The Las Vegas library is out on the edge of town, and there’s a very un-Vegas crowd gathered in the auditorium. Boys sporting tattoos and girls with kohl-dark eyes lounge around waiting for the action. The girl next to me skipped off work early to make it; the boy next to her drove five hours to be here.
Chuck Palahniuk is in town to give a reading of Guts, the latest instalment in his gore-fest celebration of all things unAmerican. (Actually, this is a fiction: he’s really here to visit his family, many of whom work in the Vegas casinos “in middle management”, and the reading means he can write the trip off against tax — or that’s what he tells me.) Guts, a cautionary masturbation tale writ large, has all the expected Palahniuk ingredients — anatomical detail, suburban melodrama, violence and humour.
It is in some sense more shocking than Fight Club, his 1996 novel (later a film) about a secret fraternity of young men who pummel each other half to death in illicit contests, and who gradually evolve into a terrorist unit.
“Guts is a short story from a book of linked short stories. And it’s not even the most extreme one; but it’s the one that makes people pass out,” Palahniuk says. “I want to have the story that makes people weep uncontrollably … a whole series of very extreme short stories, all linked together with a unifying narrative. I think that will be the book that erases Fight Club.”
Before his reading, I meet Palahniuk for lunch on the corner of Canal Street and Bourbon Street in Orleans. Of course, this being Vegas, that’s not New Orleans, the well-known city in the south of the United States, but the lesser known Orleans hotel on the fringes of the Vegas strip.
Palahniuk is a shaven-headed figure in short-sleeved, salmon-pink shirt, white trousers and brown tasselled loafers, moves with the slightly rolling gait of the muscle-bound. He looks nothing like his author photograph. “That’s the idea,” he says.
The event begins that evening with the chief librarian, Moira, dressed in character in sensible shoes and skirt, asking, on behalf of the author, how many of the audience have never been to a public reading before. Two-thirds of the 500 or so people gathered hold up their hands. This much, Palahniuk had promised me. The evening ends with him asking the audience how many of them passed out. No hands go up. Some people point accusingly at a young man. Others gesture towards a vacant seat. “He did!” they crow. “He passed out!” “It was an epileptic fit,” say friends of the empty seat.
“I think someone over here fell asleep,” says someone at the edge of the stage.
“Okay,” says Palahniuk from the stage, microphone in hand. “I think we’ve got one.” And he tosses into the crowd a fake severed limb, one of 25 he has shipped to Vegas as rewards for his audience.
Palahniuk has a thing about Guts. Guts is so horrific, the story it tells so visceral, that it can actually cause physical harm. Guts, he says, can damage your health. He’s keeping a tally of the casualties from his readings: by now, he reckons, 40 people have fainted.
“In Cambridge [England] last year, two people passed out,” he tells me as we eat our lunch. “In Leeds, nobody passed out; in London, nobody passed out. But in the venues where nobody passed out it’s typically because they ran from the room. And a lot of people will pass out after they get out of the venue. They just don’t want to be seen publicly unconscious. They’ll go to the bathroom and pass out.”
This is the literary salon as drive-by shooting. Palahniuk is so convincing, so measured and forensic, that he has me scanning the audience, jotting an accusing note whenever some- one goes to the bathroom.
“Every time I write something, I think, ‘This is the most offensive thing I will ever write’,” Palahniuk tells his audience. “But, no, I always surprise myself.”
He likes performing. A charge seems to run through him as he stands at the lectern. He ramps up the humour in Guts, and what seems a thoroughly gruesome story on the page turns into a comic juggernaut.
“Guts is three true short stories,” he tells me. Each relates to traumatic misadventures in boys’ masturbation experiments — penile and anal horror, you might say.
‘When I was researching Choke [an earlier collection of stories, published in 2001], I was going to sex-addict support groups and a guy told me that story,” says Palahniuk. He claims he is not interested in shock. “I’m always trying to reach a transcendent point, a romantic point,” he says, “but reach it in a really unconventional way, a really profane way. To get to that romantic, touching, heartbreaking place, but through a lot of acts of profanity.”
Then, as if to demonstrate this blend of heartbreak and humour, he tells me what happened after his father was murdered five years ago. His father was shot and his body burned by the ex-boyfriend of a woman he was dating.
“After we cleaned up my father’s house, my siblings and I, we’d be working, then we’d start crying. If one person started crying, everyone would start crying. And then somebody would find a prescription for Viagra and we’d all start laughing. We’d be finding these half-filled bottles of Viagra. One in each of the cars, one in the sofa cushions, one in the easy chair. And we’d be laughing and laughing and then we’d be crying again, and then we’d find another bottle of Viagra and start laughing again.”
Palahniuk is easy company. Chatty, witty, engaged, he sometimes seems to be trying just a little too hard to be nice. He doesn’t do drugs, he hates smokers, he is calm, measured and well-read — the antithesis of his characters. His approach to writing is methodical to the point of neurosis. He is an advocate of minimalism and talks consistently of the act of writing as “keying in” a story.
His training as a journalist, and the research he puts into his stories, lead him to play down any suggestion of art in his work. “I don’t do much more than organise other people’s ideas and insights and thoughts,” he says, “and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.”
His status as chronicler of America’s underside has come at a price. “I take a lot of flak from the counter-establishment for selling out,” he says. “I think a lot of people saw Fight Club and thought here’s our next Che Guevara, here’s our next Fidel Castro, here’s someone who’s going to wave the flag. And I was like, no, it’s just a book. And if I beat that drum, if I play that song one more time, I won’t have a career.”
Palahniuk’s next book is to be that most quaint of things, a travel book — a series of essays, postcards and ruminations on the underbelly of his home town, Portland, Oregon.
Yet beneath the profanities and the glitz of his new book, and indeed of Guts and almost all of his writing, there is a calm, spiritual Palahniuk fighting to get out. This side also struggles out in conversation, sometimes in the most unexpected of ways.
“If we lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, life would be much simpler,” he says, raising an eyebrow. Is Palahniuk having a little joke, or is the Iron John spirituality the real thing? Is Palahniuk, that most matter-of-fact writer-as-typewriter novelist, also that common beast, the unreliable narrator? — Â