Book Review Time: Chuck Palahniuk's Diary.

Just finished Diary by Chuck Palahniuk. Previously I'd read Choke and had seen Fight Club. That movie by the way is the first that made me consider Brad Pitt to be a serious actor, even if Ed Norton was better.

The thing I like about Palahniuk is that in every encounter I've had with his work, he does the same thing but in a different way: the truth is always shifting until you aren't sure in the end whether to trust the narrator or any of the characters. In fact you're often not sure what's real. His work really involves a critique of how we build our reality and of course the holes we necessarily suture over to make narratives out of life. It's a great theme, reminiscent of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 but not derivative.

The diary of the title, likewise, comes to mean more than one thing in the course of the novel. On one level, it indicates the chapter headings and occasional second person addresses in the text, but the "you" of those addresses is a comatose man, Peter Wilmot, whose wife, Misty Marie (Kleinman) Wilmot, is the novel's main character. The diary also refers to the journal Misty's mother-in-law keeps that appears to tell the future. It also could mean the chaotic ramblings that Peter left all over the walls of houses on which he did handyman work. A bit more abstractly, it refers to the seemingly random notes Misty discovers in library books and scrawled on the undersides of tables.

Further up the ladder of abstraction, the diary functions as a metaphor for the story of our lives -- the way we narrate ourselves to ourselves and try to make sense of what's happening to us as we move day by day closer to nonexistence. For Misty, the pieces don't fall in place until it's too late, and in some respects that's true for all of us: we are much better at analyzing the past than in predicting the future.

That Palahniuk makes Misty an artist (or more correctly, a former art school student who married a classmate and returned pregnant to his family's homestead on a coastal island -- I pictured something like Martha's Vineyard, but less populated and without much of the charm -- and has since been waiting tables and generally living the life of the working poor) who doesn't produce anything until her mother-in-law and several townspeople conspire to make her suffer physically and emotionally obviously forces the reader to think about the origin and production of art (the book's jacket features a large "Where do you get your inspiration?" slogan).

That the art itself isn't the object of the townspeople's desire, but is only a means to an end, also calls into question the uses of art in our society. I would argue that much of Palahniuk's work critiques consumer culture (e.g. Fight Club), and Diary could be seen as a swipe at the culture industry, in which cultural objects (like painting, literature, movies, etc) are merely commodities in which profit and loss are more important than "artistic value."

The book is engrossing and once I got fully behind it I had trouble putting it down. Palahniuk definitely understands how to put the pieces together to reveal enough to keep the reader's interest without revealing so much that the reader can figure it all out.

Next up (I think): Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (it sounds better in French: Du Côté de chez Swann)