Damned (Chuck Palahniuk)

You have to hand it to Chuck Palahniuk, he's certainly never short of ideas. Since his mind melting transgressive debut 'Fight Club' he's written about the politics of identity ('Invisible Monsters') coma patients ('Diary'), scam merchants ('Choke'), and a Chinese spy undercover as an exchange student ('Pygmy'). He's tackled multiple literary forms too: horror ('Haunted'), oral history ('Rant'), and an ensemble cast narrating porn ('Snuff'). Despite his consistently interesting ideas though, I've often found that Palahniuk's books are often less effective than the innovative ideas that drive them. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that only 'Fight Club', out of his published oeuvre, has a truly satisfying narrative arc. His books are always enjoyable, but can sometimes feel throwaway and lightweight, as if the idea itself is more important than the story.

Despite my reservations about Palahniuk, he is always an engaging read, so when I read about 'Damned' before it was published this winter, I was keen to get hold of it as soon as I could. Out of all of his recent concept driven novels, this one promised the most. The narrator is thirteen-year-old Madison Spencer, daughter of a Hollywood producer and a famous actress. At the beginning of the novel, she finds herself in Hell, and proceeds to tell the reader, in scabrously witty fashion, how the underworld really works. The structure of 'Damned' is based on the works of Judy Blume, with each chapter beginning "Are you there Satan, it's me, Madison..." and then going on to relate either an episode that shows us our narrator getting used to hell, or a reflection on her earthly life. Madison's closest cell mates are a jock, a freak, a brain and a prom queen, riffing on the idea of the high school stereotypes being thrown together as they are in classic Brat Pack films from the 80s. Once we get to see outside of the cells, it becomes clear that much of the book's humour is based around the fact that Hell doesn't seem to be too bad a place: most of the inhabitants are employed as telemarketers, ringing up the living to ask them pointless questions about chewing gum flavours. Yes, it turns out that all telemarketing calls come straight from Hell and that if you have an unlisted number, you are more likely to be called. Madison turns out to be very adept at her job, even making some friends among the living, notably a Canadian girl with AIDS who our heroine assures that Hell is not bad at all, and that when she inevitably dies, she should look her up. It also turns out that demons are wage slaves too, with one memorable scene having a bored and nonchalant demon conducting a polygraph test on Madison to see if she was damned mistakenly. Customer service in hell is apparently particularly bad and often dependent on bribing various demons with chocolate bars. Figures.

The landscape of Hell has all of the gross-out landmarks you might expect Palahniuk to come up with- an ocean of semen, a mountain of toenail clippings, landfill of partial abortions- and most of the asides about life in Hell are amusing and bring a smirk to the lips, if not necessarily a hearty chuckle. Madison is very keen to inform us that dying with a sturdy pair of shoes on is very important, as there'll be a lot of wading through detritus in the underworld. The misadventures of Madison and her motley crew are definitely engaging, but I think the kind of bildungsroman structure that Palahniuk adopts doesn't really suit the satire he thinks he's making, so that all of the things incidental to the plot are very well done, but the actual plot itself- Madison building up self-confidence, making friends with fellow dead teens, finding out why she was damned and building herself into Hell's most poular inhabitant- is rather slight. Like characters in Judy Blume novels, Madison was unpopular with her peers and had parental issues, and  therefore works through these issues one at a time, only in a fashion more cynical and cuss ridden than Judy would favour. The language that Maddie uses is quite distinctive and her voice stays relatively fresh throughout, but the events don't. After a while the narrative gets repetitive and that's quite a feat, because this is a short book. Then, there's suddenly a plot twist involving the long awaited appearance of Satan at the end that I found nothing short of silly, and un-necessary to boot. The author even leaves the door open for a sequel, and indeed, that seems appropriate, as the entire book seems to be shouting for Hollywood to film it, bearing such similarities as it does to John Hughes' seminal work 'The Breakfast Club', though I find the possibility of a film unlikely, given how much Middle America would react against the content of the plot.

I have mixed feelings about 'Damned'. As a throwaway comic novel, I really enjoyed it, other than the last couple of chapters, where a dumb plot twist irked me. The problem is that I don't think Palahniuk intended for this to be a throwaway comic novel, I think he thought he was writing a mordant satire on modern life, but the targets he picks- celebrities, health freaks, bureaucracy, famous villains from history- have been satirised so many times that it's a little like shooting fish in a barrel. What I'll probably remember most about the book is that Hell is full of telemarketers. That, at least, was a humorous concept worthy of a man of Palahniuk's twisted imagination.