Chuck Palahniuk is perhaps best known for his first novel, Fight Club, on which the cult film is based. The book certainly exhibits all of Palahniuk’s best and worst traits: absurd characters, flirtations with the limits of publishable content, and a vast library of disturbing facts. Granted, the book’s many recipes for homemade explosives — gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate to make napalm, soap and nitric acid for dynamite — are duds substituted for the real thing by publishers wary of curious readers. But as the recipes aren’t entirely fictitious, merely censored of a few more crucial ingredients, the explosive potential in everyday household commodities is no less thrilling.
In the same vein, Snuff attempts to seduce readers with many peculiar half-truths. The novel’s central character, a legendary porn star aiming to set the world record for “serial fornication” on film, is a figment of Palahniuk’s imagination. Its premise, the existence of such a record, is not.
The enterprising porn queen in question, Cassie Wright, doesn’t actually make an appearance until Palahniuk’s predictably twisted ending. Most of the novel occurs in a waiting room where 600 nude men mill about, gorging on junk food and Viagra as they anticipate their turn with Wright. Three of them provide the narratives through which Wright’s tragic past is revealed. One is responsible for forcibly launching her career as a porn star, one intends to marry her, and one fancies himself Wright’s long-lost “porn baby.”
It’s for the sake of this porn baby, who she gave up for adoption at birth, that Cassie takes on her suicidal endeavor — which no one expects her to survive. The record-setting snuff film will make a fortune, as will her six life insurance policies.
Cassie’s character is inspired by Annabel Chong, real-life former holder of the world record: 251 sex acts with about 70 men over a 10-hour period, as seen in industry hallmark The World’s Biggest Gang Bang. Palahniuk’s wouldn’t be the first attempt to make something of Chong’s remarkable story. But unlike other more successful works (the 1999 documentary, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival), his novel only superficially grazes the substance of its muse. Cassie Wright is a shallow rendition of Chong, the University of Southern California student who survived gang rape in her teens to embrace a career in pornography and challenge conventional notions of female sexuality.
It’s easy to mistake inspiration badly taken for poor choice of subject matter. If Fight Club spoke to legions of disillusioned white-collar eunuchs, Snuff addresses an equally critical if less visible sector of American culture, the porn industry.
It’s a pity that Palahniuk’s method is to whet the appetite without actually offering any food for thought. Who knew about the market for collectible silicone replicas of celebrity genitalia? So what?
In its tendency to exploit and rely too heavily on its shock-factor, the novel is reduced to a litany of smutty facts.
Palahniuk gratuitously resorts to exhibitions of social taboos; the plot is one big Rocky Horror Picture Show, rife with sexual trauma, Oedipal undertones and hints of necrophilia. The novel lacks intellectual density and abounds with dramatic cliches, but is unapologetically self-indulgent.
The bulk of the Snuff takes place in a waiting room, but like its occupants, readers are somewhat diverted by the oh-so-witty titles playing in the background: The Gropes of Wrath, Sperms of Endearment, Snow Falling on Peters.
When a character attempts to commit suicide by impalement on a comatose man’s electrically charged phallus, it’s instinctive to respond with disdain for all that is wrong with America. But there’s also humor in the absurdities of cultural apocalypse.
Palahniuk is over-the-top and full of bull, sloppily satirical and thoughtlessly vulgar — but entertaining. Of course readers are bound to be disappointed if they are looking for something along the lines of Woolf or Melville (yes, there is a feeble pun about the white whale), but even without reading the book flaps, what’s to be expected from a novel by Chuck Palahniuk titled Snuff?
Snuff is a little more sophisticated than elevated literary porn. With that in mind, it’s a spectacle that’s interesting, erotic and, at times, enlightening. Some might even call it funny.
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