Houston Southard

chuck Palahniuk - The INvention of sound

I've read everything this man has ever published. Chuck says fiction's gift is allowing us to confess something true. He's the Vonnegut of our generation and one day soon the status quo fear will stop the hearts of our creationist school board members and our kids will finally have Fight Club on their desks in AP literature. The man literally reinvented minimalism. His writing is more of a song than it is a story. Beautiful choruses. Lyrically staccato verses. Words chuck-full of soul. If you're into DeLillo or Hempel or Bukowski or Lipsyte or Vonnegut, I don't have to tell you to pick up Palahniuk. You already have.

His newest feature, on the surface, tracks both a strung-out hollywood sound engineer murdering women to capture the perfect horror movie sound-byte and a father whose fantasy career involves torturing men who torture children. As with all his books, though, the glamour lives in the subtext.

Peel back a layer and this book is Chuck intellectualizing his grief over never having had kids. It's how he writes. His mom dies and he pens a series on the afterlife. His father is murdered in a craigslist ad gone wrong and he does an expose on anarchy and the randomness of death.

Peel back another layer and what this book is really about is the western commodification of life's most intimate experience: death.

This is not Chuck's best book, but it is still Chuck at his most Chuckiest. Pick it up, thumb your nose at capitalism with the man the myth the legend, rinse and repeat.