Damn you, Chuck Palahniuk

A friend blogged about Lolita the other day. I’ve wanted to read this book, but I haven’t, because of Chuck Palahniuk.

The first Chuck Palahniuk book I read was Fight Club. I read the book after I had discovered, fallen in love with, and re-watched the movie Fight Club. It remains the only book-made-into-a-movie that I appreciate the book and the movie equally. The book is powerful, confusing, meaningful, visceral–like the movie, but different. I decided I wanted to read everything Palahniuk wrote. I read Choke. It wasn’t as good, but still a great book. It was funny and bawdy. It was symbolic and absurd. Then I read Diary. It was awful. It tried to be everything that Fight Club and Choke were. And it failed.

I took a break from Palahniuk until I started Amazon bingeing from an internet cafe in Iraq. I bought the book that made me want to read and write for a living, his collection of non-fiction essays, Stranger than Fiction. Even when the subject of the essay is boring, inconsequential, or obscene, his exquisite control of the English language is breathtaking. The feel of the prose makes everything I’ve written look like an eighth grade book report.

One of his essays (that you can read here) talks about his favorite author, Amy Hempel. This is the first paragraph.

When you study minimalism in the novelist Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel’s The Harvest. After that, you’re ruined. I’m not kidding. You go there, and almost every other book you ever read will suck. All those thick, third-person, plot-driven books torn from the pages of today’s news — after Amy Hempel, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and money.

He’s right. Read “The Harvest” here, and tell me you didn’t think about hanging up your keyboard and pencil. The first time I read it, I stared at the page. Then I read it again. Then I started researching accounting degrees.

That feeling has only happened to me once since then. It was when I read this paragraph from Nabokov’s “Gods”:

“Listen - I want to run all my life, screaming at the top of my lungs. Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. This is all there is to life.”

And now I’m afraid to read Lolita. I know it will be good. I know it is a masterpiece. But I’m clinging to gods and the fear of something stuck in Lolita’s teeth.