Today’s Most Under-Appreciated Writer: Chuck Palahniuk

No one’s arguing that Palahniuk’s not successful or popular: his books sell and have been adapted into other formats, and even some folks who label him as a gonzo shock artist typically name-check Fight Club as a movie they love. But when it comes to the actual quality of Palahniuk’s writing there are plenty of detractors. When Damned came out a few years ago, GQ ran an article titled “The Seven Worst Sentences From the New Novel, Damned.” More than a decade ago, Salon’s Laura Miller greeted Palahniuk’s 2003 novel Diary with an angry introduction parodying his style and a line-by-line critique of some perceived errors in that and earlier books.
The hate, it burns. And yet, we will stand here right now and say it plainly: not only is Chuck Palahniuk an underrated writer, he’s actually one of the best writers of his generation. His recent collection of short stories, Make Something Up, proves that he’s a better stylist and a more coherent plotter than his detractors give him credit for. What throws many, in fact, is his unique (some would say idiosyncratic) style, which is easily misinterpreted as lazy in its minimalism, and the fact that he often employs it in the service of unappealing imagery, unlikable characters, and unbelievable situations. But where a writer like Pynchon or even Stephen King explores unsavory and often implausible stories by piling on pages of description, Palahniuk leaves that to his reader. He keeps it simple, and that makes the awfulness of his subjects and characters stand out much more. His style isn’t minimalist because he’s a careless hack (although he has admitted to writing at least one of his novels in ten days flat), but because it’s part of a complex strategy he employs to attain a specific reaction. He employs three main weapons used to keep the reader off-balance and achieve surprising complexity with an economy of words.
I Am Joe’s Repetition of Phrases

Repetition is a word that often comes with negative baggage. If something is repetitious, it is understood to be boring: returning to the same ideas and tricks over and over again. It’s true that in a lot of bad writing employs repetitious phrasing and dialog.
Palahniuk’s work is often tagged as repetitious. And it is repetitious, but not in the way his detractors believe. Just because a phrase or construction or image is used over and over again doesn’t mean it’s the author not bothering to do the hard work of coming up with a “fresh” way to say something; repetition can also be used to establish a rhythm, to cement a concept or image in the reader’s mind, or to link two otherwise disparate aspects of the novel together, if only subconsciously. When the phrase “I am Joe’s Prostate” shows up early in Fight Club, it’s one of many examples of the bland, corporate-controlled universe the unnamed Narrator is living in—the phrase comes from Reader’s Digest, after all, a periodical not only overwhelmingly conservative but also targeted at people for whom reading is a chore they must “condense.”
When the phrase is echoed later, over and over again (as in, “I am Joe’s Inflamed Flaring Nostrils”) some find it to be an annoying tic, precisely the sort of coal-black deadpanning that high school students and hipsters fall in love with—one of those phrases that sounds meaningful but really isn’t.
But it also connects that bland corporate world to the Narrator’s new existence as he descends into what is revealed to be (spoiler alert for a 20-year-old novel) mental illness and paranoid delusion so intense, it’s basically a superpower. It could be interpreted, in fact, as a clue to the Narrator’s new existence: where once corporate America dictated what the Narrator thought and read, now his imaginary-friend-cum-split-personality Tyler Durden is doing the same. The vocabulary shifts, but the phrasing and construction are the same, and it’s repetition makes us wonder if anything has actually changed.
And again, the phrasing is cool. Not many authors manage to cook up bits that are as endlessly quotable and malleable while they also do hard work in the narrative.
The Burnt Tongue

Palahniuk has talked about his style and his influences in interviews and in formal writing seminars, and one of the key things he discusses is his use of the “burnt tongue,” a purposeful mangling of phrasing and sentence structure to create awkward, stumbling phrases most readers find difficult to parse. This is done to slow down the reader and force them to actually think through the words. The strategy is designed like prose speed bumps: you have to feel every word.
Let’s take a sentence from Palahniuk’s 1999 novel, Survivor: “Today is just one of those days the sun comes out to really humiliate you.” At first glance it’s just a sentence with a neat little poetry to it, assigning agency to the sun and efficiently communicating a mood. When you read it, though, it’s kind of clunky: the repetition of “day” is a stumbling block, and the insertion of “really” is unnecessary and kind of ugly. Read it fast and it all goes haywire—you skim over it and get no meaning from it. You have to go back and parse it a little more carefully.
Or this sentence from Haunted: “Her dress, swimsuit-tight, leotard-tight, her pantyhose run with women pedaling bicycles going nowhere at a thousand calories an hour.” To be fair, in the context of the book this line is from a poem, so some of its clunky complexity can be attributed to a bad poet reaching for gravity, but it’s still a line that slows you down. The second comparison is unnecessary (“swimsuit-tight” is a perfectly effective image) and that last phrase is almost impossible to parse on first glance. Palahniuk knows that readers have a tendency to skim, to push quickly through parts of a story that aren’t exciting, and he throws these ugly sentences at you to slow you down.
The Neutral Tone

Another complaint about Palahniuk’s writing is that the “Voice” is flat. This sometimes extends to the characters being very similarly presented between books, or as far as claiming his books all sound the same. But the neutral tone is purposeful: Palahniuk is seeking to present his characters without judgment. He calls this the “recording Angel,” which endeavors to describe to the reader what’s happening and what characters are thinking without passing judgment on them. It’s sort of like the journalistic approach: report the facts, and let the reader decide what they mean.
This allows Palahniuk to present all of his unsavory characters and their frequently horrifying behavior while maintaining a distance that forces the reader to consider them without recourse to an opinion about the author. If Palahniuk implied an opinion about the things he presents in his books, it would be a simple matter to dismiss him as a sensationalist, or, perhaps a creep working through his own issues or obsessions. But the distance he employs via the flat tone of the writing means readers can’t do that. They must come up with their own conclusions. If they enjoy or are repulsed by what they’re reading, they have to own it as their own opinion, without blaming the author.
Palahniuk employs repetition in the service of recalling the unsavory actions and thoughts of his characters, which, combined with the lack of judgment, forces readers to confront their own reactions instead of taking sides with either the authorial voice or the narrative voices of the characters. He doesn’tt hint at how you’re supposed to feel about a man who dies after eating several full freeze-dried meals that then expand in his stomach, causing him to burst. He simply reports the series of events that lead to this horrible image, and then stands there mutely tapping his finger on the scene until you make up your mind.
The Ugly

It’s a good moment to note that the argument here is not that you should enjoy Palahniuk’s spectacles of absurdity and awfulness. It’s perfectly legitimate to decide you don’t need to read about another dysfunctional weirdo in a joyless mirror universe who has special skills he proceeds to apply in disturbing ways. You don’t have to enjoy Palahniuk’s work in the same way you don’t have to enjoy reading horror novels if you’d rather not.
The argument is that Palahniuk is an artist, and a subtle one at that. The “all singing, all dancing crap of the world” he utilizes isn’t artless shock, it’s a refined approach to telling stories that has evolved into something not only powerful, but uniquely his, much in the way Hemingway’s style is instantly recognizable.
This is the perfect time to view Palahniuk in a new light. Pick up a copy of Make Something Up and read it with an open mind, and see how he uses these techniques even in his shorter work. It’s a chance to examine an evolving artist in real time, and to see past a surface skin of grotesquery and appreciate the style beneath.