Snuff
by Chuck Palahniuk
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Book Reviews of Snuff
Book Review: Grand Guignol meets Google.
Summary: 2 Stars
An Onion news article headline from the archive reads: "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People." Substitute Chuck Palahniuk's name and that sentiment probes more deeply into the author behind SNUFF than this "novel" ever does.
Chuck Palahniuk has a new punchline to share. Or aptly, in the case of SNUFF, a money shot. Viscera, the macabre, and white-knuckling, ankle-breaking over-the-topness are its default settings.
His latest punchline, as always, is designed to Shock!(tm). But in reality it amounts to a button that doesn't need much pushing in order to gain a response that doesn't require much wit or courage to elicit. It's a sweaty, overcooked, Captain Obvious overture to the cheap seats.
To get his hoary money shot, Palahniuk reverse-engineers another shaggy dog tale to lead us to it (which, at 197 pages, isn't that shaggy a dog, or very much of a tale, at all).
As Palahniuk labors to make his point (banging against the narrative's sides along the way), he packs it with phylo-dough characterizations, recites scads of Googling research, jams in a reversal or two, channels M. Night Shyamalan's ZINGER!(tm) mojo, then sticks his limp tail on the wheezing donkey with an anti-climatic "gotcha!"
Finally, he slaps on a provocative, monosyllabic title bound to titillate someone, somewhere. And then he goes door-to-door (or on Amazon) to peddle the it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Two books ago HAUNTED charted over 400 pages. His last book, RANT, cleared 300. SNUFF can't even muster 200; it disconnects at 197 and with a multi-tiered denoument it could have been even brisker. At this rate Palahniuk's next offering will be a visceral, button-pushing reduction in haiku- or fortune cookie riddle form that Doubleday hardcovers for $24.95.
SNUFF is (ostensibly) about porn. But there's precious little "there" there that someone's conception of porn hasn't already assumed as truth. SNUFF's structure is a lot like the imagined & stereotypical porn star: a obscenely caricatured thong-flossed shape; piercings in dark places & taboo tattoos in visible ones; sculpted with man-made materials like silicone, hair dye, and bronzer; spackled with makeup to mask a weak, awkward face and brittle bones, with no sparkle, heart, or soul behind dead doll eyes.
SNUFF, like most of Palahniuk's work, is a wonky Rube Goldbergian delivery system that tunnelvisions to a Shock!(tm) ending. Characters and situations in SNUFF are contrived to within an inch of their lives. It's all checkers on a board moved out of the way, his blueprint for the sake of Shock!(tm) reading like Sherman's March through the story.
Because of the hamhock fisting, there's a choppy, uneven rhythm and overlapping repetition as if the editor overcut every other page, and each character makes a running start with the last chapter before gaining new ground on their own.
The story is told from four different first-person POV's - three men and one woman - but their voices sound the same. All are interchangeable bundles of surface noise, tics, quirks and manic wackness. All are spiritless underneath. Emperor, meet your new clothes. Curtain, pay no attention to the wizard hunched behind you.
This choice of first person is terrible, since it means we're stuck wearing Palahniuk's sandwich board agenda. Everyone's a cipher for his slang (FYI, not everyone refers to their index or pointer finger as a "gun finger"). Everyone's chronically reciting obsessive/compulsive data points like they're living Google search engines looking up Palahnuik's keywords.
Anyone can parrot back party game lists ("euphemisms for male masturbation"), or riff on funny porno titles based on Hollywood movies. This isn't characterization, and it isn't even that interesting research after the first dozen instances.
(And to say that since they are all drawn this way on purpose to emphasize that they are in an amoral, heartless, and soulless circle of hell is a crutchy and narcissistic copout- like Bill Shatner's girdle-wearing in Star Trek).
The biggest tragedy is that the most interesting character - the one whose head I most wanted to be inside, the one I could forgive if she sounded the most like Chuck Palahniuk - is the pornstar punchline herself, Candy Wright, who spends the majority of the narrative in the other room and filtered through the other characters like a game of Telephone.
The irony is that Palahniuk should BE a screenwriter. I still think his best novel is the film version of FIGHT CLUB. SNUFF reads like it's in the wrong format, or that it's a treatment for his screenplay. It probably is. A lot of this book's problems could have been solved if it becomes a movie. I'd likely I'd fast-forward it on my DVD player instead of skimming its pages because it would take less time.
Book Review: Something to tide us over...
Summary: 3 Stars
Snuff is not for everybody. Those who have never read a Chuck Palahniuk novel will probably not enjoy the story or the way it is presented while others may be drawn to the subject matter alone. "Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages." Come on, it's about porn! Palahniuk fans will certainly enjoy this short tirade that seems more like a novella than an actual novel. Snuff is Chuck's shortest novel to date. Fact. Every single letter is in brown ink! Fact. It certainly does not take away from the aesthetic feel but it may come as a surprise to some when they first begin reading though it is not immediately noticeable.
Overall, Snuff is not a bad story at all, Chuck has just put himself in a bad spot with his previous novels. He has raised the bar to such great heights with novels such as Fight Club, Haunted, and Survivor that fans may see Snuff more as something of a writing exercise, rather than a true piece of accomplished work. Opting for a multi-character narrative, the storytelling is different from his other books. There is very little dark humor, instead, the humor in Snuff is much more apparent; not that it's a bad thing, just a little different than usual. It wouldn't be fair to completely bad mouth this book. It certainly does have its golden moments. Each character definitely breathes and acts Palahniuk but everything just seems a bit toned down. For a book about pornography, it seems pretty tame. It still does have its gross-out moments but about ¾ of the novel is spent inside the green room. The entire experience does seem to have a life of its own and the descriptions are nicely depicted, making it easy for readers to picture the room.
There is a great deal of suspense during each narrative and though the chapter titles claim that a different character is narrating, it doesn't always feel unique to the specific character. Sure, one may repeatedly use the word "dude" and another may repeatedly be carrying a stuffed animal but thought-process-wise, they all think alike. Every single character in the book seems to be a walking trivia machine and though that may be synonymous to Palahniuk's style, it just detracts from the authenticity of the story. The shortness of Snuff also seems to alienate us from any of the four main characters. Though we do spend a lot of time in the green room with each character, it just doesn't last long enough for us to feel attached to any of them.
There are a few plot twists but they are all mildly predictable. Anyone who has seen a soap opera in the past month or watched an episode of Family Matters will know what to expect on the next page. The ending is a bit unexpected and true to Palahniuk's signature style but it also feels a little far-fetched. Then again, this is only a book and not real life. Some stuff needs to be far from the truth; nobody wants to read about the mundane reality of life. Palahniuk claims to have already completed the first draft for his next novel Pygmy so Snuff can arguably be passed off as something to tide us over for the wait. Though it is short, somewhat predictable at spots, and a bit tame for what it is depicting; it is full of humor, wonderful trivia, plot twists, and memorable quotes. This book may not win any awards but it certainly will be mentioned in the years to come and you will be glad to have read it.
Book Review: Snuff, As In "Not Quite Up To"
Summary: 3 Stars
No amount of bad reviews will stop a Palahniuk fan from buying one of his books. I oughta know. I'm one of those fans.
I'm the first to admit that Palahniuk is a one-trick pony, but let's face it, it's a pretty good trick. There are times where it has worn thin, and others where it has struck gold. Essentially, Chuck (may I call you Chuck?) takes a few premises, milks the gastric juices out of them, and tries to blend a cocktail with a little social or psychological merit.
SNUFF, a brisk biopsy of porn, has all the trademark Palahniuk panache, but very little of his elusive elan. Chuck's not what you would call very nice to most of his characters, but buried under vivid piles of meat and blood, they still have hearts, and souls, and yens. Chuck shows us their voids, and whether or not they fill them, somehow we still manage to care.
There are lots of voids in SNUFF, and they get filled in gruesome and graphic detail, but none of them are very much other than raw, pointless wounds. The story, about an aging porn star who wants to break records with a 600-man gang bang, grasps at a few emotional straws -- failed parents and failed dreams -- but never really holds on tightly enough for any of it to matter. It's very much a "going through the motions" installment.
The motions themselves are alright, I suppose, although some of them are bizarrely out of place. Chuck's books are, if anything, catalogues of the grotesque and the arcane, but he usually manages to find some way, eloquently or not, to tie them all together. Here, some of it works (the macabre celebrity factoids and embalment techniques), but some of it is just plain pointless (see the several pages devoted to prison tattoos).
In fact, these little literary curios mostly get in the way. Chuck sets almost the entire story in the basement of the studio set where the film (World Whore Three) is being filmed. But even this limited scenery is very vaguely described. And the five main characters that compose the story (Mr. 600, Mr. 137, Mr. 72, the "wrangler," and the starlet) are equally vague personalities, people who stutter alike, who regurgitate odd-ball trivia at the drop of a hat, and who -- in spite of their gaping holes and yens -- don't inspire much in the way of either sympathy or concern. Mostly, they give Chuck a chance to come up with as many goofy porn movie titles he can, or the opportunity to utilize every single euphemism he can find or think up for the word "masturbator."
It's not a bad book, given what most Palahniuk fans will want or expect, and parts of it are downright hilarious. It's slimy, sick, and will teach you new and interesting ways to exfoliate your face (try cold, used coffee grounds). Unfortunately, that's about it. For a book that deals with such fleshy concerns, it's a shame Chuck didn't try harder to get under the skin.
Book Review: A rawnchy 3.5 stars
Summary: 3 Stars
Chuck Palahniuk is a really talented writer whom I fear will have his works misinterpreted. For on the one hand, he has quite a knack for delivering a superficial, though by no means trivial, raging masculinity among his characters. The feeling of empowerment he creates within such characters is tangible, though on the other hand his ability to subtly mock them, and create an air of absurdity around their every action is also very nuanced. Thereby his works appeal both to the crowd looking for a quick fix of titillation and/or depravity as well as those attempting to derive meaning and not merely enjoyment from such instances.
I'm feeling particularly smug for using the word 'titillation' in reference to his latest book, Snuff. For on the one hand it really is an exploration into how many clever titles one can think of for pornographizing Hollywood movie titles and depicting the described "instances of sex" within an atypical adult movie production. Conversely, Palahniuk masterfully speculates upon the traces, steps, and circumstances of one's decisions to appear in such a production, as well as the terminology and variety of colorful archetypes one may find quite literally hanging around the production set.
This particular story is about the interaction of a group of characters temporarily sequestered from the adult film star attempting to smash the record for "instances of sex" in one, her final, farewell movie appearance. Waiting for their respective turn, Palahniuk weaves these characters' background into a humorous and intriguing dialogue of opportunism, degeneracy, chivalry, and desperation. We are introduced to four characters, Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and Sheila, the "talent wrangler" and assistant to the star, coordinating the project. Without going into too much detail, we catch a glimpse of differing motivation and lifestyle among the characters: young and innocent, resigned and marginalized, and the proudly, cruelly, and ignorantly self-centered.
Suffice it to say, what happens next is pure Palahniuk. If there's anything consistent about his style, it's that he most likely despises any sort of formulaic, contrived structure to the story. Though he may have a slight fixation of the role of the mother in some of his works, he doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to providing comfy closure for his players or readers.
In any case, not only does Palahniuk vividly illustrate the rawness of the adult industry in this book, he conveys the collective discomfort of Hollywood as a whole, one desperate character at a time. In the process demonstrating an existential absurdity that's both entertaining and meaningful.
Book Review: "Rant" spoiled it for me
Summary: 2 Stars
Here's the main thing about this book (for me at least); it came out at a horrible time in this author's career. If Palahniuk might've released this a couple years ago, I might've really enjoyed it and gotten into it a lot more. Unfortunately, his previous novel "Rant" was my favorite book by Chuck (neck in neck with Haunted, but Rant just did it for me) and one of my favorites of all time. It's just tough to top something so extraordinary.
Snuff lacked the social allusions that many of his other novels are filled with. Rant makes you think about the tooth fairy, easter bunny, and santa now as being complete lies, each one step further than the other in making us believe things so out of reality. Haunted preyed upon human weakness and emotion, and Survivor alluded to corporate America and how it can destroy someone so quickly (obviously there are many other themes at work, these were just some I remembered off the top of my head). Snuff however, really never went anywhere with the whole porn theme. Palahniuk may have touched on the things people do to look beautiful, but (to me) that just seems lacking on some great points he brought across in previous works.
Finally, Palahniuk may be one of the only authors I've read where I actually have had to put a book down for a second because of the extreme squeamish/disturbing content (ie: ALL OF HAUNTED, or the plastic surgery part in Invisible monsters). When I hear a book about a girl "doing" 600 guys, I'm thinking he might've gone too far. Except nothing 'that bad' really happens. Sure there's bizarre acts and a rather humorous ending, but it was just lacking.
Again, I wish Palahniuk would've flip-flopped this and Rant. Rant seems like an obliterated mess of interviews about this 'larger-than-life' superhero of a redneck boy, his adventures of getting high off bug bites, a rabies infection, and party crashing, a new sport. Rant then completely knocked me out of my socks when it reveals it's greater 'meaning'. Snuff didn't do any of that for me.
Palahniuk is a phenomenal author, and every author can't produce A+ books every time. It's alright, I still love you Chuck and I'd still recommend this book. It's just not up to par with some of his previous works.
PS. This is my review and the world is a big place with differing opinions.