Hauntingly Close

(Warning: this entry might very possibly spoil bits of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Haunted.)

My exposure to Chuck Palahniuk consists of Survivor, Choke, the movie of Fight Club and most recently Haunted. I saw Fight Club long after most people did — in the summer of 2003 to be exact — and long after it had passed from "really cool man" to "trite" in most people's eyes, but I was always a late bloomer and I really loved it and almost started to buy into the idea that what Tyler Durden did was really cool and we should all be more like Tyler before I realized that my life as a Dartmouth sophomore would be rather dramatically disrupted by Tyler's ideas of sweeping social change.

I like to think I've matured a little since then.

After I'd read Survivor and Choke, though, I noticed that there was a very definite pattern to Palahniuk's novels, from the self-destructive main character with a gimmick to the equally self-destructive love interest to the bizarre combination of events leading up to a giant finale with firecrackers. While it worked in Fight Club and Survivor, I thought it was getting a bit strained by Choke, possibly because Palahniuk was running out of new and different variations on the gimmick and the concluding fireworks.

Haunted is different.

The most obviously different thing is the structure. It's subtitled something like "a novel of stories" and the main (novella length) story is supplemented by a series of short stories and vignettes written by the characters as well as poems by (presumably) the narrator about each of the other characters. There are other differences as well: the narrator is not a prominent character in the story at all, is never named, and never really seems to take part. There's no obvious love interest to turn into a means of salvation at the end. There are many more characters than Palahniuk's novels usually have, and they're all developed mainly through the stories they write, leaving the main story simply describing events.

They don't escape.

One of the characteristics, I had noticed, of a Chuck Palahniuk novel was what could be called the god-less salvation at the end. No matter what his characters have gone through, by the end of the story the main character and his love interest are standing together, flying their banner of fuck the world we can make it ourselves and generally looking pretty well set to do that. At the end of Haunted, the characters have not found a salvation, have not necessarily gotten close to salvation, and are still patiently waiting for a salvation that I, at least, was not convinced would ever come. It gives the novel a more biting feel than most of Palahniuk's; it moves from simply being a satire of modern life (and, in this particular case, reality television) to being a condemnation.

It also felt flat.

I don't know if those are related, but in leaving the characters without any hope, I thought it also left the reader without a real sense of why he'd read the book. The characters were all fairly miserable people — not unusual for Palahniuk — but instead of seeing that there's some hope for them, he leaves them in the midst of their problems, and I wasn't sure why he'd dragged me along for the ride if that was all he had to offer.

To me, Haunted was very close to being the condemnation of the reality television culture that, to some of us, America needs. In the end, though, it was almost too much of a condemnation, giving no sign that there was any alternative to that culture, no reason for hope, no reason to do anything but find our own bunkers and wait out the fall.