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.

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