Given Chuck Palahniuk's relentless wallowing in gross-out
stories tied to taboo subjects—the man who accidentally disembowels
himself while masturbating in Haunted,
say, or the extended segment on menstrual-pad "pussy prints" in Rant—even hardcore fans can be forgiven for approaching
his latest novel, Snuff, with
trepidation. A porn superstar trying to break a record by fucking 600 men in a
row… How could Palahniuk not wring out that subject for its full sticky, messy
worth? And yet, while Snuff is
recognizably Palahniuk, drenched in body fluids, shocking trivia tidbits, and
neurosis-collection characters, it's also surprisingly sweet and funny. Maybe
that's because he kept it so short and simple that he didn't leave himself room
to spread out and get really nasty. So to speak.
Snuff alternates
between four viewpoint characters. One is Sheila, personal assistant to porn
queen Cassie Wright, and mastermind behind the 600-dudes video. The other three
are men who responded to a cattle call, were numbered in indelible ink, and are
standing around in their skivvies, waiting to be summoned to Cassie's well-lit
bed. "Mr. 72" is a desperate young man who grew up obsessed with Cassie, both
as a sex object and as his possible birth mother. "Mr. 137" is a former TV star
hoping for a little positive publicity. And "Mr. 600" is a porn star himself,
an aging, blown-out has-been who hasn't yet realized that he's on the downhill
side of his peak.
Typical for a
Palahniuk book, all four of these perspectives read about the
same—they're all full of digressionary musings and factoid flashes about,
for instance, the horrible beauty secrets of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe.
All four protagonists are also full of rapidly emerging secrets that bind them
together; if the action wasn't so tremendously internal, Snuff would read
like a one-act play. It unfolds in a quick, sprightly way over the course of
barely 200 pages, touching on incest, Viagra overdose symptoms, and a whole lot
of punny porn-film names (Chitty Chitty Gang Bang, The Blow
Jobs Of Madison County, Sperms Of Endearment, etc.), but
mostly just building a multifaceted picture of a seemingly ugly scene that
covers some surprisingly high-minded motivations. It's hard to say this is
Palahniuk's best book since Fight Club, because it's such an airy fillip
of a book, a jumped-up short story without the knotty plottiness of Lullaby or Survivor. But it's the
most fun he's been in a long time, without the sense of sickly, grotesque
one-upmanship and morbidity that so often plagues his work.