Chuck Palahniuk: Books that changed my life

Like most of his work, Chuck Palahniuk’s latest book, Not Forever, But For Now, is not for the faint of heart. Murder, incest and assault are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the book’s taboo themes—no surprise from a writer known for making audiences faint and throw up during readings of his short story “Guts”. After some technical difficulties, Palahniuk joins me on a Zoom from his Boston hotel room to share the books that changed his life and inspired his twisted bibliography with us.

Reader’s Digest and Palahniuk have a history, actually. In an early scene in Fight Club, the narrator comes across some Reader’s Digest articles written from the perspective of a man named Joe’s organs, with titles like “I am Joe’s prostate”. These articles have quite the impact on him, as he begins referring to his own feelings in this format (for example, “I am Joe’s smirking revenge”). Obviously, writing for Reader’s Digest all these years later, I have to ask: are the articles real? Has Palahniuk read them?

They are indeed real, I’m told, and Palahniuk read them as a child. “They were fascinating to me,” Palahniuk says. “It was like being talked to by a part of my own body.” With the articles being under copyright, they had to change it to “I’m Jack’s…” in the film adaptation.

Onto his favourite books—sadly, none of the old Reader’s Digest books make the cut. The first book that changed Palahniuk’s life is The Great Gatsby, which emulates what he calls “a beautiful, classic American structure” with three key components: the martyr, the murdered and the witness. In fact, he tells me, all his favourite books are united by this common form.

In this form, he explains, typically one character commits suicide, another character is murdered and a third character leaves the setting of the novel and withdraws into the larger world as a witness.

“In The Great Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson throws herself in front of Gatsby’s car,” says Palahniuk. “In Fitzgerald’s letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, he described it as a suicide. So Myrtle Wilson is the suicide. Then Jay Gatsby is murdered. And then Nick Carraway goes back to the Midwest, from where he’s telling the story.”

According to Palahniuk, this is a very American pattern, one that teaches moderation. “You don’t want to be the overly obedient or passive character who ultimately kills themselves,” he says, “and you don’t want to be too much of a radical character like Jay Gatsby, because the world will kill you. You want to be Nick Caraway, that witness and character that learns from the flaws of the two extremes.”

It’s a structure that features in Palahniuk’s own work. His first novel, the renowned Fight Club, features the narrator as the “obedient good boy character” who ultimately commits suicide. In doing so, he murders the radical Tyler Durden. Ultimately he integrates the two personalities into the witnessing character. “What I was trying to do with Fight Club was very much based on trying to distil The Great Gatsby down to two characters instead of three,” he says.

“My theory is that this model of the martyr, the murderer and the witness goes to the core of 20th-century American politics,” he adds. “Every four years, your party either wins or loses, and you have to be able to adjust every four years to having your person in office or not having a person in office.” Power changes so frequently from one extreme to the other in America, from one ideology to the other, that the only way to survive is be the witnessing character.

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Palahniuk’s second pick is Gone with the Wind, a book that he read on the beach in the Caribbean over the course of a year. “I dropped out of college, and my friends said, Let’s move to the Dominican Republic. Prescription painkillers are sold over the counter down there. We can live on the beach. We can live this great beach lifestyle and just take painkillers and tan. So I did that for a year and the only book I could find was Gone with the Wind.”

He laughs, noting that it’s not a very popular book any more. Since its publication in 1936, it has been the source of controversy for its portrayal of African Americans and romanticisation of the Ku Klux Klan. Nonetheless, it remains an iconic American novel, ranking second (behind the Bible) in a 2014 Harris poll on America’s favourite book.

And, Palahniuk says, it embodies that structure he is so drawn to. The martyr in Gone with the Wind is Melanie Wilkes, who, after having her first child by Ashley Wilkes, is told that she will die if she tries to have another. However, she says that Ashley always wanted a big family, and she wants to give him that.

“We know that Melanie is pretty much checking out, that she’s going to die,” Palahniuk comments. “It’s more or less a suicide, because she’s choosing to try to bear a child after being told that it will kill her.”

The radical, extreme character in Gone with the Wind is Scarlett O’Hara, a brash woman who is happy to violate every social norm. She doesn’t exactly fit the “murdered” mould in Palahniuk’s thesis, but he makes an allowance. “In fiction written by female authors and, I would argue, largely for female readership, the rebel character isn’t murdered or killed,” Palahniuk explains. "The rebel tends to be banished or shunned.”

This is the case for Scarlett O’Hara, who ends the novel largely shunned by her social set. Meanwhile Rhett Butler, her husband, “goes off to Charlottesvile or Savannah or wherever he came from.” That is, he disappears as the witness.

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Palahniuk’s final pick is Rosemary’s Baby, and his theory is that it was really a book about the thalidomide scandal. Thalidomide was an oral medication widely used to combat nausea by pregnant women in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a result, over 10,000 babies in 46 countries were born with impairments such as limb differences, sight loss, facial paralysis and damage to internal organs.

“Ira Levin would never say this, but my secret theory is that the book was the result of a world not able to deal with the horrors of thalidomide,” Palahniuk says. “Throughout the book there are small clues that the baby will be deformed, in the way that thalidomide deformed newborn babies. So I think that it’s about thalidomide, and that Ira Levin could never say that out loud for fear of being vilified.”

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This theme of generational legacy and fears is something that flows through Not Forever, But For Now, too. Much of the book is concerned with the two main characters, brothers Cecil and Otto, finding their place within and wrestling with the established power dynamics of their family business. By the way, this family business is no quaint restaurant in need of an update nor even a high-stakes global media conglomerate, but rather a business of professional killers responsible for various high-profile deaths that you thought were totally natural.

“It’s a book about empire, really,” Palahniuk explains. “As flawed and kind of despicable as these two little boys seem, they’re really rebelling against perpetuating the system in which they exist. They get to live in this gigantic house with all these servants, but their prosperity and comfort depends on killing large numbers of people around the world. It’s a book about whether or not they want to perpetuate empire.”

Despite all manner of shocking themes and scenes (Palahniuk makes unsparing use of euphemisms that, should you wish to look them up, you might want to open an incognito window), the book ends with a glimmer of hope: Cecil notes, towards the end, that he is “finished with wishing for a better world. It seems I must pitch in.”

“That’s as good as it gets in my book,” Palahniuk laughs. “There’s a little glimmer of sunshine at the end, and that’s about it.”

Not Forever But For Now by Chuck Palahniuk (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) is out now