Book Review: Damned

Damned by Chuck Palahniuk (New York: Doubleday, 2011. 247pp)

Chuck Palahniuk is an American essayist and novelist most known for his novel Fight Club. As a postmodern, minimalist author, he is most widely known for his satirical works, as well as transgressional fiction and horror. He lives in Pasco, Washington.

Letters to Satan 

“Are you there, Satan? It’s me Madison. Don’t take the following as a scolding. Please regard what I’m about to say as strictly constructive feedback. On the plus side, you’ve been running one of the largest, most successful enterprises in the history of…well, history. You’ve managed to grow your market share despite overwhelming competition from a direct, omnipotent competitor. You’re synonymous with torment and suffering. Nevertheless, if I may be bluntly honest, your level of customer service skills really sucks” (79).

In a bizarre Breakfast Club meets Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Chuck Palahniuk’s Damned documents the life-after-death of a thirteen-year-old girl, Madison, who has been sentenced to life in the eternal fires of hell. I read the Inferno in high school and subsequently Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso. I thought Palahniuk might bring a funny odd twist to the hell-fire franchise with this work, and I was somewhat right. Hell, in Palahniuk’s world, is unconventional to say the least.

Thirteen and Dead 

Photo by Dave Hogg

Each chapter in Damned begins with a letter to Satan, like the one above. After this introduction, Madison usually describes part of her past life as a daughter of a narcissistic film-star mother and a billionaire father. Abandoned at her Swiss boarding school while her parents attend the academy awards (her mother is presenting), she and her boyfriend take residence in a hotel room and smoke a lot of marijuana. A lot. She smokes so much marijuana that she dies of an overdose, ending up in hell, an ironic place where The English Patient plays on repeat nonstop. She shares eternal damnation with a jock, a punk rocker, a nerd, and a cheerleader. Much like the classic understanding of damnation, none of these characters really appreciate hell.

“But, to be honest, when you’re dead probably not even homeless people are retarded people will want to trade you places. I mean, worms get to eat you. It’s like a complete violation of all your civil rights. Death ought to be illegal but you don’t see Amnesty International starting any letter-writing campaigns. You don’t see any rock stars banding together to release hit singles with all the proceeds going to solve MY getting my face chewed off by worms” (5).

Madison believes that she has the right to appeal her eternal sentence. As one would expect, Madison simply isn’t pleased with her ending up in hell. So, she journeys across the satanically-inspired terrain to hell headquarters, where she hopes to file said appeal.

“My reasoning is…if convicted murderers can linger on death row for decades, demanding access to law libraries and gratis public defenders, while scribbling briefs and arguments with blunt crayons and pencil stubs, it seems only fair that I ought to appeal my own eternal sentence” (94).

A Journey through Hell 

Photo by Carol Browne

The journey, then, becomes a gigantic satire on both hell and current human society. Madison, a spoiled, incredibly intelligent thirteen-year-old thinks she is better than everyone else. Her intricate vocabulary is a way of showing off her pride, but she admits that her only sin is smoking too much marijuana. On her journey across the candy-lined (the kinds you don’t like such as popcorn balls and sen-sen) floors of hell they cross the swamp of partial birth abortions, the sea of discarded sperm, the dandruff desert, and so on. In a perverted homage to Gulliver's Travels, Madison even climbs a demon as tall as a tornado only to end up with a job in the center of hell as a telemarketer.

“My job is: The dark forces are constantly calculating when it’s dinnertime anywhere on earth, and a computer autodials those phone numbers so I can interrupt everyone’s meal. My goal isn’t actually to sell you anything; I just ask if you have a few seconds to take part in a market research study identifying consumer trends in chewing gum. In mouthwash. In dryer fabric-softener sheets” (105).

Though the story was unconventional and frankly disturbing at times, I enjoyed this book. Chuck Palahniuk in his stereotypical style offers a story with a twist, one I will not divulge here. If you can handle some vulgarity, some humor, and some borderline sacrilegious themes, I think Damned is at least worth a cursory read. I hear it may even have a sequel.

Verdict: 3 out of 5
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Posted by: Andrew Jacobson

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Book Review: The Fates Will Find Their Way

The Fates Will Find Their Way: A Novel by Hannah Pittard (New York: Ecco Publishing, 2011. 256 pp)

Hannah Pittard’s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, the Oxford American, the Mississippi Review, BOMB, Nimrod, and StoryQuarterly, and was included in 2008 Best American Short Stories’ 100 Distinguished Stories. She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and has taught fiction at the University of DePaul and the University of Virginia, where she was also a Henry Hoyns Fellow.

Telephone!

It begins as early as preschool with children congregating in a circle. The teacher kneels and whispers information to a girl urging her to motion it onward to her neighbor’s ear. As the children intake, comprehend, and transfer information, the meaning quickly loses significance. Upon revealing the information at the final child, the group chuckles at the distance between the final conclusions and the teacher’s original message. The game of telephone teaches us the ease by which information disintegrates.

Beginning with a group of parents activating the telephone chain, Hannah Pittard introduces her novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way with a clear reference to the misinformation of gossip.

The Void of Life

Set in an unspecified suburb, The Fates Will Find Their Way depicts a group of male friends and the lives they lead in the wake of the disappearance of Nora Lindell, a fellow classmate. With time providing the chill of the cold case files, the group of boys must fill in the blanks in their collective psyche.

Did Nora jump in a stranger’s car never to be seen again like the awful scenarios exhibited often in the movies? Pondering the scenario, the boys think,

“They drove away together. It was an adventure, perhaps. But the experience that Nora had no doubt hoped would be intriguing turned quickly into something more menacing than mysterious. Almost immediately after she got in, she probably wanted to get out. It’s the stuff of fantasies, not of real life. In fantasies, you can get into strangers’ cars” (15).

Maybe Nora’s bones are buried in river sediment two counties down.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Did Nora run away buying a plane ticket to a warm location? As the boys grow up and get married, they still meet and discuss the possibilities,

“We liked to imagine that she’d picked Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the warmth. Maybe she’d though it was possible to live in it, in the canyon. But she never admitted that to anyone, not once she got there and saw how wrong her fantasy had been” (69).

As the group of boys transitions to men with wives, children, and real jobs, the obsession with the disappearance of a teenage girl shifts into slightly creepy territory.

“Like our mothers, our wives were troubled by our refusal to let Nora Lindell go. They thought, perhaps rightly, that it was an indulgence from which only jealousy and regret could come” (191).

The Fates Got Lost on the Way

Photo by Grant Hutchinson

In all honesty, that’s about it for a plot. Pittard metaphorically links the lives of these boys to the fates of Greek mythology suggesting that this collective desired to control the lives and deaths of those surrounding them.

Even though she mentions specific names of these boys, no protagonist steps forward. In turn, the reader is left with understanding the boys as the protagonist. Sadly, this step left me indifferent to the plight of these characters. Without much connection to any of them, let alone a clear link to why they valued Nora, the narrative frustrated me.

This realization, coupled with the suspension of belief around boys and gossip, left me unimpressed with this novel.

In the end, I found The Fates Will Find Their Way a quick read about gossip and what it means when a group transforms an unexplained event into a fantastical life story. Artistically, I understand where Pittard is going with the novel, but I didn’t enjoy it. Yes, humanity tends to mold information into an understandable box in our mind. No, I do not recommend this book.

Verdict: 1 out of 5 stars
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Posted by: Donovan Richards

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