“Look again,” says Chuck.
         He’s describing what he calls the “look again” game – his approach to greater detail in writing, his method for bringing more clarity to his descriptions of what we all see every day but never realize until it’s pointed out to us. We are blind until Chuck shows us the light.
         I’m looking at Chuck Palahniuk, the man who wrote the now legendary Fight Club, one of the most thought-provoking novels of the last ten years. He’s been hailed as a visionary, a rebel, and the next Don DeLillo. Chuck sits across from me in a small eatery in Edinboro, PA. What I see is a gentle man, soft-spoken and exceedingly polite. He quietly orders coffee, eggs benedict, and a muffin. He offers to pay for breakfast, but I insist on paying the bill. He answers all of my questions with sincerity.
         Look again.
         Now, in sharp focus, I can see Tyler Durden sitting across from me, along with Tender Branson, Victor Mancini, and yes, even Shannon McFarland. I can see the man who once got into a fistfight during a weekend camping trip and returned to work on Monday only to have his coworkers avert their eyes and conspicuously avoid asking the obvious: “What happened to you?” I can see the man who broke into the apartment of a friend dying of AIDS to remove all evidence of sexual paraphernalia, so his friend’s mother wouldn’t find it. I can see the man who once injected grease into a donut and watched patiently to see which one of his coworkers would take the first bite.
         “Look again, and then look for the details, and then look again, and look for more details,” he says. “That’s the mantra when I’m writing. Look again, look again, look again. What am I not seeing? What is the telling detail about this situation that I’m not getting?” Chuck leans forward while explaining. “I was sitting on the plane playing the look again game, and when you’re on a plane you’re all facing the same way, so you can really study everyone’s hair. The woman in front of me had really lovely blond hair. So I was looking at her hair thinking, ‘How would I describe this hair? In a non-judgmental way, physically, how can I evoke the experience of this hair?’ I see how every hair is a different color, and it’s almost crystalline-looking, not round, but as if the hair shaft itself is a geometric shape, with angles in it, and it’s refracting the light. The longer strands go one way, but the shorter strands splay across the surface of the hair, and the longer strands separate to create cleavings in the hair, and caves, and hollow dark spaces inside. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, this looks just cedar, or pine wood when you split it.’” Chuck smiles, indicating that the punch line is looming. “I’m doing all of this, and I realize that the woman right across the aisle is her mother.” He starts to laugh. “She’s looking at me in a hostile way, like, ‘Why are you staring at my daughter’s hair so intensely?’ The daughter has no idea, and I almost have my nose in her hair while I’m taking notes, playing this game. So people are constantly catching me staring at them really hard, when in fact I’m just trying to document something about them that I want to use in a book. And then they’re thinking, Stalker!”

        It’s Sunday, April 8, 2001, the day after the Chuck Palahniuk “Postcards from the Future” Conference, held at the Edinboro University. This is the first conference of his work, and Chuck is at ease, yet full of the vigor one might get from the energy of hundreds of fans. I heard about the conference several months ago, but when I saw that it was in Pennsylvania, I dismissed it as being too far from Michigan to attend. While arranging for this interview less than a week ago, Chuck asked if I was anywhere near here. Checking a map, I discovered that the drive was a mere five hours. Unfortunately, by that point, it was too late to register and they weren’t accepting walk-in registration. I kicked myself when I saw the impressive conference schedule: ten lectures on Chuck’s works and their relation to society; five roundtable discussions; thirteen panel discussions; creative works, ranging from poetry to performances to art, influenced by Chuck’s works; a viewing of the Fight Club DVD with Q & A by Chuck afterwards; a reading of Choke by Chuck; a keynote luncheon and after dinner party. Not something a serious Palahniuk fan would want to miss.
         The timing of the conference is perfect. Chuck’s new book, Choke, hits the bookstores on May 22 and, perhaps not surprisingly, it’s already been optioned for a movie. It’s the first novel he’s launched since his fame surrounding Fight Club. It’s about a sexaholic, Victor Mancini, who pays for his mother’s hospital bills by pretending to choke in restaurants. The twist: the rescuers occasionally send Victor money, not the other way around.
         Chuck explains. “It’s all about creating an outlandish premise, and then trying to build a case around it, trying to create this false reality around it that holds it up. How about a club where people go and intentionally punch each other out? Then build a whole argument within the context that supports that.” Far-fetched as it sounds, it works. Little by little, the narrator spouts his ideology to the reader throughout Choke so that it all makes sense. In the world according to Chuck, Victor does the rescuer(s) a favor by giving them the chance to shine as heroes.
         The act is noticeably altruistic for a Palahniuk protagonist. Indeed, Choke marks a distinct change in Chuck’s work as being his most uplifting novel yet. When asked what caused the change in tone, Chuck talks about meeting Trent Reznor last spring.
         “Nothing Records called me in Portland and said, ‘Trent Reznor is coming through town and he’d really like to meet you on tour. Would you like tickets and backstage passes?’ Yeah! So all of my friends went and we went backstage, and I sat through the concert. I really wanted to hear the song from The Fragile, his new album, ‘We’re in this together,’ but he didn’t play it. It’s such a departure from all of his really dark music. It’s his first baby step toward something positive, toward creating something instead of tearing things down, that I really missed it. When I went backstage, I said, ‘Why the hell didn’t you play it?’ Trent said, ‘Man, you know, I’ve worked on that song more than all of my other songs put together, and it still doesn’t sound right. I’m still not comfortable with it.’ I can’t help but wonder if it’s just the fact that it does take that leap of faith, that Kierkegaardian step away from standing for nothing, to actually standing for something. It’s really easy, you can spend your life criticizing and tearing down the culture, but at some point, you’ve got to pull your guts up and actually create something in the culture and stand for something. And I saw Trent doing that with that song. That’s what I wanted to do with Choke, was risk losing all of my readers who liked the nihilist stuff, because you’ve got to move on at some point and actually stand for something. Even if it’s putting one rock on top of another rock, it still has to end on something positive like that, something constructive, rather than continually destructive.”

         Sounds strange, coming from the man whose characters usually end up disfigured at the end of each novel. Chuck elaborates a bit on this change in tone with Victor Mancini’s mother, Ida, who during her younger days had committed herself to a life of random mischief; think of a kinder, gentler version of the Project Mayhem Space Monkeys from Fight Club.
         “I wanted to have a Tyler Durden character that tears things down – and that’s Ida Mancini – who realizes that her entire life of rebellion and anarchy has been fun, but boy, she never did take that next step of actually standing for something. So I wanted to make Victor the generation that would move beyond attacking constantly to creating something.”
         But does it make a difference if the thing being created has a concrete function or purpose? Not at all, says Chuck. “I really like causes that are not about doing something to fulfill a need. Nobody said if we get to the moon it’s going to do anything. Getting to the moon was a huge romantic gesture. It was about all the things that we discovered along the way, while trying to get to the moon, all the things we had to invent, in order to do this useless thing. It’s not like we were going to bring back gold. It was not doing something in order to obtain something. It was doing something just for the doing of it, and it generated so much union, and so much mutual cause, and so much identity, and so much pride, and so many beneficial things along the way. Now it seems like we’ve lost that ability to just do these seemingly pointless romantic gestures that are not about achieving something; they’re about the process itself, and what the process brings us. I know people who will write a book. The book may never be published, but it’s all of the joy that they’ve had, all of the things they’ve learned about themselves and the world, all of the ways they’ve had to be vulnerable, and meet people and know other writers; everything along the way has changed their lives. So it’s almost superfluous about whether or not the book gets published, it’s about what this task is going to teach us. I love that part of writing. Once there’s a cover on it, it’s really dead for me.”
         It seems that the transition from destruction to creation plays a larger role in Pahlaniuk’s novels than I assumed. Perhaps that’s why the most significant issue tackled in Choke is religion. From Tender Branson (The Book of Very Common Prayer) to Shannon McFarland (“Sorry, God”), all of Chuck’s novels address religion in some fashion, but the allusions in his previous novels pale in comparison to the ones in Choke. Judging from the startling revelation that occurs halfway through the book, it’s apparent that the church has had a major impact on Chuck’s writing. Curious about God’s influence on Chuck, I ask him if he thinks religion is a benefit or a detriment to society.
         “I think it’s a benefit in that serves a real social purpose and it brings people together in spiritual inquiry,” he says. “That, in and of itself, is incredible, just to bring people together in the face of mystery. It’s something I really have against what was done in the Vatican II, with the Catholic Church. By taking the mystery and the pageantry out of Catholic mass, by putting it in English, by making it accessible, we create the impression that we can actually understand and comprehend God. Which is not the point – the point of faith is that it is incomprehensible, and it is an act of faith. It’s not something you’re supposed to be able to understand, and therefore believe in. It’s something that you can never understand, and yet believe in. By making God understandable, and putting God in our terms, and making God our best friend, you no longer require faith if you know God. In that way, bringing people together in inquiry about this completely incomprehensible thing – that’s the glory of religion. In a way, the conference this weekend had that same energy of bringing people together – not so much about my books, but about ideas, and about a lot of ideas presented, and having people in inquiry and discussion about the concepts of reinventing mythology and the concepts about violence, or materialism. Just having people together, talking about these ideas, excited, talking about these ideas. This is not something that happens in the world a lot. So that’s what religion does best.”

         One thing is certain: the influence of religion on his work is distinctly Christian. I ask Chuck how he feels about Christianity in particular, if he feels that Christianity gets an unfair top billing out of all the religions, and everything else just kind of plays second fiddle. He stops to think.
         “Well, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about these things, so I don’t want to talk about them just right off the top of my head.” He drinks his coffee, ponders this question some more. “I think Christianity has some real inherent faults in some of the metaphors that it uses, and those are the things that I like to play with. If we try to identify God using metaphors from our culture, like fathers and lambs, then what happens to our connection with God? Most human beings never come across a lamb. A lamb is a totally abstract thing to me. I saw a lamb once at a petting zoo. So ‘Lamb of God’... Okay, that’s what a lamb looks like. In our culture where fathers are sort of absent, and where father are no longer a huge item of respect, or discipline, or whatever – if we’ve already been using that metaphor to describe God, and then the real thing in society, the father, breaks down, what happens to our idea of God? This shortcutting to comprehend God by using our world breaks down our idea of God when our world breaks down. That’s what I don’t like. That’s what I’m always attacking in my books. In Fight Club I talked about that a lot.”
         Despite the profound subject matter, however, Choke is actually his most humorous novel yet. Perhaps that’s why it works so well to get its message across. In one scene, Victor participates in a rehearsed, simulated rape that produces absolutely hilarious results.
         “Oh, man,” he laughs. “The day I brought that into workshop, I expected to get crucified on that. And people laughed their eyes out. People were laughing so hard, that I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’m just being too sensitive about it.’ Then I sent it out into the world and I thought, ‘I’m still going to get crucified on this.’ But no, what I was hearing back from editors and readers, men and women – especially women at the movie studios that I knew – said that that was the scene that they laughed at the most. Then I thought, ‘Well maybe it works, and it’s not quite so threatening.’ But I did fully expect to get people objecting to that.”
         At this point, a waiter approaches our table and asks Chuck, “May I recommend the clam chowder today, sir?”
         Chuck puts his hand to his forehead and groans. “Oh no, not on a Sunday. Should I not be eating this?” The waiter laughs nervously at his joke, then leaves. Word gets around and everyone’s acting out scenes from Fight Club.
         Several minutes later, a waitress approaches and tells Chuck that Ryan (the waiter) really wanted to ask for his autograph but he was too embarrassed – so he’s taking his fork instead. Chuck gasps. “My fork? For DNA testing? Have we come to Gattaca already?” After laughing about this, Chuck tells her to bring over a piece of paper and he’ll autograph it. Which he does happily.
         Getting back to the interview, Chuck addresses the issue of sexual addiction in Choke. “From what I understand about sexaholics, and the whole pathology of it, is that they use sex as an anesthetic,” he says. “In the groups that I attended, it wouldn’t be each person was constantly like some sort of gourmand out there trying to discover as many different sexual things as possible. Each of them seemed to have latched onto one thing. There were these guys who whacked off 18 times a day, and there were these guys who went to lingerie modeling parlors 5 times a day, and guys who went to prostitutes 8 times a week. And, no pun intended, they were in a rut. Cute pun though. They used it as an anesthetic. They didn’t want something new and different every time. They found the thing that worked for them, so they just went and did that thing. It wasn’t so much an exploration as they just wanted the same old same old. A heroin addict is very happy with heroin. He doesn’t screw around once he finds heroin.”

         Similarly, in Colonial Dunsboro, an historic park of sorts where Victor works as an Irish indentured servant, many of his coworkers are drug addicts. Even Victor’s mother, Ida, throws LSD to the animals at the zoo. The punishments for the addicts in Choke – whether the addiction be drugs, sex, or general mischief – seemed futile. “My family is a portrait of compulsive behavior. My brother exercises compulsively, I exercise compulsively, my mother gardens compulsively. We all are compulsive in so many ways. Even when we get together, we all have to be doing something while we’re together as a family. Shelling peas, shelling walnuts. We can’t sit still. I wanted to demonstrate as many ways that people use the things that they use to keep from moving on in their lives, whether it’s constantly attacking and tearing things down, like Ida, or whether it’s using drugs at the same time that you dream about putting together the band that you’re never going to put together. All the things that these people use because they’re too afraid to create their world. It’s so much easier to stay in stasis than it is to make that leap, to say, ‘This is what I’m going to do with my life,’ to make that choice, to make that commitment, and to eventually make that contribution to the world. It’s so much easier to hide out in drugs or in anti-social teardown behavior. I wanted to find as many ways as people hide out as possible, and demonstrate those in Choke.”
         As usual with Chuck’s novels, all of the issues seem to tie together to focus on one omnipresent theme: the disillusionment of the American dream. “My friends who are teachers say that their students see their parents as achieving everything that they were taught to achieve in terms of money, possessions, success, status – and their parents still aren’t happy. In fact, their parents are unhappier than their own parents, who had nothing. So these kids are suddenly going, ‘Oh my gosh! If we’re all supposed to be chasing achievement, status, money, and we’re seeing it not work for our parents, what the hell? What does success mean for us? If success isn’t money, what is success now?’ I see people in crisis about not wanting to chase the money thing, because it’s obviously not working for so many people who have the money thing. They’re not sure what to chase now. In a way, that’s part of the ongoing inquiry in process. What does ‘success’ mean now, in the world? What will ‘success’ mean for the next generation? I just see the American Dream breaking down in terms of success as money and achievement. What is the next definition of success?”
         In Chuck’s opinion, this is the theme today’s writer’s should be tackling as well. “Despite the highest standard of living in the world, most people aren't very happy.  And a large chunk of these people are about to get old and die.  And the children of those people are seeing how money and power might not be the master key to success.  And in that case, what is success?  What will bring happiness?” A sobering thought for this generation, because there’s no easy answer.
         Chuck shows his light-hearted side by telling a few amusing anecdotes, including a story that David Fincher told him about how the slum-tenants were throwing bags of piss and shit on Brad Pitt during the filming of the alley chase scene in Se7en. (The people yelling “Shut the fuck up!” in the background? Those are for real.) Then he proceeds to tell me about the time he was sitting in a restaurant with a photographer, and their waiter – not realizing “the Fight Club guy” was right in front of him – described how Chuck lives in a castle on a cliff above the ocean with a former Miss Oregon, how he hates people and refuses to sign books (none of which is true). That probably falls in the same category as the time a writer got the courage to ask him if he was “really Bret Easton Ellis’ secret lover” (Chuck’s never even met Bret).

         Chuck’s had what most people would consider to be an adventurous life up to this point. He’s interviewed Juliette Lewis and Marilyn Manson. He’s watched cadavers being dissected. He’s used steroids. He’s had a conference on his works. And of course, he’s had one of his books made into perhaps the most provocative film of the 90’s – already Fight Club is being hailed as the number one DVD to own.
          But it really all started with what Chuck describes as a “shabby, thin version” of Invisible Monsters, which nonetheless garnered a huge amount of attention in the publishing industry. It’s a freakish story about a infomercial model, Shannon McFarland, who teams up with transsexual Brandy and her lover after her own face gets blown off by a shotgun. “People really seemed fascinated by it,” he says. “But ultimately all these publishing houses that were so excited, none of them would buy it, because they said it was impossible to market. They said they didn’t even know what shelf it would go on in the bookstore. After all this foreplay (as my agent would say), I was ultimately just left with everyone telling me, ‘Your work is too dark. It’s too outrageous. It’s too risky. It’s too offensive.’ At that point I was thinking, ‘Well, should I tone it down?’ And I thought, no, I could tone it down, or I could ramp it up. So I thought, ‘What if I make it even more offensive, and more dark, and more risky? They’ll never publish it.’ I had really given up hope. I was never going to get published so I might as well write what I want to write. That’s when I wrote Fight Club. Because I never thought it would be published, but I thought, ‘Well, at least it’ll sort of shock these people, and entertain them maybe.’ I thought for the rest of my life I was going to be writing for publishing house readers, who would ultimately reject me, but would still look forward to my manuscripts, because they would be something different.”
         Asked if he feels any resentment for having difficulty getting his “dark books” published, when numerous other authors have had much darker material published, Chuck responds, “When you cite ‘dark books,’ they’re pretty much automatically not Oprah Winfrey books. They’re not those comforting best-seller books that everyone is going to rush out and buy because they touch a chord in their heart so readily. Maybe when they’re saying ‘too dark,’ they’re saying ‘not commercial enough.’ That’s what I’m hearing. ‘Dark’ doesn’t translate into a lot of profit.”
         But at some point it did translate into some profit, because soon after the Fight Club movie was released, the two novels Chuck had written previously – Survivor and Invisible Monsters – were published. Granted, although Chuck’s “dark” material had finally found its way into the public eye, he still thinks there’s a cutting off point. “Lois Rosenthal, the editor of Story magazine (which she shut down a couple years ago), at one point really loved to publish some of my short stories. I sent her a short story that became parts of Survivor – about the man running the fake crisis hotline – which actually became chapter two of Survivor almost verbatim. She sent it back, saying, ‘No, this is too dark.’ Later I was talking to her and she said, ‘I don’t know what it is with people, but if one more person sends me a short story about having sex with their German Shepherd, I’m just going to go insane!’”
         After laughing at the memory of his conversation with Lois, Chuck clarifies with an example as to what he finds gratuitous. “I was sort of appalled by the book, The Alienist, which was a best-selling novel about the birth of psycho-analytical detective work on homicides, around the turn of the century, New York. In it, a series of male child prostitutes are being killed by someone, and so, using fledgling Freudian ideas and psycho-analytical therapy, they identify what type of person this is doing the killings, and track them down. Most of the book is written in sort of a glib, stereotypical, really surface way, but then whenever they find a dead child, the camera zooms in and every detail is picked out, and it just seems like a travelogue used to connect these fantastically detailed scenes of children with their entrails strewn all over, and butchered in fantastically grotesque ways. As I was reading it I was thinking, ‘Is this just an excuse for us to get this incredible thrill of seeing butchered children?’ It just seemed like the plot was only a device for presenting these incredibly, masterfully done, hideous scenes.”

         When I bring up Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho as a parallel example, Chuck disagrees. “The Alienist was a very horizontal story. We’re going to catch this killer, and along the way we’re going to fall in love. A to B. American Psycho had that metaphorical comment on society that allowed it to transcend the plot line and actually rise in meaning, so it was about accomplishing something. Even Silence of the Lambs was about accomplishing something and completing an aspect of the protagonist’s personality. So at least that did have some metaphorical rise to it. The Alienist was just dead child, dead child, dead child, love, dead child, dead child, romance, the end.”
         Getting back to his work, I mention how his novels seem to tackle a lot of themes, and he laughs. “Everyone in Los Angeles says, ‘Oh my God, we could get ten screenplays out of this novel! We don’t even know where to start!’ There’s a joke in Portland. We have these old department stores called Newbury’s, like dime stores from the 1920’s. The windows at Newbury’s are always packed and crowded and cluttered, full of rotting manikins wearing plastic dresses. The joke in Portland is that the window dressing philosophy at Newbury’s is ‘If it doesn’t look right, put more in.’ That’s the way I think about my books. If it’s not working, put more in. That’s why they end up getting so crowded with stuff.”
         When asked if this is why he considers Invisible Monsters to be his “weakest” novel – because it doesn’t take on as many themes as his other novels – Chuck explains his original concept for the novel. “I wanted to do a linear novel, but to break it up, so that it would say to jump from chapter one to chapter seventeen, to chapter thirteen, and you would physically have to jump back and forth throughout the book. It’s been done before. Hopscotch. But what I really wanted to do was to write a half-dozen incredibly exciting, linguistically bizarre and beautiful chapters that the plot would never pass through. As you physically had to leap through the book to find the plot, you would pass through scenes: Brandy on a submarine, Brandy on the Titanic, or whatever. Just some outrageous scenes that you would assume that eventually the plot would pass through, but by the time you got to the end of the book you’d realize, ‘You know, I never did see that Brandy on Mars chapter. Did I miss something?’ It would be like those fashion magazines – no matter how many times you read that fat magazine, every once in a while it will fall open to something that you never saw, and you’ll realize that this chaotic, beautiful thing is ultimately unknowable, like a person. Every once in a while you’ll see your wife across the floor at a party or at a department store, from an angle, and you won’t recognize her. You’ll go, ‘Oh my God, who is that beautiful woman?’ Then you’ll realize, ‘Oh my God, that’s my wife!’ You’ll realize that that person is ultimately unknowable, that you’ll never completely know that person. That’s what I wanted the book to be, something that would imply the unknowability of beautiful things.”
         Unfortunately, that’s not how it worked out. “I had a friend read it, and she said, ‘Oh, I hated that jumping back and forth. It was just too confusing.’ So I went and put it back together as a more linear novel. I think that’s why I feel like I failed. I should have presented it the way I wanted to present it.” Although it still jumps throughout the timeline in the novel, Chuck feels that it doesn’t quite go over the edge. “Again, like with Fight Club – you can do dark, but if it’s not dark enough, it doesn’t work. You can do confusing. If I had boosted the confusion, and the extravagance just a little bit more, it would be a masterpiece. Right now, it’s just not confusing and extravagant enough. I could have made a point with structure that would have been much more eloquent than any point made with content. I didn’t do that. I pulled up short. I shouldn’t have.”

         I assure Chuck that it’s still a great novel.
         “You’re just saying that,” he laughs.
         One significant thing about Invisible Monsters is that the main character is female.  When asked what kind of problems he encountered writing in another gender, and if he thinks he was successful, Chuck says, “The main character in Monsters is more a person, than a female.  No way was I getting into a faux description of cramps or her period or anything bluntly ‘female’ to prove she was a woman.   In that way, my character is a failure, but because this is a book about ideas, surreal ideas, is reality all that important?  When my life is going fast and furious, I'm not much aware of my balls.  My guess is women don’t rush around, living life, always aware of their genitals either. Invisible Monsters was a ‘reverse Cinderella story’ where a character gains power by losing her looks.  In the real Cinderella story, I don’t remember the title character obsessing over her period.” Indeed, despite the lack of stereotypical telltale signs of femininity, the narrative voice of Shannon McFarland is convincingly female.
         On a similar note, Chuck’s first novel addresses a theme that appears in all of his works: homosexuality.  In Invisible Monsters, Shannon's parents disown her gay brother because of their own homophobia.  “The gay thing in Invisible Monsters is a take-off on the IKEA thing in Fight Club.  People are so desperate for a complete identity, an instant identity, they grab one off the shelf.  Black.  Gay.  Feminist.  Home-owner.  All these labeled lifestyles are easy to embrace.  Nice off-the-rack identities.  Like IKEA furniture.   But by accepting them, don't we limit our own capacity for creating a more personal, powerful identity?”
          As usual, Chuck makes a compelling argument. To drive home the point even further, he brings up the theme of identity again in Survivor, the story of Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult who dictates his life story into the flight recorder of a doomed 747. In the novel, Tender describes in detail how his case worker would change his identity every week, simply by picking a different diagnosis out of her DSM – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s the perfect example of society searching for quick and easy answers to problems that don’t have quick and easy solutions.
         In the Creedish Death Cult, the children are all referred to as Tender. “Like money,” Chuck says. “The children are raised and sold as a commodity, so in a way the children are legal tender. The way that Beanie babies are now legal tender, I think.”
          I ask Chuck how he feels about his novel sharing the same name as a certain highly rated reality TV series. Chuck groans. “That was originally called Unnatural Disasters. I really loved that title. God bless him, but my editor at the time, Jerry – who’s now my editor again with Choke – really liked the title Survivor. He lobbied like crazy. ‘Just one word. Survivor. It’s perfect.’ If you did a search on the title Survivor it would already bring up 60 books. Stephen King’s wife Tabitha King was writing a book called Survivor, and Dean Koontz had just written a best seller called Sole Survivor. I hated the idea, but I finally knuckled under to Jerry, and let it be called Survivor instead of Unnatural Disasters.”
         The book and the TV series actually have much in common in the respect that they both take people who aren’t really ready for fame and who are essentially manufactured into celebrities. Asked if he thinks fame has the potential for some kind of major psychological or emotional damage, Chucks says, “It seems like some people are really threatened by the idea of being recognized. They’re very spooked by the idea of losing their anonymity. I talked to Juliette Lewis about that moment when you realize that you’ve lost your anonymity in the world, and when you walk into a place total strangers know who you are. That can be really, really frightening to people. I think that’s the worst part of it – losing the ability to be just alone in public, and not being watched and being disregarded, because no one knows who you are.” Chuck himself has only experienced a loss of his anonymity (other than at this conference) in Portland, because it’s such a small town. “That’s the nice thing about being a writer or a movie director. There’s this old Fran Lebowitz line: ‘Nobody knows who you are, but you still get a good table at restaurants’ – or something like that.”

         Fame and prestige are key elements in Survivor. Tender Branson’s employers are middle-class snobs obsessed with knowing proper etiquette for every possible occasion, which they ask Tender to find out for them. “What I understood was that there wasn’t a lot of etiquette until the Golden 90’s – the Industrial Revolution, after the Civil War – when suddenly, there was a new rising, an American aristocracy. They had an enormous amount of money, but it was America, and it was a democracy, and there was no innate way, inherent way to differentiate between the lower classes and the higher classes. So they started creating these codes of behavior, codes of etiquette, by which they could differentiate between low-class people and high-class people. In so many countries, there is an accent that differentiates the classes, but in America, we had nothing. So we started creating all of these really innate, ritualistic codes of behavior – all these different forks, all these different ways of conducting dinner parties, all these ways of resenting ourselves that would automatically let you know who was ‘in’ and who wasn’t, by whether or not they knew the intricacies of this behavior.” A secret handshake, so to speak. Chuck agrees. “I wonder, with all of our new instant-Internet wealth people, the high-tech money, all these people – what sort of rituals will they create, whether it’s language, or whether it’s rituals of behavior or appearance? What will they create that will differentiate their class from the people not in their class? In the 80’s, when so many people were rising so quickly and creating so much money, in that Donald Trump-type way – suddenly we saw the resurgence of Miss Manners. That’s when she really came to the forefront and people were really fascinated with manners and etiquette again, and they were obsessed with the right fork, for the first time in decades. I couldn’t help but think it was just because people want to create that invisible way of identifying who’s who in our culture.”
          Indeed, divided social classes are a key element in all of Palahniuk’s novels. But it was his third written (and first published) novel, Fight Club, that really delved deep into the issues of a polarized society. The story of Jack, who starts a “fight club” with his newfound friend Tyler, can be interpreted in many different ways, but there are glaring social/political symbols that can’t be ignored. When asked if Fight Club is all about the repudiation of capitalism, Chuck says, “It is in the respect that I don’t like the way capitalism splinters people and puts them all against each other. By splintering society and driving us all apart and forcing us all to compete against each other, I think it alienates us, makes us unhappy. We never really achieve the great things that we could achieve. That’s what I don’t like about capitalism. All of my books are about bringing somebody from self-imposed pseudo-happiness of being isolated – in a way, we all want to be Howard Hughes, and live in that penthouse and never have to deal with anybody else – but in reality, that dream is like hell. That would be misery. So it’s bringing people from this isolation back into community, forcing them back into community, whether it’s with support groups or whether it’s with them being on the lam in Survivor, and running the crisis hotline. In some way these people are all being dragged out of their lonely lives back into interaction with people. I think capitalism does force us into that ‘us against the world’ thing, by pitting us all against each other.”

          Yet Chuck is a relatively famous author who happens to be profiting well from capitalism. Asked how he feels about it in that respect, it’s clear that Chuck is not motivated in the least by greed. He talks about how he would like to create a foundation that will eventually fund a writer’s retreat, or writer’s colony, which the West Coast really doesn’t have. He’s not above helping out his friends occasionally either. “I don’t want the success to drive me away from my friends,” he says. “I want it to bring us together – I don’t want it to drive us apart.”
         But his own altruistic ideals aren’t always seen in his works. Fight Club has the most ominous ending of all his novels. As a result of his frustration of not getting published, Chuck displayed a level of anger in Fight Club that’s not present – to the same extent – in his other works. “I was never going to be published at that point. There was no hope. It was a novel written out of anger at publishing. Damn it, I was writing exactly like Stephen King and they still weren’t publishing me. I had that Stephen King thing down and they still weren’t publishing me.”
         I ask him to explain what he means by that “Stephen King thing.”
         “I mean I was writing those perfect sentences, and those perfect thriller plots. I had modeled my writing after successful writing, trying to copy successful writers so well. I thought I was following a pattern of success, when in fact my work was completely unremarkable because I following the pattern so closely. Rather than writing the stories that I would tell in real life, the stories that I loved, I was writing the stories that I thought would sell – more ‘marketable’ stories – and they were getting shot down. Fight Club was written out of the frustration and anger of so much rejection. It was also written out of the freedom and resignation that I would never be published, so therefore I could write anything. If you have nothing to lose you can do anything,” he says, “and that’s what Fight Club is about. At that point I had nothing to lose.”
         And again, Fight Club deals with the issue of homosexuality. In the novel, when Jack and Tyler meet for the first time, it’s on a nude beach. Was he consciously attempting to create a homosexual undercurrent throughout the book? Chuck laughs. “I wanted to play with that, so people would be squirming, thinking, ‘Oh God, am I reading a queer novel? Oh God, I’m reading a queer novel! Oh God, I’m enjoying a queer novel!’ Then they get to the end and they think, ‘Oh yeah, they’re not queer, they’re just insane! Yes!’ There would be that huge rush of relief. I also wanted to play with the idea that we have all these buddy movies, where we’re never supposed to broach the idea: ‘What is it that keeps Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid together for so many years?’ We’re never supposed to broach that aspect of those relationships, what’s innate in every buddy movie. Fincher just went crazy with it, ramping it up even more.” But the scene on the nude beach isn’t in the movie. “No,” says Chuck, “but I sat there for hours while he was trying to get Brad Pitt to put the gun in Edward’s mouth in such a way, and cock his hips in such a way, so that, from the camera’s angle, it looked like nothing but...” He trails off, laughing, leaving the rest to my imagination. “Fincher was playing with that dynamic to make people squirm.”

         On the commentary track on the Fight Club DVD, Chuck mentions that he was disappointed that the recipes for napalm and bombs that he researched for so diligently were changed in the book, but for obvious reasons. In that respect, I ask him if he feels that writers should exercise some responsibility in their writing.
         “Boy, I could go so many places with that,” he says. “First of all, in a really literal sense, I’ve read so many books like Heartburn, where they would put recipes in the books. It seemed like there was this whole genre of novels that had recipes written in the narrative. So I thought, ‘Hmm, how about a guy novel, with guy recipes in the narrative? What would be a guy recipe?’ My brother was visiting from South Africa, and he’s an electrical engineer. He spent 72 hours coming up with all these different recipes for explosives. I just put them as this sort of jokey comment on novels with food recipes. I was amazed it made it all the way to the final proofreading before W.W. Norton said, ‘Maybe this isn’t such a smart thing. Could you change one ingredient in each one to make them useless?’ So I did, and it wasn’t that much of a heartbreak. But really early on, when I was talking about splicing the porno into the movies, I mentioned that to some friends, and one of my friends said, ‘Please don’t do that, please don’t write about that. If you write about that then people will do it. It’ll just make the world a worse place.’” He laughs. “So I went ahead and wrote about it. Since I wrote about it, David Fincher himself, when he was a high-school projectionist in Ashland, Oregon, said he used to that. There’s nothing I could conceive of that a million people aren’t already doing. In Survivor, some of my friends – the ones who told me about how crematory urns aren’t examined before you board an airplane, and how that would be the most effective way to get a gun on board – said, ‘Don’t put that in there.’ I think it’s much better to be the person who points out that faulty situation in the world, than to wait until some malicious person does it. I’d rather be the person saying, ‘The emperor’s not wearing any clothes,’ than letting somebody take advantage of the situation. So, I think you have responsibility to bring it out there, because if you have that idea, millions of people have that idea, and it needs to be recognized in the culture and dealt with.”
         When asked what he thinks about the Natural Born Killers lawsuit (that was recently thrown out of court), he says, “I was talking to Juliette Lewis about that, and she was saying that there’s a director’s cut – that I don’t think I’ve ever seen – which is even more over the top, and in that director’s cut, it really makes its message clear, and you totally get that this is a satire. It’s very much like Absolutely Fabulous, the British comedy, where it effectively makes fun of this thing that it seemingly supports, that you never want to do it. You watch Ab Fab, you never want to do drugs. So I think it’s a case like with Invisible Monsters, where if you don’t take it too far, then you’ve failed. I think, talking to Juliette, it wasn’t taken far enough. It wasn’t extreme enough, and that’s why it failed.”

         One issue that hasn’t been discussed much is Jack’s insomnia. In the world of Fight Club, Jack’s inability to sleep seems to be the symptom of a much larger, deeper problem. Indeed, his attendance at various support groups only offers a temporary cure. I ask Chuck if he feels that sleep deprivation is a sign that we need to slow down.
         “We really need to be aware of what we want from our lives, what we really want to be doing, so that our job is not just our job, so that it’s the thing that fulfills us, it’s our life,” he says. “So we don’t feel like we have to rush around and get that thing done and then still go off and live our life. A way of integrating what you do with who you are and with what your entire life is, so your entire life isn’t your job. By compartmentalizing these things, it’s like we’re constantly rushing to complete one thing – we’re rushing to complete our vacation, and then we’re rushing to complete our work, so we can get another vacation, and rushing to complete our vacation again – and then we’re dead. If there was some way to focus on what we really wanted, rather than doing all these things that we settle for, then we would need so little in our lives. Now that I’m writing for a living, I need so little money, I need so few possessions, I need so little everything. My life is this really monk-like life, because I don’t need to compensate with a lot of extra things. I’m so fulfilled and so happy with what I do for my living. That’s what I wish people could get in society – to be doing what they want to do, rather than be doing what they don’t want to do and trying to compensate with a whole bunch of other stuff. I have wonder if so many destructive addictions – whether they’re drinking, or sex, or shoplifting – are because that person would really like to be a painter, but doesn’t have the guts to be that creative painter. So they anesthetize that frustration, that sense of failure, that fear, by doing the destructive thing. It’s a huge act of faith to put yourself out into the world and say, ‘I’m going to create.’”
         Chuck talks about when it finally clicked for him, when he realized that there was more to life than just waiting for paychecks. “When I was working full-time and writing, yeah, I could do my job. Suddenly I was happy doing my job because every day I could get a few sentences in, and my life wasn’t just about filling the bank account so that at the end of the month I could pay bills, and the bank account would be empty, and then filling the bank account again. I hated that. You sit down, you write those checks, and then you see you’re right back where you started. That was just so crippling for me. At least this way I was getting a sentence a day or a word day, and it seemed like I was building something beyond just paying the bills. My head was full of a narrative and I was actually creating something, and it was like the greatest Prozac. It really kept me from going insane in the job I hated.”
         So it seems that the real message of Fight Club is encapsulated in one truly moving scene: When Jack (in the movie, Tyler) holds the gun to Raymond K. Hessel’s head and tells him that if he’s not on his way to achieving his life’s dream – becoming a veterinarian – in three months, then he will be dead.
         The unexamined life is not worth living, or so they say.

         Chuck laughs when I bring up the scene. He’s had people approach him at book signings and tell him things like, “That was the scene that made me go back to school and get my Master’s degree.” This is Chuck’s life dream, this is what he wants to see: for people to stop sucking up to shit-ass jobs and do what they want. And being a writer, he certainly can relate. “I’ve joked that there should be creative writing programs where, instead of having these nurturing workshops, they put a gun to your head and they say, ‘If you don’t have a novella done in six weeks, you will be dead.’ The kind of energy that that would suffuse into not empowering people to living their life’s dream, but sentencing people to living their life’s dream. Because whether or not there’s a gun there, there is a gun there. Nobody’s going to live forever. That gun is there, whether it’s cancer, or a gun, or whatever.”
         On The Writer’s Cult web site is quote where Chuck says, “I write now because I find fewer and fewer books that interest me.” Asked what it is that he dislikes about today’s fiction, he says, “So much of the fiction is too slow and too reflective, not enough happens plot-wise. It involves too much thinking. Brew a cup of tea, sit in the window, watch the leaves fall. Give me a break. Either that or it’s too full of popular culture references. It seems to be trying too hard to be really hip and flip and cynical and glib, without ever bringing me to a deeper meaning, bringing me to heartbreak. It sort of skims along the surface without ever really breaking my heart. Those are the two things I kept on running up against.”
         Without question, Chuck feels that good fiction needs to have some sort of deep commentary on society. “Otherwise it’s just a sketch, a movie pitch,” he says. “It never moves beyond that point A to point B horizontal plot line. It never gradually rises.”
         I ask Chuck what he thinks are the benefits of his own writing style – basically first person, present tense – as opposed to the traditional – third person, past tense. “A couple different things,” he says, rolling his eyes. I ask him if he dislikes reading novels written in that style.
       “Not if they’re written by Tobias Wolff,” he says. “Jeez, I would read his shopping list. Tobias Wolff’s third person, omniscient viewpoint, past tense, is gorgeous. It’s beautiful. But one of the tenets of minimalism – which is what I studied and which is what I write – is that someone has to be responsible for the story. This can’t be God telling the story. Because we know anymore who’s telling the story shapes the story as much as the events of the story. And in what context is the story being told shapes the story. And the reason why the story is being told shapes the story. All these things shape the story as much as the events themselves. Establishing those things is sometimes the hardest part of writing one of my novels. It’s really easy to come up with a chain of events, but to come up with a context and a reason and a person that is the only way in which the story can be told is most important. So that’s why I like first person, because there’s someone owning the story. Choke is really my first foray into third person, in sections. I think Socrates condemns writing because he says, ‘Speech is the closest thing to thought, and therefore is the most true thing.’ Writing is once removed from speech, which is even farther removed from thought, so therefore, it’s even more likely to miscommunicate. So I try to make my writing as close to speech as possible, and to entertaining speech. We don’t say, ‘Once upon a time, a nun walked into a bar and she sat down next to a penguin.’ We say, ‘Okay, okay, a nun walks into a bar and she sits down next to a penguin, she says, she says, this is what she says.’ We talk with so much more of an immediacy, and that’s how I want the stories to occur, with that same conversational immediacy, so that they appear even closer to thought.”

         Charles Baxter, noted Michigan author and writing instructor at U of M said that all authors/writers steal or borrow from their idols and then break away into their own style. Does Chuck think this applies to him? If so, what authors did he borrow or steal from, and how is that incorporated into his novels?
         “Chuck Baxter is a god,” Chuck says, “But he's too well-known to steal from.  I steal everything from Amy Hemple.  Short stories are miracles; they do something in seven pages that takes most writers 300 pages.  So, I steal from short story writers.  Hemple.  Thom Jones.  Mark Richard.  Bret Ellis’ collection The Informers.  Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.   And I steal non-fiction forms from everywhere: household hints, rules, recipes, prayers, haikus, beauty tips, fashion magazine copy, epitaphs, graffiti.  I steal any convention that will help ground my ludicrous world in reality.”
         Chuck’s current project is Lullaby, which is due out in summer of 2002. He feels it’s his strongest work yet. “It's a horror novel that re-invents Wiccan culture as a means to give people the power of life and death.  In a way, it's really about my struggle over whether to recommend the death sentence for the man who killed my father.  In a book sense, it's about how as we get power, we want more power.  And how if we have the power of life and death, we tend to use it more and more often.  This is demonstrated by many cases of serial medical murder where caregivers killed out of sympathy at first, then killed increasingly out of annoyance, whim, cruelty, boredom.  The research on this one's been chilling.”
         Wrapping things up, he says, “The greatest thing a book can do is push you to write. (I hate the word ‘inspire.’)  My dream is, people will see the possibility for new literature, film, paintings, dance, music, everything, and I can sit back and watch a flood of work – maybe spurred by my work – but a thousand times better.  I look forward to reading myself blind.”
         This is Chuck Palahniuk: positive, creative, sincere.
         I’m disappointed that I missed a great opportunity to experience the first Chuck Palahniuk conference, but I’m glad that he’s taken the time for this interview. It’s helped to bring his latest work, Choke, into focus. No longer a spokesman for total nihilism, Chuck’s made the transition into something stronger; Choke represents a new generation that moves beyond attacking to creating. “That’s what I really see after this turn of the century, especially at this conference,” he says. “I’ve written off young people as TV-drained with no creativity. Now I’m seeing the incredible possibility that they have so much more talent and intelligence and thought than their parents, than my generation. So it makes me very excited by the future. That’s what I wanted Choke to be about, and that’s what I’m seeing fulfilled in so much of the work I’m seeing now from people. I can’t wait for the future now, instead of just dreading the future.”