Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor

Until book club chose his novel Survivor for this month's selection, I'd never read anything by Chuck Palahniuk, and I still haven't watched Fight Club. This makes me a small person, I get that, a traitor to my generation and gender etc, and I'm fine with that.

For one thing, there are always enough online bros ready to tell people about Palahniuk's fiction. Besides, my sense was always that his material and schtick was so very American that (a) I'm Canadian enough that I get it already, (b) I'm a Canadian, so I don't need more American in my life/mind, and (c) he wouldn't miss my attention.

Now that I've read Survivor, yeah, I was right that my life didn't need more Palahniuk than the trace elements I was breathing in from living next door to 'Merica and its legions of bros. On the other hand, he's a deeply interesting guy, and his Substack (Chuck Palahniuk's Plot Spoiler) is both generous and prickly, as well as a great blend of the old internet and the new, so all things considered, I'd say he's a better icon than most.

Did I love his second novel, Survivor, which came out in 1999? Reader, I did not, but neither did I hate it, and I wasn't bored while reading it.

The 90s were a strange time, as culturally we were trying on a lot of things that didn't stick (and that we kind of knew at the time wouldn't stick, because jadedᵀᴹ), and Survivor reads like the 90s novel it is. That's fine, and I appreciate the nostalgia, but I struggled to see where the cult-fave stuff comes from. The cover of my edition includes Spin's description "The perfect comment on our apocalypse fixated times," for example, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle's "Brilliantly satiric," and I'm not seeing any of that.

To some extent Survivor feels an American version of Douglas Coupland, and mostly I mean that as a good thing, except to the extent that I don't. I'm a big Coupland fan: I've read almost everything he's written, and I own copies of almost all of it (including downloads of web-only publications), though I've complained about his writing before. I'm used to thinking of him as more American than the Canadian writers I'm more usually reading, so it was intriguing to read an American writer whose style mapped so well onto what I thought of as Couplandiana. They're not Cascadian, these two, but Coupland identifies with Vancouver, Palahniuk with Washington and Oregon, and that's not nothing.

Their 2014 conversation at the New York Public Library must've been pretty great, if the official short's anything to go by. The overlap's clear, but wow do they present differently on stage.

Anyway, Survivor is about a man believed to be the last survivor of a religious cult, the Creedish, who's dictating his life story into the cockpit voice recorder of a plane he has hijacked and is flying on autopilot until it crashes. The crash is the book's end, and if the ending's not clear to you, Palahniuk explained it via email to the person who runs the official Palahniuk fan site (a hyperlink that deserves the most obvious "Spoiler alert!" of all time.) Tender Branson, whose odd-seeming name is explained early on, survives the obliteration of the Creedish cult and becomes a massive celebrity, and ... well, read the book, if that's an interesting teaser.

Re Coupland, Survivor had me recalling Miss Wyoming, Hey Nostradamus!, and All Families Are Psychotic.

And it's fine. I'm not going to find myself thinking about it in future, but if you're not looking for a book that'll stick in your memory, and you're keen on 90s apocalypticism, celebrity culture, people who can see the future, and/or the disposability of human life, especially if you've found something to enjoy in Douglas Coupland's work, you could do worse than Survivor.

Palahniuk seems a good guy, as I say, and there's often a good crackle to his prose. If he's for you, great, but I've got other things to read.