Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Novelist Pens an Insightful Story About Sexuality and Much More
Chuck Palahniuk has written another strange novel. Fans of the Fight Club author will not find the previous statement surprising. Palahniuk has established a reputation as a literary iconoclast at a time when it seems that few popular writers are willing to take chances in their writing.
Going Farther than Fight Club
Such a claim makes Snuff even more impressive because Palahniuk's work pushed the envelope so far that some readers might wonder whether he has left any territory unchartered. For those readers, consider the following synopsis: Snuff is a novel about Cassie Wright, an absentee mother and legendary adult film star who secretly plans to commit suicide while trying to break a world gangbang record during her final film. (Insert your own joke about the book's climax here.) However, despite the book's setting, to describe Snuff as a book about pornography is to miss its main points entirely.
Voices of the Snuff Characters
Palahniuk tells much of the story from the viewpoints of some of the six hundred men who have been chosen to join Wright in her record pursuit, a group that includes mainstream actors, adult film stars, and ordinary people alike – although, granted, the word “ordinary” must be used loosely in any description of Palahniuk’s body of work.
As a consequence, Snuff simultaneously becomes a story about fame, fandom, fanaticism, and – believe it or not – family. It also discloses a disturbing view of the ways in which people integrate mediated fantasy lives into their own realities. “Sometimes a fantasy is all you need,” as Billy Joel once sang.
Palahniuk also ventures into virgin territory – oops, another sexual pun – by providing insight from the perspective of Wright’s personal assistant, a young woman whose bitterness toward the adult film industry seems to be grounded in feminism at first.
However, the reader eventually learns another source for her attitudes as the plot reaches its . . .um, resolution (another term to be used loosely with Palahniuk’s novels). Palahniuk’s wise decision to give strong voices to the story’s only two female characters suggests a maturation on his part that will have readers counting the days until his next novel.
In sum, Snuff is not your typical novel about sex or pornography or power or fan culture or betrayal or regret or the need to belong. It is all of the above, in ways that will cause readers to take a long, hard look at themselves – a hallmark of exceptional literature.
ISBN: 0385517882
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: May 20, 2008
