Snuff | Chuck Palahniuk | "The Damaged Love the Damaged..."

Snuff | Chuck Palahniuk | My least favorite Palahniuk book.

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Snuff

	Snuff Chuck Palahniuk Doubleday, 2008 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 97 reviews view larger image
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"The Damaged Love the Damaged..."

An over-the-hill porn star wants to go out with a (gang) bang, so arranges for a world record effort with 600 stout and hearty fellows, brave and true. A few of this cast of hundreds are there for more than their allotted 60 seconds of, ah, contact with the legend. She has deep ulterior motives, as do each of the featured characters, and all of their twisted narratives come together in the concluding pages.

Someone is supposed to die as this event climaxes, and most of the folks know it, although their perceptions of the who, when and how don't quite match up. The plans go a bit off the rails, and everyone gets more or less what they deserve.

The main characters certainly have had enough of the world, with what they have made of it, with their fortunes having turned on single instances and bad choices, in this case almost all of them sexual. Most everyone is ragingly bitter and resentful, untrue and self-serving, bent on rectifying only their problems, regardless of effects on others. The story runs on damaged adults hurting others, intentionally and instinctively, out of selfishness and revenge, or even to manufacture a more compatible companion. It's about the need for fame, the need for redemption, the resentment of future lost, and the clawing need to retain one's perceived best position, all taking place in arena of porn, the "...job you only take after you abandon all hope."

This is not a novel about the sex industry, but there is some behind-the-scenes detail. Palahniuk's detailed portrait of the washed-up porn star Miss Cassie Wright is not as complete and detailed as I had anticipated. I don't know why, but every time I pictured her, a strange combination of Kitten Natividad and Lisa DeLeeuw came to mind. Ah, but I digress. She is more or less the central character, at least that around which all others and the main story revolve, but I was a tad disappointed in that we didn't get more from her. Much of this was necessary for plot purposes, but I thought we'd get a bit more inside her head, and hear a bit more about what Palahniuk has observed about the porn experience. Cassie is a treasure trove of obscure Hollywood factoids, though, all of them thoroughly fun and enlightening.

And Palahniuk has observed; he slips in what appears to me to be his description of things that come to him, "...a remarkably rarefied set of facts for anyone to reference offhand." It was obvious even in Fight Club with the details about automobile recalls that Palahniuk is a collector of slices of divergent existence and uncommon experience. He's fascinated by the edge of the road, and he collects the esoteric, fascinating and titillating tidbits, saving them for the right time to drop into a story. We saw a very straightforward collection of these experiences in Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. When it's time and the fit is right, these bits add depth to a character, provide the basis for a scene, or serve to power just a soliloquy. We got that in Survivor, with the Palahniuk's extended dissection of the blissful suffering stupor achieved on the Stairmaster. Such is the case here, and this time we get lots of insight on the directly physical aspects of manufacturing video pornography. Most of it has been covered, but Palahniuk manages to show us a few things that are new. We also get details about embalming, the chemical and physical processes of cyanide, and about the sacrifices Hollywood stars made for their careers--not for their craft, mind you, but for themselves.

Palahniuk records detail, and this brings the porn-shoot green room scene into a sharpness of focus that had me wanting to shower after reading. It is unflinching and close-in; I swear I could smell it.

The story has lots and lots of people in it, but only a handful get to speak. The story is all about them, which seems to me to close down the world a bit too tightly. As struck me reading Invisible Monsters, everyone is intertwined, closely and disgustingly, but it seems a bit too close, that everyone is that tied and related a tad too easily. It works to keep the story tight, of course, but it seems that social groups are just not that tight.

Palahniuk's porn-title takes on classic film and literature titles is good fun, with dozens of them sprinkled throughout the book. My personal favorite, unfortunately, is not reproducible in this venue. If anything, just this exercise must have been inspiration enough to bring forth the novel.

The font is large and the pages relatively small; at 197 pages the book reads quickly, in short chapters of about 7-8 pages. Each chapter is the voice and POV of one of the characters, which takes a bit of adjustment. Most can read it all in 3-4 hours. There is very little raw, graphic sex, but lots of descriptions of the business, how things are done. The adult language is profuse and completely liberated; readers put off by profanity need not go on this ride. The language is not clinical, but, ah, straightforward and non-euphemistic professional language for what is brought to the table, and what is then done on the table, under it, with the legs of the table, with the guys who delivered it, their friends, etc.

Bottom line: I enjoyed this story, another off the wall Palahniuk tale populated with thoroughly original characters in a story for which I had no kind of previous reference. It took me to a new and unpredictable situation, with interesting albeit unpleasant characters, in a story that delivers where it counts, right in the end.

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My least favorite Palahniuk book.

You can never go wrong with a Palahniuk book. All of his storeis are so unique and interesting. Snuff just really didn't keep me interested. It's still good. But nowhere near as good as any of his other books.

A rawnchy 3.5 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.

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