Salon‘s Laura Miller lays the hurt on Chuck Palahniuk. I’ll concede that his books all have the same (over-stylized) voice and can get repetitive and tiresome after awhile, but I don’t think he’s as bad as all that…more like trashy pleasure reading for the misanthropically-inclined. I’ll take him over most light fiction any day of the week…In fact, I just picked up Lullaby for the flight home.
2 thoughts on “Taking Fight Club Down a Notch.”
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I’ve read two Palahniuk books and I enjoyed them to some extent, though I’ll confess I wasn’t all that impressed. But I’m inclined to agree with you. If you’re going to dog Palahniuk, you may as well go after Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo, Jack Womack or any of the other testosterone-heavy novelists riding the threshold between shock pop and slick lit. I think the article might have been provked by Laura Miller wanting to maintain her credibility now that she has a regular gig in the Sunday NYT Book Review section.
Not sure what Mrs Miller was expecting.
Most reviews I’ve read in the other hemisphere have appreciated Palahniuk’s deliberatley exhaustingly intricate narrative style.
Dito on Brett Easton Ellis, et al.
All I’d groan about, was all the ‘these noise-aholics’ etc ad infinitum, in the otherwise perfectly head scratching ‘Lullaby’.