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.
