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Book Review: Palahniuk's Diary

Chuck goes spooky with his latest novel.

by A. Reinsch | 2004.01.21

Chuck Palahniuk has achieved enough of a name for himself that, by his sixth novel Diary (Doubleday. 260 pp. $24.95), we might as well dispense with the ordinary trappings of review, acknowledging that his abrupt paragraph structures and his enthusiasm for sharing his vast knowledge of society’s many curiosities, both of which are present in Diary, the latter in the form of discussions of handwriting analysis and art school arcana, are well enough known quantities that discussion of his unique style is no longer really necessary. For those familiar with Mr. Palahniuk’s writing, Diary looks, tastes, sounds and smells like a Chuck Palahniuk novel. For the uninitiated, Diary is a fine sample of his work, though not as good an introduction as Fight Club might be. For the latter group, there are much worse ways to spend a few hours than acquainting yourself with his work.

What does merit further discussion though, is what separates Diary from the pack, and on that subject there is a great deal to say. While publicity for the book bills Mr. Palahniuk as a horror writer, this is the first piece of his that I actually see fitting into that genre, and what truly makes Diary unique is the way in which he fits it in, describing a wholly internal horror.

The piece takes on the form of a bitter “coma-diary” kept by our protagonist, the trailer-park-bred art student Misty Wilmot, for her husband Peter, comatose after a badly botched suicide attempt. The results of Misty’s resulting downward spiral are where Diary manipulates the definition of the horror novel to fit Mr. Palahniuk’s concerns. Misty, painfully near-widowed and caught in her dreary “queen of the slaves” job at Waytansea Hotel, increasingly turns to alcohol and the company of vaguely creepy know-it-all Angel Delaporte to ease the sense of uselessness the disaster of her life has conferred upon her. Delaporte surfaces as Misty is forced to clean up the last mess her almost-dead husband, a contractor, left behind: entire rooms walled off and hidden from rich vacation homeowners on Waytansea Island. The rooms, when found, contain eerily threatening messages written by her husband all over the walls.

The potentially crippling legal complications of angering legions of rich vacationers, regardless of Peter’s objection to their ‘bottomless hunger and noisy demands’, conspire along with Misty’s increasingly independent daughter Tabbi and her mother-in-law to force her to relinquish control of her life. She acquiesces to the constant demands by Waytansea Island’s finest that she resume her derailed art career in pursuit of her inevitable greatness.

Discussions of Mr. Palahniuk’s work inevitably lead to the subject of his nihilism, and while Diary will probably spark some of the same comments, I believe Misty Wilmot’s story offers an option to that particular line of thinking. His novels consistently touch on Martin Luther’s theme of “despairing of yourself”, which surfaces in Mr. Palahniuk’s characters as a hopeless free fall towards some inevitable rock bottom. What determines whether the epithet “nihilism” is useful is whether he reserves the possibility of something redemptive in this bottoming out.

Mr. Palahniuk has Misty taking Luther’s plunge in the form of grotesque, progressive physical debilitation that she accepts at the behest of her domineering mother-in-law. Redemption at the end of this Lutheran despair is dangled in front of the reader and Misty in the form of remembered conversations with Peter over the purpose of great art. Peter Wilmot offers long lists of example of “some idiot who’s not afraid to say what he really loves” and extols the beauty in suffering, explaining, “Inspiration needs disease, injury”. The hauntingly gruesome tale of the violinist Paganini is fashioned by Peter, and eventually the citizens of Waytansea Island, into a motivational story for Misty. The assumption driving Mr. Palahniuk as he writes Misty is that there is something “beyond mortal” that Paganini found in his miserable life, and Mr. Palahniuk’s insistence on returning to this Lutheran despair in so many of his works indicates a desire for the infinite that, though fruitless thus far, is a far cry from nihilism.

The horror of Diary is looking for the “beyond mortal” and finding only a void. When Misty finds the void, there is nothing left but herself, and as Mr. Palahniuk has made entirely clear over his career, that should not be a source of comfort for her. A crushing determinism takes the place of the horror novel’s traditional monsters, and the inevitability of Misty’s fate becomes truly terrifying. His keen understanding that there is something frightening about the lack of redemption in Misty’s despair not only prevents us from classifying his work as nihilistic, it makes Diary a “psychological horror” in the strictest sense. In Diary, Mr. Palahniuk has breathed a creative life into a genre that lately had seemed to wander a long way from its proud tradition.

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