Diary, by Chuck Palahniuk: A disjointed review

Okay, first things first: raise your hand if you have read either Lullaby or Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk? You have? Okay, then here’s the review: this one is pretty much the same (goto nextpost). If you haven’t read either of the two aforementioned books but have read one of his other novels (Fight Club, Choke, Survivor etc) I’m betting you can skip this review, too (goto nextpost). But for you newbies I’ll go into the gory details.

Diary is written in the form of, you guessed it, a diary. The entries all take place over a single summer and are written by a failed art school student named Misty Marie (Kleinman) Wilmot. She’s now a waitress at a resort hotel. Pretty true to life isn’t it? Sorry, I can’t help taking cheap shots at art school folk (see this link for how I feel about it). Anyway, Misty's husband apparently went crazy and tried to kill himself after screwing up a bunch of rich folks' houses by writing crazy threatening graffiti all over certain rooms, and then walling the rooms in so they were not accessible. All this "makes sense" in the end.

So as the book progresses, weird things start to happen with the diary. For example, Misty's mother-in-law reads future entries that turn out to be true two days later. This gets us to one of the main themes of the book: destiny vs. free-will. Mr. Palahniuk falls squarely on the side of fate. In quite a nihilistic way as a matter of fact. He's so heavy handed about it that the end is totally telegraphed from a mile away. No suprises here. I'll let you read it for yourself to find out what happens, but it involves Stendahl Syndrome, crazy island maniacs, rich people, poisoning and art.

We have now arrived at the part of the review where we compare the book being reviewed to other books and then talk about the writing style and why we did/didn't like it.

What this book most resembles is......other Chuck Palahniuk books. It has all his hallmarks: avaricious soul-killing consumerism, a "counter-culture" group that is intent on stopping the consumers, ham-handed focus on individual vs. society, and questions of personality and identity. What is always a little unclear in Palahniuk's writing is how he feels about rampant consumerism. First, he makes the consumers out to be mindless automatons bent on consumption to the point of global destruction. But then he makes the "anti-consumerists" out to be total nutjobs who have no qualms about murder and slaughter. Nobody comes off well in his books, but that's nihilism for you I guess.

Now, to get all literary on you, there are parts of this book that evoke echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his "magical realism" in which strange and supernatural things happen, but are not treated as such. A statue comes alive and starts walking around? No biggie. But here, it comes off more as just bizarre instead of enlightening, almost as if Palahniuk has a formula for strangeness that he follows for each book (hmm, that actually sounds possible...)

Plus, if you were planning on understanding everything at the end, look somewhere else. Diary is also a little heavy on the annoyingly cloying lyrical affectations, for example, the repeated phrases "Today, the weather is..." and "Just for the record..." But strangely enough, even though I expected all this going in, I still enjoyed reading it. It's short and makes the perfect bizarre companion for a train or plane trip. Does is stick in your craw like a GREAT book? No, but it sure will keep your attention long enough to finish it.

Diary: A Novel, by Chuck Palahniuk. Three out of Five (insert pithy and offbeat rating unit here).