Lullaby
June 28th 2006 06:26
Lullaby
'Lullaby' is the first novel by Chuck Palahniuk that I've read. He's a fairly hip young dude as far as authors go and is most famous for the book 'Fight Club'. He writes anti-authoritarian/almost nihilistic stuff that riffs on pop culture and modern society, and he usually gets lumped in with authors like Brett Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh, which is fair enough I guess. To put it shortly, he's hip and cutting edge!
I wasn't really sure what to expect beyond what I'd seen in the film to 'Fight Club'. I guess the book is similar in that it follows a small group of people who make themselves outsiders by facing off against society as a whole. There are a lot of ideas in Lullaby.
The book follows a journalist, Carl Streator, as he investigates cot death across America. Carl is actually trailing an ancient African culling song - a lullaby that kills the person who it is read to. This is the cause of the cot deaths he is investigating. It was also the cause of the death of his daughter and wife twenty years previously. This idea, that of the culling song, is the seed from from which the entire events of Lullaby stems, but it only pertains to a small portion of the book itself.
Lullaby concerns itself with ideas like that of the nuclear family, necrophilia, absolute power and the corruption it causes, the homogenisation of culture, the power of words, Big Brother-as-noisemaker, the apocalypse, magic spells, trauma, the sanctity (or lack therof) of life, etc, etc. I could on and on. And the book only goes for 250 pages or so.
Now, while I easily prefer too many ideas to not enough, I think there is way too much going on in this book. Obviously, I can't comment on whether this is Palahniuk's normal style or not, but I think this story would've been better served by either focusing on a few of the excellent points it raises or extending it's page count to give all it's points a fair examination. Then again, I could be missing the point... Palahniuk may not care to exam his points, he may be on a one-man blitz of information saturation.
It's interesting to note that this book started as a kind of therapy for Chuck Palahniuk - his father had recently been murdered by an ex-con (for the circumstances, go here - Wikipedia page) and Palahniuk had helped get his father's murderer the death penalty. Some of this book's themes stem from his coping with that.
Anyway, I enjoyed this a lot. It's an entertaining read but also made me think, which is everything a good book should be, so I think I'll definitely read more. Also, the name 'Chuck Palahniuk' sounds so good when you say it out loud.
Chuck Palahniuk
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