Not Forever, But For Now by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Simon & Schuster on September 5, 2023

Chuck Palahniuk has a long history of writing dark stories about creepy characters. His novels have been described as twisted, disturbing, raunchy, and weird. Palahniuk doubles down on that tradition in Not Forever but for Now.

Otto and Cecil are brothers. Their ages are not quite clear. They think of themselves as “wee pre-male prey.” A nanny bathes Otto and they spend much of their time in a nursery. Yet they steal cars and frequently “have a go,” which in the context of the novel is a sexual reference. The age ambiguity is presumably part of the novel’s absurdist humor.

Cecil narrates the story. He uses “pre-male” as a synonym for gay. When the incestuous gay brothers did not meet his standard for masculinity, their father caved in the head of their pony with a brick “because he wanted his sons not to be always weak, twee, sentimental babies, but to face up to the grim realities of life . . . and to stop messing about with paper dolls.” Cringe-worthy yes, but with the obvious intent of ridiculing the notion that straight men can beat the gay out of their male children.

The brothers come from a family of assassins. The family has done away with Lady Di, Kurt Cobain, Elvis, and many other celebrities. The brothers particularly enjoy reenacting their grandfather’s murder of Judy Garland. Perhaps Palahniuk meant to mock the unlikely speculation that inevitably surrounds a celebrity’s death.

Otto also enjoys imitating Richard Attenborough as he narrates footage of predators stalking and devouring their prey. Taking their cue from Attenborough's dispassionate descriptions of violence in nature, the boys are natural born killers. Nannies, tutors, butlers, and other residents of and visitors to the manor house where they boys reside usually meet a gruesome end. The brothers lure predators to their home with the promise that they can “have a go” with Otto, who leads them on a chase through the woods before dispatching them (sometimes after granting their wish to have a go with him). The village is certain that the house is haunted, as well it should be. The house also seems to have hatched a monster with “extra limbs and breasts and peckers” that now roams the woods. I have no idea what to make of this fantasy element. Perhaps nonsense is its own reward.

Their grandfather is grooming the brothers for criminal enterprises other than homicide. He instruct them to steal expensive cars as part of an insurance fraud scheme. He launches an app that involves a suicide lottery and assigns the brothers to assist the suicides. Cecil's commentary suggests that the app will play a key role in plot development, but readers looking for a plot are likely to be disappointed.

To the extent that the novel has a plot, I suppose it develops in the last act. Much of the story is a family drama, complete with schemes by family members to kill other family members. Eventually the story moves to a prison and a plan to create an army of “fey, feeble pre-males with little education and no prospects,” calling upon them “to hold up chip shops and to monger whores.” This leads to a “twee” crime wave, a “pre-male revolution” that engulfs England.

Like much of Palahniuk’s work, Not Forever but for Now is primarily an exercise in describing violent and demented acts with clever prose. Perhaps Palahniuk intends to satirize people who view homosexuality as demented, but it is difficult to square that interpretation with grizzly depictions of murder and sexual encounters that are clearly nonconsensual. Perhaps he intended to satirize crime fiction, but if the reader needs to guess at the point of satire, the humor loses its punch.

Palahniuk more clearly satirizes the British empire (or its remnants), royalty, the ruling class, social media, and a prison system that supposedly “coddles” predators by housing them with an endless supply of prey. Those are easy targets, yet Palahniuk barely hits them.

The story has its funny moments. Stealing the queen’s debit card made me laugh (her PIN is 1234). She has billions in her account but can only withdraw three hundred pounds a day. Palahniuk combines the male complaint about emasculation with the female complaint about toxic masculinity to arrive at “toxic emasculation.” I laughed at that, but there are few other moments of inspired comedy.

When I was young I might have enjoyed the story for its shock value, but I am now too old to be shocked by much of anything. Palahniuk was fresh and original in Fight Club but hasn’t ever returned to that form. I can recommend Not Forever but for Now to readers who enjoy mockery for the sake of mockery, but the story lacks sufficient entertainment value to earn a full recommendation.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Invention of Sound by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Grand Central Publishing on September 8, 2020

Chuck Palahniuk is known for transgressive fiction, but being transgressive for the sake of being transgressive gets old. Shock value only has value if it wakes readers up or makes them think. The Invention of Sound isn’t particularly shocking — I don’t know if it is still possible to shock readers with violence — but more to the point, the novel has nothing new to say. It’s simply Palahniuk being Palahniuk.

The story centers on the production of sound effects — particularly screams — for movies. Palahniuk gives the reader interesting tidbits about screams, yodels, and other vocalizations that moviegoers have heard, probably without realizing that they’ve heard the identical scream in other movies. The Wilheim scream, for example, is a stock sound effect that has been used in over four hundred movies. Who knew?

Mitzi Ives has followed in her father’s footsteps as a Foley artist by making a lucrative living recording screams. They seem more realistic than the screams produced by actors because they are actual screams produced by fear, torture, and fear of torture. After tying down her victims in a sound studio, Ives sedates herself with Ambien and alcohol so she won’t remember what she did. The reader will find that odd and will likely not be surprised to learn the truth about the torture sessions.

The surrounding plot involves a long-missing girl named Lucinda (her face has been on every milk carton in the country, presumably terrorizing children who wonder when they too will go missing) and her father, Gates Foster, who spends his time tracking down pedophiles in the apparent belief that one of them must be to blame for his daughter’s absence. An aging actress named Blush Gentry adds her perspective, both as a character and as the author of an autobiography, excepts of which pepper the plot. A caricature of a producer and a supernatural element are additional ingredients in a stew of clashing flavors.

Foster can’t come to terms with his loss, as he makes clear when he disrupts Lucinda’s funeral. He even pays actresses to play her part based on computer-generated likenesses of what she would look like at the age of 24. So okay, that might be a shocking, although I’d probably categorize it as creepy.

The novel’s key concept seems to be that the blending together of screams can create a sound that is greater than the sum of its parts, a sound that can wreak havoc. That’s likely intended to be disturbing but Palahnuik didn’t make me feel anything for the theater patrons who find themselves buried in rubble after the collective scream is unleashed. If the novel is intended as a work of horror, it is less than horrifying. Perhaps it is intended instead as dark humor, but if so, it doesn’t generate enough grins to be satisfying.

Palahnuik can always be counted on to craft interesting if twisted characters. His in-your-face prose style always creates a sense of immediacy that always keeps me reading to the end. Perhaps true fans of transgressive fiction will love The Invention of Sound. Readers who wonder, as I did, if Palahnuik had a point other than showing off how transgressive he can be will probably agree that this is not his best book.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Doubleday on October 21, 2014

"I love you because you're so average" is not the nicest compliment Penny Harrigan has ever heard, but since Linus Maxwell, the world's richest man, is only describing her "textbook" genitalia, she can live with it. Having satisfied supermodels and the first female American president, Maxwell knows something about female parts. He is developing a new product line called Beautiful You that might render men obsolete. The products are designed to enhance female erotic pleasure and Penny is the latest in a long line of test subjects, each of whom has been dismissed from the project after 136 blissful days.

Penny rejects both the "women must go to law school" and the "women must stay at home and raise the kids" model but is struggling to find a third way. She would also like to be less lonely. The pleasure provided by the Beautiful You gadgetry is welcome but it is not a substitute for love ... or is it?

Whether Penny will ever get love from Maxwell is a mystery to which Palahniuk provides conflicting clues through much of the novel. Maxwell wears a lab coat during his sexual encounters. When he participates more actively, he scribbles in his notebook (without breaking stride) and studies readouts of pulse rate and blood pressure. Still, he seems to have genuine feelings for Penny. All of this is funny but it also makes a telling point about the clinical and emotional elements of sex. Either element alone (thrilling sex without love or loving sex without thrills) can be rewarding but the combination is a powerful form of witchcraft.

Beautiful You suggests that women pay the price for male inventiveness. The desire of men to control women and the empowerment of women to resist that control is a related theme, one that is advanced here with a conspiracy to enslave women for an insidious (albeit nonsexual) purpose. Beautiful You also explores the changing role of women in society and advances near-future technology as the latest weapon in the battle of the sexes, all from the satirical perspective that Chuck Palahniuk often adopts.

There is not a surfeit of substance in Beautiful You -- most of the satirical points it makes are obvious ("personal fulfillment" can be a selfish desire) and its targets (consumerism, Promise Keepers, corrupt politicians, greedy lawyers, controlling men, trendy women) are easy and familiar -- but the argument it makes in favor of a balance between deep love and astonishing sex is sound. The graphic nature of some scenes and the opening rape might offend sensitive readers but none of the descriptive text is crude or (from my perspective, at least) offensive. Its bawdy nature may be too much for some readers, its silliness too silly for others, but for me, both of those factors added to the humor, some of which is deceptively clever. I particularly enjoyed the way all the plot elements tie together at the end.

On the downside, Palahniuk's prose occasionally has a rushed, unedited feel and I found the over-the-top storyline, while amusing, to be too over-the-top to provoke many belly laughs. Beautiful You is not one of Palahniuk's best literary efforts, but it is sufficiently entertaining to earn my recommendation.

RECOMMENDED

Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk

Published by Doubleday on October 8, 2013

Is it possible to base an entire novel on potty humor? Not many serious writers would have the audacity to try, and few of those would pull it off as capably as Chuck Palahniuk. Doomed, the sequel to Damned, is a send-up of religion, Hollywood parenting, and hypocrisy in all its guises. Humor of this nature is difficult to sustain, so it's fortunate that Doomed isn't overly long. Sometimes Palahniuk's satire is too over-the-top to be effective; other times it is spot on. Most of the time, Doomed is amusing. On occasion, it is outrageously funny.

Dead, fat thirteen-year-old Madison Spencer, the daughter of a billionaire tax dodging environmentalist father and a New Age actress mother, is experiencing a mid-death crisis. She suffers from postmortem depression and is blogging about it on her PDA. Satan has trapped her on Earth, in a sort of purgatory. By communicating with the predead, Madison has inadvertently inspired a new religion called Boorism that is based on cursing, belching, racial slurs, and ... well, you get the drift. As Madison blogs about her own predeath (her motto: "I irritate; therefore I am"), she reveals some truly awful and truly funny events from her childhood, including one that takes place in a public men's room. (Warning: Not everyone will find it funny. A taste for the macabre helps. And since the incident involves an erect member that the little girl mistakes for something quite different, some readers will find it offensive.)

Riffs on Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and on the Bible contribute to the offbeat humor, as well as an unusual prophesy of the End Times (which involves something called Madlantis, where dwells a baby-thing conceived inside a lipstick-and-chocolate coated latex sheath that is tossed out the window of a Lincoln Town Car as it drives down Hollywood Boulevard). I enjoyed the humor and the prose more than the story (which often seems to be searching for a point), but maybe Palahniuk's random acts of satire are the point. In any event, I enjoyed the novel so I'm recommending it, but this is far from Palahniuk's best work.

RECOMMENDED