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A review of Tell-All (chuckpalahniuk) by Dr. Joseph Suglia
INTRODUCTION
chuckpalahniuk’s followers have grown older and are now turning against the one they once adulated as their master. How could they not be insulted? They have been treated with contempt by a writer who dumbs everything down for them. They read more widely now and have come to recognize that the idealism that they once saw in their leader is false, and they despise him for his blatant opportunism. This is a man who has no interest in knowledge or language, but who merely wants to make as much money as possible. (chuckpalahniuk said: “I don’t care what they do with my book, as long as the f****** check clears.”) They resent him for simplifying ideas that he has stolen from more sophisticated writers–and from his own fanatical base, his base of worshippers. chuckpalahniuk writes under the heads of his sixteen-year-old target audience. Sadly for him, those sixteen-year-old sheep are now twenty-four. chuckpalahniuk is irrelevant, and the responses to his most recent work demonstrate this.
* * * * *
Those who write according to deadlines inevitably generate dead lines. It should surprise no one, then, that chuckpalahniuk’s tired, labored contractual offering, Tell-All (2010), is a concatenation of lifeless sentences. I’ve always felt–and clearly I’m in the minority these days–that words should bleed from the page, that one should write with one’s blood, as Nietzsche would say. Well, Palahniuk’s pages don’t bleed; they suppurate. A genuine writer composes electric prose, nothing but electric prose. There is no electricity here, no artfulness. But to claim that chuckpalahniuk writes artlessly would be to say too little. Every sentence, every phrase, every word in this book is spoken by a voice from the grave. Consumerist fiction is never vivacious. You don’t believe that Palahniuk is a “literary” entrepreneur? Here is his advice to a young poet: “Don’t expect to make any money off [poetry].”
The “plot,” such as it is, regurgitates All About Eve (1950), with Hazie Coogan reassuming the role of Eve and Katherine Kenton reincarnating Margo. Every name is embossed in bold type, which makes the book as appealing to read as a telephone-directory. The weakest elements in Bret Easton Ellis’s fiction are his lists. One needn’t know how to write in order to compile lists of indiscriminate items. Here, the entire novel is a list–a list of proper nouns. Reading this drivel is exactly like being jabbed incessantly in the ribs by an idiot savant who recites name after name in a narcotizing monotone, giggling after each jab.
The prose is irritatingly incompetent. Should we forget that the first letters of German nouns are capitalized? Are we supposed to think that “bile-ography” [32], “fossilidealized” [46], “laud mouthing” [58], and a “jury of sneers” [147] are clever neologisms? Should we forget that hipster Dave Eggers popularized self-reflexivity (though he did not invent it–such a practice can be found in Ludwig Tieck and Shakespeare, to cite but two names) and that the use of it is no longer particularly “experimental”? Should we ignore the fact that the phrase “name-dropping Tourette’s syndrome” is used no fewer than four times in this novel [on pages 3, 79, 129, and 177] and that such mindless repetitions are excessively fatiguing?
[After writing this review, I learned that the terms “bile-ography,” “to fossilidealize,” “to laud-mouth,” a “jury of sneers,” and “name-dropping Tourette’s syndrome” (not capitalized?) are not of chuckpalahniuk’s contrivance.]
chuckpalahniuk’s knowledge of his subject is as limited as his vocabulary. “That vast wealth of 50’s [sic] film info comes from my editor, Gerry Howard,” chuckpalahniuk announced to Amazon. Silliness abounds. Are we to allow that Samuel Beckett was a “celebrity” [2] who attended opulent parties at Hollywood mansions? Beckett recoiled from the entertainment industry as if it were a cancerous polyp (though he was not entirely indifferent to fame: See Stephen Dilks, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace). Are we credulous enough to believe that folk singer Woody Guthrie composed music and lyrics for Broadway shows when he never did–and would have probably found the very idea of doing so repellent? Should we be persuaded that the great French filmmaker Alain Resnais “saddled humanity” [109] (with what, precisely?), when he has given us so many strikingly beautiful, provocative, and groundbreaking works of art–something that chuckpalahniuk has never been able to do? Though Resnais opened up a new way of seeing, most of humanity has ignored his oeuvre. Muriel (1962), his masterpiece, is almost completely obscure.
chuckpalahniuk’s opera minora belong to a genre we might term “moron fiction,” fiction intended for readers who hate books. One suspects that chuckpalahniuk hates books himself, given how little effort he invests in reading and creating them. Tell-All is a nonliving entity, a throwaway, a trifle, a triviality, a little slice of nothing.
CONCLUSION
Being taught how to write fictionally by chuckpalahniuk is exactly like being taught how to play football by a one-legged man.
Joseph Suglia
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