“Fight Club” and “Choke” author comes to Asheville with “Tell-All”
by Rob Neufeld
Also, see interview.
For the second time in six months, Malaprop’s Bookstore has had to move an author program to the Asheville High School auditorium to accommodate a huge turnout. In October, it had been Barbara Kingsolver; and this coming Saturday at 7 p.m., it’s Chuck Palahniuk, author of “The Fight Club” and ten subsequent novels, including his latest, Tell-All.
Palahniuk’s appearance is of special note because there’s no Appalachian or Southern connection, as with Kingsolver, half of whose recent novel, “The Lacuna,” takes place in Asheville.
“What brings you to Asheville?” I asked Palahniuk (pronounced PALL-ih-nik) in a recent interview. “The company told me where I need to be,” he said. “Random House has some mysterious system involving incentives and rewards.”
The mystery of Palahniuk’s trip to Asheville—as part of an eight-city tour that otherwise gets no closer than Chicago—is partly answered by Asheville’s and Palahniuk’s edginess. In a career that has explored the horrors through which characters go in attempts to break through alienation, he has feared no taboos.
Tell-All
Tell-All explores the syndrome of celebrity. The narrator, Hazie Cooper, a homely woman, had latched onto the stunning actress, Katherine Kenton, at the beginning of her career. Hazie becomes the manager and lead manipulator of “Miss Kathie” in a plot that swirls with screenplays, gossip, and the sex-and-glamour-filled hype of tabloids and tell-all biographies.
Palahniuk had gotten the idea for the story at the filming of “Choke,” the 2008 movie based on his 2001 novel. “I was talking to Sam Rockwell, who was telling me about being in a Brad Pitt movie about Jesse James, and he stopped himself mid-sentence and said, ‘Listen to me. Blah-blah-blah. Brad Pitt blah-blah-blah.’ It sounded like he had some name-dropping form of Tourette’s Syndrome.”
“And then,” Palahniuk continued, “I was in a cab maybe an hour later with a publishing executive, who was talking about the number of biographies that they had on ice…At the moment certain celebrities died, a final chapter would be slapped on these books, and the books would arrive in bookstores within a week of the celebrities’ deaths. The idea of that kind of jackal culture was fascinating to me.”
Intrigue and farce
The “blah-blah-blahs” made their way into “Tell-All” as animal sounds that accompany name-dropping. Biography-writing provides the core of the plot, for it’s nearly everybody’s game in Palahniuk’s book of intrigue, which is also a parody and a farce.
“You need to be careful,” Terrence Terry, Miss Kathie’s fourth husband, warns her as he sees the “vultures circling.” “That pack of stage-door hyenas,” the commentary continues, “waited on Mae West to die. They phoned Lelia Goldoni, hoping for bad news…Most were already finagling introductions to Ruth Donnelly and Geraldine Fitzgerald.”
“I wanted to know the generalized story arc of a female star of that period,” Palahniuk explained, “so I read dozens of biographies—Bette Davis, Joan, Crawford, Gene Tierney. I saw how each of them moved from obscurity through a series of discoveries, successes, failures, marriages, and how ultimately their lives ended in some kind of horror and pathos, and how the very tail ends of their lives were tawdry and awful compared to the glory of the beginnings. That allowed me to map out what Katherine Kenton’s rise and story arc would be.”
The Palahniuk touch
So far, the story sounds pointed and deep, but not terribly edgy. So, you’ve got to add the Palahniuk touch, which is to push both the form and the fiction as far as they can go toward mythic shock, even if it is at the expense of expansive character development.
The novel begins, “Act one, scene one opens with Lillian Hellman clawing her way, stumbling and scrambling, through the thorny nighttime underbrush of some German schwarzwald, a…brood of infants clinging to her back.”
Hellman is the heroine of screenplays that Miss Kathie reads. Palahniuk takes Hellman’s self-mythologizing memoirs to an outrageous level. In a later scene, Hellman fixes John Glenn’s Friendship 7 in outer space, and then has sex with him in zero gravity.
Hellman’s name is in boldface type in Palahniuk’s text, as are all notable names, mimicking the practice of doing so in gossip columns. Since the narrator, Hazie, and Katherine’s new beau are both writing scripts about Katherine Kenton, the fantasies blur to the point where little seems real.
Does Miss Kathie play host to placement agencies, which parade a succession of foundlings, whom Miss Kathie tries to match to her décor? Does she have a “mirror of Dorian Gray,” which shows the marks of aging she manages to erase from her body?
Appalachian connection
Palahniuk’s horror stories are not to be confused with the pessimism that pervaded Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” in the late 1950s and early 60s. Palahniuk is an optimist of a sort. He’d related more, in his life, to the movies of the 1970s—“Rocky “ and “The Bad News Bears,” for instance, in which the characters are brutalized and embrace, in the end, humble victories.
I told Chuck about the Southern Appalachian novelists who write historical novels in which community and individuality work pretty happily together. “Do you know,” Palahniuk responded, “who used to write for ‘Twilight Zone’? Earl Hamner, the guy from “The Waltons” [his novels were the basis of John-Boy’s stories]. He grew up to write for ‘The Twilight Zone.’”
Book reviewed:
Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk (Doubleday hardcover, 2010, 188 pages, $24.95).
EVENT: Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café presents Chuck Palahniuk on the occasion of his tenth novel,
Tell-All, at Asheville High School, 7 p.m., Sat., May 8. Tickets are $30 plus tax and include a signed copy of “Tell All.” To get tickets, stop by the store, call 1-800-441-9829, or order online at
www.malaprops.com.
