In a post-thesis high, I read the new Chuck Palahniuk book. Good or bad, I always plow through his books in a couple of days. This one, like most of his recent novels, was on the bad side of the spectrum. It's okay. Better than the last couple, I guess. Recently he's on this kick of building into his novels some meta-fictional justification of the novel, meaning he tries to "convince" the reader that this is not a fictional text but an actual history. I don't really get the point of that. It's never convincing and it comes across as gimmicky, usually underscoring the flawed logic of a fictional piece rather than making it more believable.
Like many of his novels, this one had a lot of plot twists. But in this one the plot twists didn't just alter the plot, they altered the entire novel. It was too jarring. Suddenly you're reading a novel about zombies. Then it's about class warfare. Then it's about the erotic thrill of car crashing ala Ballard. Then it's about TIME TRAVEL. I mean, what the heck? It was intriguing, but way too contrived. When plot twists get too radical they stop being clever and surprising but instead become concepts that the author is forcing onto the reader. I was never surprised because there was not enough setup.
I got the feeling that, like his last novel Haunted, Palahniuk was making use of existing short stories to beef up the text. They are slightly more integrated in this book, but still I'm suspicious. For example, every chapter is told via rotating view points (it's an "oral history") except for one chapter, which is a five page, single-view point discussion about some new direct-input-video technology. It's then mentioned later in the text and he tried to work it into the plot, but it's a weak connection. I feel like that chapter is just a way to either (a) make use of an existing short story, and/or (b) drop in one more clever plot point that doesn't really tie into the whole novel.
As always, I enjoy reading his books because they are fun and interesting and different, but if it took me longer than two days to get through them I wouldn't bother.
