Chuck Palahniuk and Gabe Hudson at BookPeople
Thursday, Sept. 26, 7pm
Fri., Sept. 20, 2002
Lullaby
by Chuck PalahniukDoubleday, 260 pp., $24.95
The details of Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel are that the author of Invisible Monsters and Fight Club has, with his fifth book, crossed to the realms of the unreal. And shouldering aside the likes of Stephen King and Clive Barker, he has unleashed another of his indictments of our times -- only now he's using the hoary tenets of fantasy. The plot concerns Carl Streator, a journalist who runs athwart an African "culling rhyme" while working on a story about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The culling rhyme's included in a small-edition book called Poems and Rhymes From Around the World; the rhyme, upon recitation, gently kills anyone within earshot. Or, maybe, whomever it's directed at. (There's the book's main problem. We'll get back to it.) Further investigation brings Streator into cahoots with a real estate agent that specializes in haunted houses, the agent's earnestly Wiccan assistant, and the assistant's ecoterrorist boyfriend.
This quartet sets out to find and destroy all remaining copies of the culling rhyme -- and the original grimoire from which the fatal verses were cribbed. It's a fast, bickering road trip of countercultural power plays through the arteriosclerotic heart of America, and it's in service of a twisted monkey wrench manifesto that will resonate happily with Palahniuk devotees or just about anyone who saw Fight Club. If you fall into neither of those categories, I'll tell you that it's like a cross between Edward Abbey and Lenny Bruce, and you'll know what I mean: There's a certain philosophy underlying the story. You'll laugh a few times, maybe, but you'll wince while you're laughing. You might even wish that a man who can write this engagingly would make his characters more than cleverly caricatured pegs on which to hang the dark and weirdly patterned cloth of his imagination. Failing that, you'll want the internal logic, at least, to be consistent.
The deadly culling rhyme works, we're initially told, when the verses are spoken aloud. And Lullaby is largely concerned with the omnipresence of manufactured culture and, especially, the unremitting noise of our times. So when Streator kills by just thinking the thing and silently whacking folks even if they're at some radio station across the country, Jesus, it's enough to make a reader feel overly anal for noticing that this is a major contradiction to the main premise. So it's a problem, yeah. But since you're most likely to pick up this book for the incisive and inventive jabs Palahniuk takes at consumer culture and corporate greed, you might be able to overlook that problem. The way you might overlook a deep scratch in the finish of a Biedermeier credenza with a mother-of-pearl inlay.
Dear Mr. President
by Gabe HudsonKnopf, 164 pp., $19
Gabe Hudson's debut collection of short stories is certainly timely: The stories are about Gulf War soldiers shipping out, presently involved in the war, or suffering its aftereffects at home -- all of this just as George Bush II is itching to ignite the Gulf War II in real time. Suddenly, Desert Storm doesn't feel like ancient history anymore, and it's safe to say that Hudson is plowing fresh ground with these stories. Himself a former rifleman in the Marine reserves, Hudson (a UT alum) is able to take the reader into that time period and those locales -- that violence and bloodshed, but also the comic surrealism of war itself -- as well as inside the heads of the soldiers, with compelling immediacy.
But sometimes having fresh material is not enough. "The Cure as I Found It" is about a soldier suffering from the Gulf War Syndrome: His hair falls out and his bones seem to be crumbling. Interesting possibilities there. But the plot -- his run-in with a neighborhood thug, his love for his luscious girlfriend, the inevitable violent end -- feels trite and melodramatic. Other stories, including "The American Green Machine," read more like playful-but-failed experiments, and thus lack much of a punch. Some of the stories are far more successful and reveal Hudson's imaginative talent and promise. The narrator of "Cross-Dresser," shaken over both his stint in a P.O.W. camp and the death of his daughter while he was away, becomes convinced that he is the one who is dead and that his daughter's spirit entered his body through his bellybutton. Hence, the little-girl dresses he starts wearing. And the clearly brain-warped letter-writer in the title story, who has sprouted an extra ear on his stomach, begs President Bush to write a letter to his own wife so that she will come back to him. "I mean if a man doesn't have a family, what does he have?" he writes.
The collection's finest piece is its concluding novella, "Notes From a Bunker Along Highway 8." Here, Hudson abandons the show-offy playfulness and disturbed narrators while spinning the funny but sad story of a deserting soldier who drags an injured comrade with him, holing up in an abandoned Iraqi bunker that's filled with caged chimpanzees. Interspersed are letters from the boy's father, a former Green Beret in Vietnam who turns gay to protest the idiocy of the Gulf War. The father writes, "I piss on your war, and it has no more bearing on history than an ant's testicle. I can't wait to see the great stories your generation writes about their war. Oh boy. That's going to be fascinating." In this powerful novella and in his maniacally oddball stories as a whole, Hudson has already proven the soldier's father wrong.
