'Snuff' is not up to snuff
Devoted readers of Chuck Palahniuk will hardly need a warning. But as with most of his previous eight novels, it's best to start with a reviewer's disclaimer: Plenty of disturbing (and ultimately disappointing) material ahead.
As it is, "Snuff," Palahniuk's lackluster new novel, is -- despite being set during a record-smashing group sex porn shoot -- comparatively tame. This is Palahniuk after all -- a writer whose most famous work, "Fight Club," took barbaric feats to new artistic heights and later gained notoriety with a descriptive book excerpt about gruesome injuries incurred during masturbation.
The plot of "Snuff" centers on the events of a shoot designed to be the crown jewel in Cassie Wright's adult film crown. Wright, a porn legend edging to retirement, is attempting to shatter the world record for most sex acts in a single shoot.
This is the porn equivalent of Horse Racing's Triple Crown, Joe DiMaggio's 52-game hitting streak and UCLA's Wooden-era college basketball dominance rolled into one graphic achievement. The stakes being what they are, and the unsavory types associated with the adult industry being who they are, things, predictably go wildly astray.
When it comes to Palahniuk's work, finding cringe-worthy passages is hardly a noble task. They proliferate as easily as periods and commas. In one chapter, there's a quite literal colorful description of Cassie's pre-game wax; in another, a vivid description of Cassie's male protagonists eating various dips and snacks just before they go on screen for their bit roles in X-rated immortality.
Some of the rankest passages, though, come from the grizzly voice of Mr. 600, a veteran adult actor, and one of the several shifting narrators Palahniuk floats between.
"Sure, she's been in training. Kegel Weights. Aerobics. Pilates. Yoga, even. Hard, as if she was going to swim the English Channel, but ... in the room back there playing mattress underneath six hundred dudes -- she's being the English Channel," Mr. 600 narrates in one of his tamer assessments.
It would be one thing if this sort of bawdy dialogue peppered a narrative with alacrity or coherence, like say, the film "Boogie Nights." The events, though, are as graphic as they are hard to follow. There are, as mentioned, the shifting narrators: a virgin who believes he is Cassie's son; a creepy man who totes a stuffed animal signed by celebrities and who appears to have nefarious intentions that may sabotage the whole shoot; Mr. 600 and Sheila, a shell-shocked production assistant.
There are, to be sure, pockets of Palahniuk's trademark matter-of-fact prose that sparkle, and his occasionally delicious dark sense of humor is intact. A chapter in the voice of Mr. 72, the virgin, contains an amusing download of information on the tattoos of street gang members. His explanation of how he acquired this knowledge is priceless:
"My adopted Dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement."
Sadly, such flickers are rare. Palahniuk, whose past works have evinced a forceful and darkly entertaining narrative voice, seems to have come up limp in an effort to out shock himself in "Snuff." The reader, like Cassie one suspects, remains deeply unsatisfied.