In “Act One, Scene Five” of Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel, the narrator, Hazie, rips up a letter and flushes it down the toilet. “Folding the parchment, I tear it once, twice. Folding and tearing, until the sentences become only words. The words become only letters of the alphabet, which I sprinkle into the toilet bowl.” This is essentially what Palahniuk does with language in “Tell-All.” And a toilet seems like a cozier place for his prose than the 179 pages his narrative occupies.
Palahniuk is no stranger to the neighborhood of contemporary fiction. His 1996 debut, “Fight Club,” remains a much-lauded part of popular culture’s lexicon. “Choke” (2001) inspired a cult following that fashioned a fringe writer into a literary mogul.
Both these novels were made into films. While most of Palahniuk’s books read as if tailor-made for book-to-movie adaptation, his 11th novel literalizes this trend and takes it too far.
In “Tell-All,” Palahniuk employs the jargon of a screenplay, such as dissolving “into flashback” or “a panning shot.” To a cumbersome degree, he conflates this trope with the language of playwriting, directing us to “stage right” or “stage left.” The point of this uninspired leitmotif is never really established, nor does it really support the novel’s content. Demarcating chapters into acts and scenes is equally befuddling.
With this in mind, the book reads like a script written by the narrator, Hazie Coogan, who in describing herself says, “I was Thelma Ritter before Thelma Ritter was Thelma Ritter.” Palahniuk stages his novel in the milieu of Old Hollywood before smog and cynicism set in. Hazie is a self-proclaimed “Pygmalion,” a housekeeper and life coach for the actress Katherine Kenton.
“William Wyler, C.B. DeMille and Howard Hawks may have directed her in a picture or two, but I have directed Miss Kathie’s entire adult life,” Hazie surreptitiously tells us. As the narrator, Hazie works to keep Miss Kathie from falling out of stardom and to preserve the illusion that her mistress’ life is founded on more than just a backdrop of washed-up Hollywood nobodies.
If Shakespeare’s right and the world is truly a stage, then what happens in the wings of Miss Kathie’s life is far more interesting than the production itself. She has an illicit love affair – orchestrated by Hazie, of course – with the bachelor Webster Carlton Westward III that quickly goes from passionate to putrid. Miss Kathie and Hazie discover that Webster has written a draft of a memoir he calls “Love Slave.” Not only does it contain a litany of Miss Kathie’s filthy, intimate indiscretions, like a soft-core “120 Days of Sodom,” but Webster’s book also foretells the actress’ death. Doesn’t it make you wish that instead of a few excerpts, the whole novel were “Love Slave?”
Miss Kathie seems to cherish the longevity of her career rather than her life itself. Immediately she panics about how Westward’s draft will be received after her death. Never mind that Westward plans to run her over. And in the world of “Tell-All,” the words “death” and “kill” have double meaning. They refer to dying yet more than that, these words refer to one’s Hollywood career and clout: To kill is to kill a reputation.
It takes about 100 pages for Palahniuk to get the narrative wheels turning and once he does, the book’s almost over. In lieu of taut, tightly wound narrative structure, he fills the book with page upon page of digressions. “Tell-All” is certainly a telling title because Palahniuk, in his plain yet affected prose and his awkward metaphors and similes, tells rather than shows.
His hubris is in full form here. He makes more than a few nods to canonical writers that would only sate the most undeveloped of literary palates (“Katherine Kenton will sit alone as abandoned as Miss Havisham in the novel by Charles Dickens.”). Through every act, scene, whatever of “Tell-All,” Palahniuk, like a bad film critic or a paparazzi with Tourette’s, namedrops ad nauseam. In a failed act of postmodernist flourish, he boldfaces each name – and often in quick succession. In one particularly overstuffed paragraph, Pocahontas, Athena, Hera, Juliet Capulet, Scarlett O’Hara, Ophelia and Marie Antoinette, among many others, are all mentioned in 12 lines of text. Fortunately, “Tell-All” doesn’t demand that we understand every reference. Most are more irrelevant than irreverent, and if you don’t get one of them, you’re bound to get the next one.
In typical Palahniuk style, he’s at his best in the book’s bawdiest scenes. There are some grotesquely comic moments, like Miss Kathie shopping for a baby by matching its skin color with a paint chip, and her stupidity is often the brunt of Hazie’s jokes (“‘I love that word … au pair it sounds almost like … French,'” Kathie says). Yet sometimes Palahniuk is too self-consciously witty, such as neologisms like “was-bands” for husbands.
Palahniuk was once the guy who put every public service ad about masturbation to shame with his short story “Guts.” And he’s also the guy who told us what “filching” means in the novel “Invisible Monsters.” What happened to that guy? Is he still in there? “Tell-All” is less hysteric and less daring Palahniuk. Without the kinky sex, flesh-curdling gore and even the occasional insight of his previous books, we’re left with a mere skeleton of a novel that isn’t even worth pulling out of a closet and hanging in a classroom.