(book promo)
What does the beautifully dark, cynical, and comically outrageous Chuck Palahniuk write in a culture currently obsessed with vampire books and fan fiction erotica passed off as literature? He composes a novel making fun of it. Palahniuk is the sadistic Jon Stewart of literature, the malevolent Saturday Night Live of the written word. Palahniuk has earned the right at this point in his career to write just about anything his delightfully demented head can stir up—not that he hasn’t always done so—and people will listen.
In the time since Fight Club finally found a publisher in 1996 and especially since David Fincher’s adaptation of it featuring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton became a cult classic, Palahniuk has continued to rummage and probe into the most unsettling and ominous locked drawers and musty closets of the human psyche. He does so with a sense of dark humour that makes Quentin Tarantino and Kurt Vonnegut look like sissies in comparison. Beautiful You, the latest Palahniuk novel, is no exception.
So here I shall warn you: this book is about sex, a lot of sex, dirty sex, ridiculous sex, violent sex, and non-consensual sex. If that bothers you, read no further. And certainly do not read the novel in question.
So here I shall warn you: this book is about sex, a lot of sex, dirty sex, ridiculous sex, violent sex, and non-consensual sex. If that bothers you, read no further. And certainly do not read the novel in question.
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| Official US Book Cover |
Stuffed like a dumpling with romance novel clichés (you know this one: the ordinary girl whisked off her feet by a mysterious, rich, handsome man as the quirky best friend cheers her on), and the tongue-in-cheek usage of erotic language E.L. James would be proud of (“The feeling spread to her arms. Her breasts seemed to swell. Her mind stretched to accommodate a joy she’d never known existed.”), the first half of the book reads like 50 Shades of Grey. As it is supposed to. But all the while Penny, our ordinary girl, is experiencing mind-numbing pleasure at the hands of the stoic C. Linus Maxwell (nickname: Climax Well), we find that he is really experimenting and gathering data for the world’s most perfect line of “personal care products” to be marketed under the name “Beautiful You”. Our girl Penny is a smart cookie. She knows the products are dangerously pleasurable. “Despite their delightful effects, the Beautiful You products generated merely a powerful love substitute. Her darkest fear was that the world’s women wouldn’t know the difference.”
About now is when we remember this book was written by Chuck Palahniuk, not Danielle Steele. The second half of the novel is something of a post-apocalyptic memoir where once the perfected sex toy is released to the masses, it becomes an full-fledged, junkies in the street, abandoned building combination of epidemic and addiction. Good old Penny from small-town Omaha was right. Women refuse to leave their bedrooms, except for the retrieval of batteries. Maxwell uses this to his advantage, manipulating the stock market by manipulating the way women who use his product shop, controlling their pleasure to coerce them into buying products manufactured by his various companies. World domination through vibrators and dildos.
Here is where it would be easy to write off Beautiful You as another novel warning about the dangers of consumerism. But I think Palahniuk is getting at a very different point. He approaches the idea of arousal addiction in an outrageous way that somehow manages to highlight the subtlety of his point. While people have long denounced pornography and the advertisement industry exploiting sexuality to convince men to buy their product, Palahniuk offers us the other side of the coin. He addresses this idea of “arousal addiction” as so: “Artificial over-stimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available.” Replacing human interaction with sex toys and porno is relatable to replacing human interaction with text messages and social media. And then it becomes a compulsion.
The post-Beautiful-You chaos is a gruesome and abhorrent scene only Palahniuk could have concocted. The world descends into chaos as the products take over. There are gang fights, underground black markets specializating in the manufacture and trading of counterfeit vibrators, violent assassinations and drive-by shootings of armored trucks and their drivers, all to attain new toys. “The whole situation seemed almost as crazy as Beanie Babies or those Michael Jordan shoes had been. Almost.” The flourish of Palahniuk’s unmistakably distinct sense of humor is apparent. A particularly gruesome scene involves a terrified CNN reporter in a helicopter above New York City where “the skies of the city were crisscrossed with these flaming warheads. Wherever they landed, each burst like an incendiary bomb, igniting buildings, cars, and trees. Turning the island into a warzone.” The copter almost gets shot down. No, this is not Tim Obrien’s The Things They Carried, and we are not in Vietnam. The bombs are dildos, exploding from a massive bonfire in the center of Yankee Stadium where angry husbands and boyfriends savagely throw the artificial phalluses into the flames like banned books, Fahrenheit 451 style.
For so much build up, the climax was less than satisfying for me. (I’m sorry, I just had to.) Beautiful You’s culmination, although riddled with classic Palahniuk twists, just falls short for me. It seems as if Chuck was so consumed by the concept and portraying it so dramatically that the plot became an afterthought, especially its ending. The novel raises important questions, and, as usual, brilliantly employs hyperbole to draw attention to important and shocking trends in modern society. But perhaps it’s Penny, the narrator, or maybe it’s the idea of pink phalluses goofily flying through the air like some weird ‘80s porno, but I rolled my eyes far more than I nodded my head.
I missed the clever Chuck quips, the repetitious phrases and subtle literary devices that made me fall in love (if I may be so cliché myself) with Lullaby, and Survivor. This is not his first time climbing the Mt. Everest of literary topics that is sex (see: Choke, Snuff), but in his effort to write in the style of the books and culture he is mocking, we lose his witty voice that is inherent despite its many manifestations in his other works, most memorably Damned and Pygmy.
Despite its failure to live up to its predecessors, Beautiful You still delivers a hilarious tale of the dangers of blind obsession with the sex objects advertisers throw at society daily. While Chuck Palahniuk’s voice may not be as strong, his message is impactful. As he said in a recent interview with Curious Animal Magazine published November 3, 2014, “My goal is not to be liked. My goal is to be remembered.” Well Chuck, I’m certainly not forgetting those flying pink dildos any time soon, my friend.
About now is when we remember this book was written by Chuck Palahniuk, not Danielle Steele. The second half of the novel is something of a post-apocalyptic memoir where once the perfected sex toy is released to the masses, it becomes an full-fledged, junkies in the street, abandoned building combination of epidemic and addiction. Good old Penny from small-town Omaha was right. Women refuse to leave their bedrooms, except for the retrieval of batteries. Maxwell uses this to his advantage, manipulating the stock market by manipulating the way women who use his product shop, controlling their pleasure to coerce them into buying products manufactured by his various companies. World domination through vibrators and dildos.
Here is where it would be easy to write off Beautiful You as another novel warning about the dangers of consumerism. But I think Palahniuk is getting at a very different point. He approaches the idea of arousal addiction in an outrageous way that somehow manages to highlight the subtlety of his point. While people have long denounced pornography and the advertisement industry exploiting sexuality to convince men to buy their product, Palahniuk offers us the other side of the coin. He addresses this idea of “arousal addiction” as so: “Artificial over-stimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available.” Replacing human interaction with sex toys and porno is relatable to replacing human interaction with text messages and social media. And then it becomes a compulsion.
The post-Beautiful-You chaos is a gruesome and abhorrent scene only Palahniuk could have concocted. The world descends into chaos as the products take over. There are gang fights, underground black markets specializating in the manufacture and trading of counterfeit vibrators, violent assassinations and drive-by shootings of armored trucks and their drivers, all to attain new toys. “The whole situation seemed almost as crazy as Beanie Babies or those Michael Jordan shoes had been. Almost.” The flourish of Palahniuk’s unmistakably distinct sense of humor is apparent. A particularly gruesome scene involves a terrified CNN reporter in a helicopter above New York City where “the skies of the city were crisscrossed with these flaming warheads. Wherever they landed, each burst like an incendiary bomb, igniting buildings, cars, and trees. Turning the island into a warzone.” The copter almost gets shot down. No, this is not Tim Obrien’s The Things They Carried, and we are not in Vietnam. The bombs are dildos, exploding from a massive bonfire in the center of Yankee Stadium where angry husbands and boyfriends savagely throw the artificial phalluses into the flames like banned books, Fahrenheit 451 style.
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| Other Beautiful You cover art. |
I missed the clever Chuck quips, the repetitious phrases and subtle literary devices that made me fall in love (if I may be so cliché myself) with Lullaby, and Survivor. This is not his first time climbing the Mt. Everest of literary topics that is sex (see: Choke, Snuff), but in his effort to write in the style of the books and culture he is mocking, we lose his witty voice that is inherent despite its many manifestations in his other works, most memorably Damned and Pygmy.
Despite its failure to live up to its predecessors, Beautiful You still delivers a hilarious tale of the dangers of blind obsession with the sex objects advertisers throw at society daily. While Chuck Palahniuk’s voice may not be as strong, his message is impactful. As he said in a recent interview with Curious Animal Magazine published November 3, 2014, “My goal is not to be liked. My goal is to be remembered.” Well Chuck, I’m certainly not forgetting those flying pink dildos any time soon, my friend.
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