In Chuck Palahniuk’s world, knowing the truth is the same as eating a hunk of rancid, sweating cheese that smells like burning hair and dirty gym shoes.
The stench may be off-putting, but as Palahniuk explores in his latest collection of short stories, “Make Something Up: Stories You Can’t Unread,” there’s a certain freedom in looking past the lies we tell each other and accepting things as they are. The only trouble with that, of course, is that the truth often hurts – but in the case of that stinky cheese, reality is glorious.
“Monkey ate the cheese yet she did not die,” Palahniuk writes. “She ate and ate it. She never wanted to swallow, only to chew it, to grind the cheese between her teeth forever and to always savor it. She wanted to live forever so that she could eat nothing else. Worse than killing her, the cheese tasted – incredible.”
Not everyone in Palahniuk’s stories is so lucky. In scenes that are occasionally cringeworthy and downright hard to read, the renegade author reminds us that bad things happen – to good people, bad people and everyone in between.
But these experiences are not without some kind of redemptive value. In “Loser,” a frat boy tripping on acid has a revelatory moment when he becomes a contestant on “The Price Is Right.” It makes him recognize the disconnect between effort and achievement.
“It’s like, if you live a boring-enough life, knowing the price of Rice-A-Roni and hot dog wieners, your big reward is you get to live for a week in some hotel in London? You get to ride on some airplane to Rome. Rome, like, in Italy. You fill your head full of enough ordinary junk, and your payoff is giant supermodels giving you a snowmobile?”
Similarly, in “Zombies,” high school students choose to opt out of “a miserable life as a world-famous architect or heart surgeon” by self-administering shocks from cardiac defibrillators to their temples, effectively lobotomizing themselves.
“Since that day in the nurse’s office, Griffin Wilson has never seemed happier. He’s always giggling too loud and wiping spit off his chin with his sleeve. The Special Ed teachers clap their hands and heap him with praise just for using the toilet. Talk about a double standard. The rest of us are fighting tooth and nail for whatever garbage career we can get, while Griffin Wilson is going to be thrilled with penny candy and reruns of ‘Fraggle Rock’ for the rest of his life.”
Reveling in discomfort is nothing new for Palahniuk’s readers.
As a 19-year-old on my own for the first time, I treated Palahniuk’s sensational first book, “Fight Club,” as a kind of bible as I raged against consumerist culture. “It’s only once we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything,” I quoted to anyone who would listen.
In the same way that groundbreaking novel functioned as a dangerously prescriptive commentary on modern isolationism, many of the stories in “Make Something Up” feel a little like modern parables, with characters taking on animalistic or blatantly villainous qualities to remark on everything from greed to relationships to racism.
Thanks to Palahniuk’s original and often shocking prose, the stories contain enough humor and raw emotion to draw the reader in, even if some of the material is too grotesque and potentially offensive to discuss here.
These certainly are stories you can’t unread – and at times it takes fortitude to finish. But like a wheel of smelly but delicious cheese, once you bite, you’ll find yourself wanting more.
