Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

reviewed by Laura Quest

I expected to see a certain amount of multi-layered, self-indulgent narrative between the covers of Chuck Palahniuk's The Diary, being that most of the ideas I feel guilty enough to write in my own diary are laden with such things. And certainly this is the case. Palahniuk makes fine use of every type of diary-like literary device one could think up to introduce his main characters. He structures the novel around the very tricky perspective that people seem to develop in diaries (and with themselves, for that matter). In fact, he develops a slew of his own devices that are clever in a way a Palahniuk novel must be in order to support his elusive ideology and quirky characters. As literary devices go, these were fresh, invoking, ironic, and pungent. I was captivated by them, in fact. When I didn't quite believe a character, along would come some shift in perspective or some totally bizarre moment of symbolism and a grin would spread through me, cementing my delight in playing detective within Palahniuk's writing.

That is, until around page 120. He explains away a very obtuse emotional climate by slipping in yet another usage of the technical syntax of physiognomy (because, see, the characters are artists and they studied that at the school where they met), and I reach my hand up to my collar and pull it away briskly. Twenty pages later, the plot not having developed any further and upon another moment of technical jargon, I am flat-out wishing the whole thing was over. I've always prided myself in restraining the temptation to read the last page of a novel and call it a night. In this case, the gimmick at the end of the book (as poignant as it had the potential to be), was simply too watered down to effect me by the time I had swum through the layers and layers of irony.

I closed The Diary and with a sigh of relief, read the quotations on the back cover. A top-drawer horror novel, it says. I had to search my recollections for even one example of something horrifying. The inclination of the main character (at times, narrator) to pierce through his nipples with various timeless, yet tacky brooches did seem a bit horrific. Certainly the amount of times this fact is mentioned in relation to any other relevant information about him is far more horrific, however. Palahniuk's most ambitious novel to date, the front cover proclaims. Again, I would totally agree: this novel is ambitious. In fact, it is so ambitious that it takes on at least one new gimmick per page for the first fifty pages. And as the narrative unravels, the gimmicks boldly push on (note, I did not say forward).

Don't get me wrong, I went to a party when I was about halfway through the novel and fought for its virtues amongst tipsy skeptics. But I was deceived. And you can bet I went and wrote about it in my diary. I flipped through my own entries and noticed that they also all start out so fervent, so energetic, insightful and captivating, that it's a terrible let down to see how they basically all end up in the same place. Maybe Palahniuk's gimmick is deeper set than I gave him credit for - even at the expense of his own work.