Author: Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: Norton
Rating: WARTY!
Chuck Palahniuk evidently has a high opinion of himself. He seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the only person ever to grasp that fashion magazines are a far more insidious abuse of women than ever the porn industry dreams of being. I guess this explains why he wrote a truly ugly novel as a commentary on the 'physical beauty pandemic' which afflicts modern society, at least in the western world - and in those nations which foolishly seek to emulate us.
This is the second novel the author wrote. It was intended to be the first published, but it was rejected by the publisher "for being too disturbing" according to wikipedia. I agree with that assessment, but probably not for the same reasons. The original version came out in 1999, but it was not, apparently, the version the author wanted, hence his remix, released in 2012.
Some reviewers have commented that they've heard of "director's cuts" for movies, but never for novels. Clearly they haven't detected the rise of the self-publishing industry. And clearly they don't grasp that while we have director's cuts of movies, we never get a writer's cut - unless the writer is also the director.
The novel was never intended to be read linearly, apparently, and the remix was published to 'fix' this by adding some more material, and appending an instruction to the end of each chapter advising which chapter should be read next. Not only is his layout unlike that of real fashion magazines (and a host of other magazines which have nothing to do with fashion, I might add - as well as newspapers), it doesn't even address the real problem with fashion magazines whose sole purpose is to berate women for being ugly. 'Beautiful' in this case is defined as whatever the whim of the fashion magazine's editor is, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.
So Palahniuk's take on this not only misses the mark, it also misses even the rather clueless mark at which he does take aim. The novel's layout made absolutely no sense. I can see that it would make sense if this were written as a Choose Your Own Adventure style of book, wherein you're offered a variety of options on each page as to which page you should read next, dependent upon what kind of outcome you favor, but when there's only one choice, why not simply make that the next chapter? Why dictate that people must learn by rote what they already know (assuming they possess even a modest amount of gray matter) by imposing a forced march through his novel - literally going back and forth like a ping-pong ball, and ending in the middle? It's so farcical and pretentious that it forces us beyond ludicrous and into plaid.
And in the name of all that's holy, which moron came up with the idea of doing this for the audio-book version? And the Kindle? I'm not about to start disk-diving in a moving vehicle when I'm driving on a 65mph highway! I don't know of anyone other that the acutely perverse among us who would be seriously interested in jumping up and down to change out disks and seek tracks even if they were at home listening to this. Screw that for a self-tapping screw.
It only goes to prove that Big Publishing™ - the very evil against which Palahniuk supposedly rails - has its head only as far up its ass as Palahniuk does if he thinks he's making a statement here. Palahniuk has a dot net address yet does nothing with it. If he really wanted to make a statement in this manner, why not distribute his cobbled-together bits and pieces across the Internet and let people surf it? Now that would be an experience. Evidently Palahniuk would rather let his readers do the work as long as he can enjoy establishment benefits.
Believe it or not, that actually wasn't the first problem I had with this novel. I wasn't impressed - even before I reached the point of the author telling me exactly where to go - by the writing itself, or by the audio narration (which the author does himself along with a couple of other people). Jump this, Flash that simply was not entertaining. It was actually nothing but irritating, and it most certainly wasn't linear, even within each section, because the story started in the middle of something, and with no preamble and jumped every which way but loose from there on out. Maybe I should have started on the last track first, if this isn't linear? I must admit I was curious (for about the length of that thought) to see how it would read (listen!) if I loaded this onto an iPod shuffle and had it play randomly, but why would Palahniuk think of doing something like that when he can simply not?
I thought the author completely nailed the fatuous pretension of magazines like Vogue, insofar as he wrote a couple of paragraphs about it, but that doesn't take any deep insight. My own dislike of such magazines began right there on the cover, where the magazine title routinely obscures the model's forehead as if to assure us that's what behind there is completely unimportant, and instead we must focus solely on her pore-less skin. Although I admit that magazines seem to have learned their lesson from somewhere (not from me, I'm sure! I'm not that important!), since they appear to do this far less than they used to, it still happens.
Other than that I found nothing to like on disk one, but since I was doing this at the urging of a friend and at the time, had no other audio books to listen to, I intended to press on for at least two more disks. I'm such an addict! In the end I skipped the last part of disk one, hoping for disk two to be an improvement, but I became so quickly irritated with that, that I quit listening right there and returned the disk set to the library in short order. Let someone else suffer through it!
Normally I hold on to a disk set until the library has the next one available, even if I don't quite like it. It's a testimony to how much I disliked this, that I would rather go without than keep listening to it until a replacement arrived. Part of this wasn't just the text itself but the chalk on a blackboard reading voice of Anna Fields. It was awful! So, all-in-all, I cannot even remotely recommend this novel.
