Salon has published a vicious broadside aimed at Chuck “Fight Club” Palahniuk, a brilliant and savage novelist whose new book, Diary, has just been published.
I just started reading Palahniuk this year, with Survivor, but once I’d read that, I sought out every one of his novels and read them one after another. His got the glibness and popcult sensibility of Douglas Coupland, the drunken-master prose of William S Burroughs, and the ferocity of Charles Bukowski. Can’t wait to read Diary, even though Salon panned it — the reviewer admits up front that she hates all of Palahniuk’s books, so it’s a little mysterious as to why she’d decide to pick up his latest…
The latest is “Diary,” the story of Misty Marie Wilmot, who works as a waitress on a tourist-plagued island off the New England coast. Peter, her building-contractor husband, lies in a coma after a suicide attempt. Early on, it’s fairly obvious that Misty’s 13-year-old daughter and mother-in-law are colluding with the rest of the island’s old-family residents in a homicidal plot to drive the tourists away by forcing Misty to become a painter. Misty, however, remains clueless about this despite everyone’s egregiously suspicious, “Rosemary’s Baby”-style behavior and despite the fact that shortly before Peter shut himself up in the garage with the car motor running, he went around scrawling graffiti about the plot in the houses of his clients, then walling off the vandalized rooms to make it look as if they’d never existed. (By the way, the car now smells like urine.)