Family fictions

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2002 by Davis, Alan

Oddly enough, Roth makes only one mistake. He closes the book with a millennial celebration and claims that "the triumph of trivialization over tragedy" is our fate in a world where brilliance flares "across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden." We know better now, of course, and Roth himself once suggested that the daily newspapers make fiction almost obsolete. Franzen, in a way, makes the same mistake by trying to predict the future in his novel, but Chuck Palahniuk, made famous by Fight Club, is too anarchic and unliterary (in the Franzenian highbrow sense) to make any claim to prophecy. His latest novel, Choke, is a mess, but a delightful mess.5 He manages to convey almost without trying the mess of families and the mess of literature. Everything is a mess, he seems to say, so why try to figure anything out? Why not submit to the destructive element, as Conrad suggested in Lord Jim, and ride on the surf of the mess?

Victor Mancini, his narrator and anti-hero, has dropped out from medical school to become an aficionado of sex addiction groups (where he finds plenty of action), an employee at a re-created Colonial village (where everyone is stoned or lustridden), a frequent visitor to the nursing home where his mother (deranged all her life) suffers through Alzheimer's disease, and a scam artist who pretends to choke in restaurants so that the person who saves him will feel obliged afterwards to be his financial benefactor. (Odd logic, yes? but hundreds of people apparently fall for the scam in this fictional world.) All of this, and much more besides, notably a subplot that suggests that Victor's father might be divine, is finally too undeveloped to convince.

Palahniuk, a cult figure among college sophomores since Fight Club, is antic and hilarious in the manner of a standup comic. Clearly, he aspires to be his generation's Kurt Vonnegut, but (in this book, at least) he tries to keep too many eggs in the air and they sometimes splatter at his feet. Even so, the book almost works, because Victor is one of the most unreliable narrators I've met, and he may or may not be having us on. He is all bravado as he attempts to make himself whole in the wake of the serial desertions that his mother inflicted upon him in childhood. For Victor, whose attention span is a wreck, families are an affliction when they're not a joke. Though Palahniuk in this book is too clever by half, his style either brilliantly staccato or repetitively mannered with little in between, his structure sometimes whacked-out improvisation (which works) and sometimes too dependent on Victor's medical school vocabulary or on references to twelve-step recovery programs, I plan to read more of him because he conjures up a vision that could be magically powerful if he can transcend his tics and get it right.

His fictional family is deranged and damaged beyond any normal recovery, but in Nick Hornby's latest novel, How to Be Good, a marriage on the skids receives a jolt when the sarcastic husband of an unhappy and frenetic physician meets a guru, aptly named GoodNews, and transforms his life.6 The book is a hoot, sweet and nuanced, light as air but satisfying, not a gourmet offering but a good curry from North London. Which, as it happens, is where both Hornby and the fictional Carr family live. "Getting married and having a family is like emigrating," Katie Carr says. "And even though I didn't notice it happening, I started to speak with a different accent, and think differently, and even though I remembered my native land fondly, all traces of it had gone from me."