Tell-All by Chuck Palahniuk (Jonathan Cape)
Tell-All arrives at just about the point I’d given up on Chuck Palahniuk.
I’ve read seven of his 12 books, greatly enjoying the punchy transgressiveness and taboo-busting glee of novels such as Fight Club or Choke. But somewhere along the way, the shocks stopped feeling illuminating and began to feel calculated.
Haunted was, almost literally, just one bit of unpleasantness after another: a masturbating boy gets his lower intestine accidentally sucked out by the automatic pool cleaner, for example, and then his floating semen impregnates his sister. Fun! Palahniuk’s structural limitations began to show, too, with novels that were less stories than three or four unrelated ideas thrown together to see whether they stuck. Often the answer was no, and by the time Snuff came round — about a porn actress attempting a world-record gangbang — I had pretty much lost faith that Palahniuk wasn’t just beating a dead horse and recording the rot in graphic detail.
What, then, to make of Tell-All? It is, of all things, an ode to old Hollywood, when the men were men and the women were drag queens. Our narrator is Hazie Coogan, maidservant to Katherine Kenton, a fading star of the grandest sort. With the marital history of Elizabeth Taylor and the deranged hauteur of Gloria Swanson, Katherine’s life is held together by Hazie’s tireless ministrations.
Danger appears on the horizon, though, in the form of a young Lothario, Webster Carlton Westward III, who shamelessly romances Katherine for what Hazie suspects are nefarious reasons. Her suspicions are confirmed when she finds a series of drafts of Webster’s already written memoir of his life with Katherine, each of which ends in her death — under an omnibus, poisoned by tainted almonds, or even eaten by grizzly bears. If Westward can kill Katherine and make it look like an accident, he’ll be able to sell her story as his own and make a mint. Can Hazie thwart his plan? Or is something even more diabolical going on?
Tell-All is written in what the publishers call a “veritable Tourette’s Syndrome of rat-tat-tat name-dropping”. Each page is filled with bold-fonted stars of forgotten Hollywood: “Miss Kathie hurtles her bouquet at a crowd that includes Lucille Ball, Janet Gaynor, Cora Witherspoon, Marjorie Main and Marie Dressler. A mad scramble ensues between June Allyson, Joan Fontaine and Margaret O’Brien. Out of the fray Ann Rutherford emerges clutching the flowers.”
The bold font is distracting enough — making the book feel too often like a PowerPoint presentation — but it leads to a larger question: What percentage of Palahniuk’s Fight Club readership is going to find a Marie Dressler reference funny? Won’t most casual readers under 70 be asking themselves: “Who the hell is Marie Dressler?”
Palahniuk also applies his usual shock tactics to the old names: a pink bedroom is as “insular and silent as sleeping tucked deep inside Mae West’s vagina”. At one point Lillian Hellman says: “Eleanor Roosevelt chewed every hair off my bush.” Are these funny? Are you shocked? Are Mae West and Eleanor Roosevelt still legitimate comic material in 2010?
The answer, somewhat unfortunately for Palahniuk, is yes. James Lever’s Me Cheeta had almost the exact same combination of old Hollywood name-dropping and eye-watering obscenity, but somehow made it not just hilarious, but also rageful and ultimately heart-breaking. There are interesting ideas in Tell-All about ownership of biography, but Palahniuk’s characters are too thin and his plot so unsubtle that it’s hard for a reader to see past the bold print.
For all its weaknesses, though, the bloody-mindedness of Tell-All actually restores a bit of my faith in Palahniuk. Surely being so unafraid of alienating his core audience, of writing something so defiantly different from what’s gone before, speaks of a restless mind. I don’t think Tell-All really works, but I am, for the first time in a long while, interested to see where he’ll go next. — Guardian News & Media 2010