By Ryan Alan

Philly EDGE Correspondent

 

In the most everyday of moments, Chuck Palahniuk is just like us.

This afternoon is one of them.

He is outside of his home in the Pacific Northwest coaxing his dog back indoors. The quiet, genial Washington State resident begs our indulgence for “two or three minutes” while he puts his pet at ease.

It is in those moments between the covers of a book, however, that Palahniuk seems to transform himself, just as he has made that real life transformation from an auto mechanic to a cult hero writer who has sold more than three million copies of his work in the United States alone and, according to one observer, built one of the largest centralized followings of any author on the Internet, based around his official Web site: www.chuckpalahniuk.net .

He very well could be, as he has been described by his publisher, the most interesting “underground” literary author there is, fashioning imaginative plot lines and, perhaps, even more imaginative characters with an eye to the future that seems to predict the next pop culture phenomenon.

His first novel, Fight Club, which was later turned into the movie starring Brad Pitt, seems to have become a touchstone of sorts for young males. Its themes of gender and masculine identity are now taught in colleges.

Palahniuk has said that his books are always about somebody “who is taken from aloneness and isolation, often elevated loneliness, to community."

And he explained that his work is never about what someone might think it is about.

He cites his Survivor, for example, whose storyline has a person hijacking and crashing a 747 into the Australian wild. It is really about our educational system, Palahniuk explained.

“I feel, more often than not, kids are sort of taught, or trained, to be the best possible cogs in some big corporate machine,” he said. “They’re not really taught in an empowered way that they can start their own company so that they can create and run their own lives. They are sort of taught to be just good employees, to just fit in.”

Dennis Widmyer, Web master and writer of the author’s richly informative site, says that, "Several of Chuck's novels feature biting satire on the fate of the working poor in America and the myth of a classless society…”

Palahniuk (pronounced: “Paula Nick,” suggests Widmyer) likens much of his fiction to essays.

“I love to read essays because I write so much like essays," he explained. He draws inspiration from bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy during his writing process. It’s said that Trent Reznor expressed interest in scoring Survivor for film.

Palahniuk’s latest work, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (Doubleday; $24.95), released May 1, takes the form of a fictional oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which a variety of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors and relations offer perspective on his short life and sudden death. Rant escapes from the tedium of small-town life for Middleton, the big city, where the populace is divided into Daytimes and Nighttimers, a government-enforced segregation.

This separation results in two divergent, adverse cultures: the seemingly normal, moral Daytimes who conduct their lives and business during the light of day, and the pale, degenerate, and often rabid Nighttimers who are only permitted to go out into public after the sun has set.

Palahniuk will read and talk about Rant in an 8 p.m. visit to Philadelphia Thursday, May 10, in a program with iconic crime novelist Elmore Leonard. The free event is at the Free Library of Philadelphia (1901 Vine St.; 215.686.5322)

He offers this preview in a phone interview with Philly EDGE:

 

Philly EDGE: It’s a great double bill for book fans in Philly with you and Elmore Leonard. Are you a fan?

Chuck Palahniuk: “It’s kind of unreal reading with people who have been your hero your whole adult life.”

 

PE: Do you have any Philadelphia connections?

CP: “Kyle McCormick of Philadelphia was the very first reader who wrote to me about Fight Club. He’ll probably be there with a lot of other people.”

 

PE: Your tremendously loyal fans have been compared to those that might follow a rock star. What is your reaction to such support?

CP: “I don’t think you ever get used to it. I find myself trying to do more and more at the event to justify that attention and to redirect that attention to supporting those people and what they would like to do. I talk about the essays I’ve written on minimalism and what helped me the most, and pass those things on to other people that want to be writers. That attention shouldn’t go to me but to their energy - to what they want to do.”

 

PE: Do you have a feel for who your readers are?

CP: “I think I do until I start accepting mail. Then I get it from a really wide group of people, almost equally men and women; often young adults from their late teens to mid-30s to early 40s.”

 

PE: The perception seems to be that you have a larger male readership.

CP: “Maybe I do, but the letters are pretty much equally from men and women. Maybe women tend to write more letters (laughter).”

 

PE: What can a woman take from your books?

CP: “Some of my books stereotypically have more female issues. Invisible Monsters is a reverse Cinderella story. It’s about an incredibly beautiful woman who is always the center of attention until her face gets shot off in a drive-by shooting. She becomes culturally invisible and realizes there is more power in people being afraid of acknowledging her presence than focusing on her all the time. I can’t believe the following it has with either women or gay men. It’s a cult bible for them.”

 

PE: Why does your writing resonate with people?

CP: “Part of my process is to go to hundreds of people, tell them what I’m working on and collect anecdotes from their lives, the common experiences we all have. Each book is kind of a field study that includes experiences of a lot of people.”

 

PE: Fight Club has been described as a "rite of passage" for young males. Why do you think it struck such a chord?

CP: “Because I talked to everybody who I worked with at Freightliner that had issues with their dad, and that was pretty much every guy I worked with. I collected their gripes and put it all together; even my dad, I collected the gripes he had about his father.”

 

PE: Where are you in this interesting career journey? Are you surprised at where it has taken you, and the manner in which it has impacted people?

CP: “I’m very surprised. But so much of what you do is because you love to do it. A lot of time is spent denying anyone will see what I do.”

 

PE: What continues to motivate you? How do you keep it fresh for yourself?

CP: “My own threshold of boredom, and the (writing) workshop with my friends every Monday night. So many of my ideas are generated from other people. Most of my job is coming in and being quiet and listening to people. After every (book) tour there are more great ideas than I can ever develop.”

 

PE: What do you hope people take from your writing? Is there something beyond entertainment?

CP: “No, I’d be happy if people are entertained and develop a freedom around darker issues like violence and death or compulsive behavior, but not buy into the drama of those things and learn to laugh at those things, sort of. “

 

PE: Regarding your goal of trying to find “the really dark funny thing that is present in all tragedy,” do you sense that is a coping mechanism that many people use, especially with times being what they are?

CP: “Yes, but as a child of the ‘70s, you were prepared for that: The Bad News Bears lost. While John Travolta won the dance contest, he found out it was rigged. Bonnie and Clyde lost. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? lost.

All movies I grew up loving had unhappy endings. I saw the absurdity of goals they had been striving for. We are starting to see that come up again in response to everything happening in the world now.”

 

PE: What are your thoughts on Rant?

CP: “It’s an updated Huckleberry Finn, an updated Tom Sawyer American archetype.”

 

PE: Where does it rank in your body of work, or don’t you look at your books that way?

CP: “I really don’t. Each book represents a personal issue I’m dealing with at the time. I’m turning 45, looking in the mirror and seeing myself becoming my father physically in so many ways.”

 

PE: Will Rant surprise people?

CP: “Yes (he laughs), it will, but my readers are kind of used to being surprised and would be really happy if I surprised them.”

 

PE: How did you decide that the oral history approach would be the best one for Rant? CP: “The oral history approach was just perfect for this book. If you use the non-fiction form it allows you to tell an incredible story. That goes back to Orson Welles and War of the Worlds, The Blair Witch Project, telling that story. If you tell people, ‘This is a true story,’ you can tell a much more incredible story. I find the form incredibly reliable. It’s like eating chips, one incredible plot point after another. And you can cut story like film, juxtapose stories and provide interesting comparisons, cutting it together without any transitional phrases.”

 

PE: Publishers Weekly, in praising Rant, says that while it may not attract new readers, it will delight old ones. Can you see it winning new readers too?

CP: “It might, just because it’s such a readable form. We have another movie on one of the earlier books, Choke, going into production. The movies seem to grow the readers.”

 

PE: We’re still trying to decide if we want to be Rant’s Daytimer or Nighttimer. While being a Nighttimer might be potentially dangerous, it seems a lot more fun than playing it safe and being a Daytimer. Where are people weighing in on this so far, and do we get a choice?

CP: “Most of us, no. But people who feel like they drive the culture are more likely to identify as Nighttimers. It’s like the Red State, Blue State, question.” (He laughs).

 

PE: How far into the future is the setting for the society in Rant?

CP: “It’s kind of a secret that I imagined it as 1978 - as an alternative time, as going back in time.” (He laughs again).

 

PE: You’ve said that you find it important to give yourself license to write without apologies. You also suggested that if you can’t shock yourself, you are not going to be able to shock anyone else. Can you talk more about this please?

CP: “One of my litmus tests to see if I’ve gone far enough is if I regret how far I’ve gone. If I worry about my family or friends seeing the work, or I can’t conceive reading it in public, that’s a really good sign that I’ve gone far enough. I don’t want to be a few years down the road and wish that I had gone that extra bit...I don’t want to regret not having regrets. It’s kind of proof of having lived a rich life.”

 

PE: You’ve described your writing approach as trying to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar. Can you elaborate?

CP: “The last great storytellers of our time are stand-up comedians. They really know about immediacy and pacing and timing and delivery. A well-written story should be more like a story told to you over a camp fire, at a bar, through the grill of a confessional, or at a party.”

 

PE: You told The Guardian Unlimited that, “You could say I'm always trying to get the story so I can tell it to other people. I really believe it's the moments we can't talk about that become the rest of our lives. It's the moments we cannot process by telling a story that destroy us in the end.”

CP: “I really think we tell stories at Starbucks, sitting around digesting our experiences - things that are either too good or too bad that happen to us - and we have to tell the story; exhaust it by repeating it. It’s an involuntary nature to it. We cannot not do that. We have to tell it to let it go and have to know it’s been heard by someone else. That’s a large function of church: you present the worst side of yourself once a week to be forgiven and to be accepted back by the community. Recovery groups have the same functions.”

 

PE: You made the discovery that there are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they will read your books. Is that a particular source of satisfaction to you?

CP: “Very definitely. I’m always trying to find books I really enjoy (and sharing that information with his readers). The energy keeps going and you have other examples and even push people to take a crack at writing themselves. If they are looking for something in a genre that they can’t find, maybe they should be the one to write that book. It’s really nice to make books exciting again the way they used to be when we were little.”

 

PE: John Updike expressed his concern last year to us about the future of literature and reading. He suggested that young people did not read in leisure time the way he did when he was growing up. “Picking up a book was a happy, anticipatory feeling,” he recalled. He did not think that was the case now. 

CP: “Young people are not dumb. They are the smartest, most sophisticated audience in human history. They are exposed to more stories, and forms of storytelling, than any other generation; they will go to the form that serves them the best. If books continue to follow the 19th Century model and do not evolve, young people won’t read books.”

 

PE: Are you optimistic that books will evolve?

CP: “Very. The latest generation, in their late teens and early 20s, seems to be defining themselves as the book generation, if only to distinguish themselves from the MTV generation that preceded them. Those who were reading Harry Potter are just getting older.”

 

PE: How do you view yourself? Do you see yourself primarily as a social commentator?

CP: “As a documentarian or archivist. So much of what I do is collecting anecdotes and finding a way to arrange them along a good, common theme. American fiction writers tend to come from academia or beautiful language and very little personal experience; or journalism and plain language and exposure to enormous experience. I’m from the J school.”

 

PE: Do you have any idea what the public perception is of you?

CP: “No, I don’t have any curiosity about that at all.”

 

PE: To critics who do not get it, who do not understand what you are striving for in your writing, what are they failing to see?

CP: “I have no idea. I don’t read reviews. (He laughs). Those aren’t the people I’m trying to please. It’s beside the point.”

 

PE: Do the themes and subject matter to which you find yourself drawn change and evolve; or is there a core of themes that continue to be your foundation?

CP: “Issues of identity are always a recurring theme for me; and issues of building or maintaining personal power in relation to other people. Also intimacy.”

 

PE: Here's an update on the old alien-come-to-Earth question. What could someone learn about our society just by reading your books?

CP: “That there are a lot of verbs. I love verbs.”

 

PE: …Speaking of which, you told DVDtalk.com that you write fiction based on verbs, rather than fiction based on adjectives. You said that you offer enough description to get by on, “But I really think that's the reader's privilege to fill in the blanks and I'll handle the verbs." Are the readers indeed filling in those blanks?

CP: “Very much so. People attach a personal vision of what takes place. It offers the reader a greater participation, rather than deciding for them how they should feel or react to things. When you read a verb, like “kick,” “kiss,” “punch,” a part of your brain lights up as if you are physically kissing or punching or kicking. Studies have shown that a reader has a different sort of physical engagement with verbs, rather than abstract language and description.”

 

PE: What do you see as your strengths?

CP: “The fact I don’t give a shit. It’s really a good place to operate from when writing. It’s like when I’m at the (writing) workshop and make them laugh, or make them all moan in unison or shock them. It’s like telling a story at a party….and living in the Northwest away from the whole sort of politics of literature is a strength.”

 

Chuck Palahniuk

Thursday, May 10 at 8 p.m.

215.686.5322