Josh Shear

Chuck's back.

I've been a big fan of Chuck Palahniuk since reading Choke a few years ago. I swallowed the rest of his novels and one of his nonfiction collections pretty quickly, and have been faithfully waiting for each novel since.

His new novel, Tell-All is a return to what got me hooked – a somewhat ridiculous but still semi-plausible story line with an ending that makes the reader say, "Wait, did that just happen? Let me read those last 20 pages again."

It's been a long time coming for me. I was disappointed that Rant turned into a cheap sci-fi joke at the end; I thought Snuff was a total throw-away book that probably sounded good after a bottle or two of wine; and Pygmy's redemption-of-the-villain ending was way too shiny happy for me.

This is supposed to be from the guy whose every review called him funny and subversive – I guess that's what happens when your first novel is Fight Club.

And so.

Katherine Kenton is an Elizabeth Taylor type. Hollywood actress, famous leading lady, lots of husbands (or "was-bands") in her wake. The novel is narrated as a tell-all by Hazie Coogan, the ugly girl who was a better actress than her Miss Kathy when they were younger, but she could never compete for parts with those good looks. So Hazie becomes the assistant. She's a maid. She dresses and coaches Ms. Kenton. She's there when all the husbands die, and when young strapping Webster Carlton Westward III comes into Kathy's life. And she's there to bury Katherine Kenton when the time comes and publish her best-seller, because anybody who's ever lived in a star's shadow has everything but the last chapter written and ready to go to the printer.

Tell-All brings back the we-thought-she-was-beautiful character types I loved in Invisible Monsters, which really needs to be made into a movie, if anyone's got backing money to commit, since it seems to start off then falter every few years.

Anyway, read this book. It's summer, it's the perfect time for some fun fiction, and this definitely fits the bill.

Next up for me, I'm going back to getting serious with John Jantsch's The Referral Engine.

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We saw Choke on Saturday. This was the book that got me hooked on Chuck Palahniuk.

David Fincher did such an awesome job with Fight Club, though the box office draw for it was low. So Clark Gregg had quite a challenge ahead of him: do artistic justice to a really good, but really tough, book, and still put some butts in seats.

For opening weekend, it was only on one screen in town. We went to a 4:25 showing, and the 67-seat theater was almost full.

Gregg's version is very commercially viable. It's short (run time is around 90 minutes), and he managed to get an R rating on it (the book is very NC-17).

He didn't have an easy time of it, but he did.

I clearly am not alone in thinking it was an OK interpretation.

Palahniuk fans are, admittedly, a hard bunch to please.

I went with someone who had not read the book, and the only Palahniuk she was familiar with was Survivor, which looked like it was going to be optioned as a film, but, well, 9/11 happened, so no more airplanes crashing on purpose for a while.

She was very conflicted about the movie, on a "I really shouldn't like this, but I kinda do" level.

I enjoyed it on a "this is entertainment, and I'm glad I spent an hour and a half in a theater watching it" level (especially with the dinner that followed).

But, yeah, it was an OK interpretation. Victor bottoms out in a much different place, and the intricacies of the choking scam aren't fully revealed. For me, that was really the brilliant part of the character – that he's got a really good ledger system for it, despite the fact that he's a royal screw-up in most other parts of his life.

Anyway, see it. If you enjoy movies, see it for the diversion. If you enjoy Palahniuk for the art of Palahniuk, see it because if you want more of his books to be optioned, this needs to do well.