Raw, tender truths from ‘Fight Club’ hard-hitter

Stranger Than Fiction

True Stories

Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday: 234 pp., $23.95

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Chuck Palahniuk’s six novels, including “Choke,” “Lullaby” and “Fight Club,” share themes of isolation, addiction and nihilism. His characters often yearn for companionship, no matter how dysfunctional or damaging.

In the introduction to his latest book, “Stranger Than Fiction,” Palahniuk writes: “If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people.” Every essay in this collection is “about being with other people. Me being with people. Or people being together.”

Palahniuk finds that the “one drawback to writing is the being alone. The writing part. The lonely-garret part.”

In 23 pieces -- some of which appeared previously in publications such as Gear, Black Book and the Los Angeles Times -- Palahniuk writes expansively on topics ranging from bizarre to tragic, outrageously funny to tender -- sometimes in the same piece. Throughout, he offers insight into his approach to writing fiction: “Each time you create a character, you look at the world as that character, looking for the details that make that reality the one true reality. Like a lawyer arguing a case in a courtroom, you become an advocate who wants the reader to accept the truth of your character’s worldview.”

“Stranger Than Fiction” includes both journalistic essays and more personal pieces; it’s the autobiographical material that proves most compelling. Yet Palahniuk’s voice is so distinctive and intimate -- he writes as though he is recounting a great story to a close friend -- that even the slighter pieces are full of wonderful moments. Anyone who assumes, for instance, that Palahniuk is too concerned with violent and macho material may find those notions overturned. (He devotes a piece to his love of Amy Hempel’s fiction and its influence on his writing.)

In “You Are Here,” Palahniuk offers a sardonic take on an event in the ballroom of an airport Sheraton Hotel, a spectacle in which desperate writers pitch book manuscripts and screenplays to agents, publishers and movie producers. The material of one’s life becomes reduced to a story to be packaged, marketed and sold. (Each writer has paid for the privilege of face time with would-be buyers, and each gets only seven minutes to make a pitch and get lucky.) “Maybe a book contract is the new halo,” Palahniuk writes. “Our new reward for surviving with strength and character. Instead of heaven, we get money and media attention.”

Palahniuk displays a wry sensibility in “Confessions in Stone,” a story about men trying to build their own castles. Whereas other pieces reveal the human longing (and failure) to connect with others, he describes the curious new trend of castle-building as a means of willfully shielding oneself from society’s intrusions -- particularly the ever-looming threat of terrorism. “What SUVs are to regular cars,” he writes, “these castles are to regular houses. Solid. Safe. Secure.”

Palahniuk hilariously profiles Roger DeClements, who has built three castles, replete with drawbridges and dragon statues. “A castle has got to have a dragon,” the Washington state man explains. Yet he admits that castles, like all homes, are not without their problems: “I didn’t anticipate the problem with the mold.”

Palahniuk is a savvy writer, well aware that many readers are more hungry for details of “Fight Club” than castles, of college wrestling, Marilyn Manson or other quirky subjects. So he delivers. Brad Pitt (star of David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation of Palahniuk’s book) gets plenty of mention, as do details about its origins: “It’s less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives,” he reveals. “I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks.” To eager fans who regularly beg Palahniuk to tell them the locations of underground fight clubs described in the book, he patiently explains that they don’t exist because he made them up.

He describes other perils of his post-”Fight Club” fame. In “Almost California,” he writes about going to Los Angeles, courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox, and enjoying a lavish hotel room, where he indulges in the mini-bar goodies and the large whirlpool tub. The evening before an important Hollywood meeting, he decides to use a men’s depilatory on his head, then proceeds to “hack at my scalp with a razor.”

The results are unfortunate: “Tomorrow, I was going to Hollywood. That night, I couldn’t get my head to stop bleeding. Little bits of toilet paper were stuck all over my swelled-up scalp. It was a sort of papier-mache look, with my brains inside. I felt better when my head started to scab, but then the red parts were still swollen.”

With “Stranger Than Fiction,” Palahniuk again proves himself a writer unafraid to expose his own foolish moments and reveal experiences that aroused the most pain and anger. He recalls how his grandfather killed his wife and later himself with a shotgun as Palahniuk’s then 4-year-old father hid under a bed. In the summer of 1999, when the “Fight Club” movie came out, Palahniuk’s father and a woman he was dating were murdered in Idaho, shot by her ex-husband.

Whether engaging in loopy humor or sorting through the haunting detritus of his own life, Palahniuk writes rigorously, getting the tone just right in each piece. Those readers who appreciate the author’s previous work will be satisfied by this wide-ranging collection, which should earn him new fans as well.