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Book Review: Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby

More eccentrics, loners and people with bad jobs.

by A. Hung | 2002.10.19

Chuck Palahniuk is either a genius or a very bad writer, and unfortunately it's not always easy to tell immediately. What I think he is, though, is a PoMo writer wannabe who's a closet sell-out; someone who's sitting astride the fence of art and entertainment, trying to decide what he prefers. Palahniuk had his first hit with Fight Club and has been riding on a similar formula every since. Five books later, he still hasn't produced anything fresh or new. Palahniuk's portfolio reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons when Homer becomes the newest hot artist in town after his failed attempt to build a grill was hailed as a piece of art; and he tries to repeat the same formula repeatedly because that's all he knew how to do. Fortunately, Homer does create something of great scope by the end of the episode, and perhaps Palahniuk is aiming for that great breakthrough as well.

For those who expected Lullaby to be a horror fiction, you may be disappointed. There is a lullaby. You hear it, you die. And a reporter is out to investigate the phenomenon. Anyone expected a further Koji Suzuki exploit would not find any more similarities, for Lullaby is populated with your typical Palahniuk characters: eccentrics, loners, people who have bad jobs, or at least bad bosses, and people who are out to inject their own dose of chaos into a villainized order.

In Lullaby , Palahniuk makes yet another assault on the mass media, although he seems to also probe the hypocrisy of those crying out against the mass media as well. For at least all the characters, from the journalist to the ecoterrorist, all seem to be hypocrites of sorts. They are not really as interested in overthrowing the system as they are in ruling it in their own image.

Palahniuk's depiction of the media as "noise" crowding out thought-processes is far from original. It recalls the book Age of Propaganda by Pratkanis and Aronson, a work that also depicts the strategies of all those who use the media in attempts to shape our thinking. Of course, readers of Lullaby may be immune to or at least aware of such attempts, but the reality is that the majority of people buy into this "noise" as perpetuated by the media, so much so that any prolonged instance of silence is deemed uncomfortable. Our daily lives are so inundated by noise from all sources (especially if you live in New York City) that it's sometimes impossible to think. And soon we are no longer able to think without noise.

The theory of brainclouding noise is, I believe, Palahniuk's thesis. For the cursed lullaby presents a true dilemma. It's hard enough to stop printed copies of things to circulate, how much more difficult would it be if such a curse was filtered through all means of the media? We would have to crowd out all noise and be ruled by the reserve dictatorship of silence -- but is that what we really want? In the end, Palahniuk doesn't really offer an answer. Perhaps he only wants us to be aware of the dominance of noise in our lives, and for us to tread a careful balance between the dichotomies of noise and silence, altruism and hypocrisy, and to question everything we hear, regardless of whether we agree with the message or not.

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