Stranger Than Fiction -and- Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk, whose name I have really no idea how to spell and even less idea how to pronounce, is best known for writing the book Fight Club, but I also think fondly of him as a local literary superstar from when I lived in Portland. In addition to his novels and non-fiction essays, he’s also written some travel guides of the Northwest and made more than one appearance at Powell’s while I was in the area.
Lullaby is a super dark short novel about an investigative journalist with a tragic and shady past who gets caught up following clues he’s found at the home of six infants who died of SIDS and ends up having to confront the power of his own suppressed emotions – but in rapid, action packed way. Along the way, he meets up with a real estate agent who sells haunted homes, her new-age, semi-nudist assistant and the assistant’s anarchist boyfriend. Palahniuk doesn’t spend much time lingering on emotional fallout but, like his narrator, pays attention to the tiniest details and paints a vivid picture of people’s internal lives nonetheless; I was particularly struck by the simmering rage he manages to convey as the real estate agent marks a path through a furniture warehouse by gouging deep lines and arrows into furniture with her expensive rings. Palahniuk doesn’t worry too much about making the characters loveable or charmingly quirky, but they do come across as depressingly real possibilities – not the kind of people you like to think of yourself as, but the kind of people you worry you just might be if you weren’t able to get your priorities quite in order.
Stranger Than Fiction is a collection of essays which Palahniuk groups into “People Together,” “Portraits,” and “Personal” – which is to say, stories about groups, stories about individuals, and stories about Chuck. Like Lullaby, the writing is crisp and spare, short sentences in short paragraphs and not really dripping with adjectives. I found the style slightly hit-or-miss in this context. “The People Can,” about life on a navy submarine, really benefited from the style, which felt like it captured the constrained life of six months under water, but “Frontiers,” about steroid use, just felt herky-jerky and unfinished and “In Her Own Words,” based on an interview with Juliette Lewis, just made me feel like Lewis was kind of a jerk – which I imagine was not the intention of the piece. Still, Palahniuk (I think I’m finally getting the hang of typing that) really endeared himself to me over the course of the book, which gives a charming view of what his life has been like, struggling to be a writer and then being faced with unexpected success, dealing with his father’s murder and trying to make sense of what people do to make themselves happy. And the book is worth reading if only for the introduction, which is a really insightful take on whether or not writing is a solitary venture.

Complete Tales of the Unexpected by Roald Dahl

I have many happy memories of devouring Dahl’s young-adult novels and short stories – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, but also Matilda and James and the Giant Peach and The Witches. They were all particularly satisfying for a child because they coupled fairy-tale-level evil adults (child-eating witches and child-torturing headmistresses and child-abusing aunts) with charmingly realistic, if astonishingly clever, children who managed to wrestle happy endings out of horrid situations. In his short stories written for an adult audience, Dahl maintains the same cleverness but gleefully abandons happy endings for brutal irony of the type O. Henry would have appreciated.
Forgive me for ruining one of the stories in the service of a review, but if I may illustrate: the contrast is most distinct when one compares the short story “Champion of the World” with the children’s book “Danny, Champion of the World,” which offer two permutations of the same plot, about poachers catching pheasants by feeding them raisins stuffed with sleeping pills. The plan is clever and seems to go off well for both sets of protagonists, but no one seems to have planned for what will happen when the birds wake up. While “Danny” (as I recall, aided by Wikipedia) ends with some absolution for our plucky youngster, who is able to still get his revenge on the evil pheasant hunters and walks away with a few pheasants for dinner, in the short story an infant (in whose carriage the sleeping birds were hidden) is terrified by a cloud of pecking pheasants and the poachers resign themselves to a failed endeavor.
And so it goes for Dahl’s heroes: hoisted by their own petard, generally, with a real “n” shaped story line. Someone is down on their luck, plots himself into good fortune and then, inevitably, runs afoul of the laws of the universe. The form could get a little repetitive, and as a reader you quickly find yourself looking for the flaw in the plan, trying  to anticipate how a scheme to buy antiques off of unwitting farmers or extort money from widows or store one’s brain after death could go awry. But Dahl is really an enjoyable writer, and unfailingly just that much more clever than the protagonist and so the stories fly by but still evoke a pained wince at each final turn.
This collection also contains a very different genre of stories, from his collection “Over to You,” which are realistic (and presumably semi-autobiographical) recountings of British pilots during WWII. While they’re also well-written and richly characterized, I found myself skimming them in a haste to get back to the more dramatically ironic stories in the rest of the book.