly being spoken into a recorder by the main character — he's delivering his life story while waiting for the plane he hijacked to crash — all the reader can hear is Palahniuk's own generic, choppy voice.  Characters don't act of their own accord, they just stumble into situations, they react glibly, satirically, like neutered ironic hipster puppets. When, about a quarter of the way through Survivor, a secondary character describes the protagonist out loud, there's a disorienting jolt from seeing how the character is supposed to seem compared to the impression of him we get from his voice and habits.

Palahniuk wants to bring his satire down to a rapid-fire, hard-hitting salvo, and falls into a lot of grating habits as a result — sentences that endlessly repeat each other, paragraphs broken up into one-by-one list form, pointlessly rearranged grammatical structures.  His struggles with poignancy aren't a dealbreaker, and they don't really derail the book, just make it slightly annoying to read.  Its Palahniuk's resulting inability to focus that hurts the story the most.  Survivor is a satire that never bothers to explore the things it's satirizing, and the things it's satirizing are so broad or vague that it's hard to be sure whether they need to be explored to begin with.  It's a book about fame where the protagonist is never shown being famous.  It's a satire of celebrity culture where the character becomes famous from one page to the next, with no reason given.  It's a take-down of superficiality where the character never cares what he looks like, or has any reason to.  Survivor is trying to be a lot of things, and doesn't achieve any of them.  Fittingly, it's not even a terrible book, just a completely unnecessary one.