Chuck Palahniuk: American scream

I am sitting waiting in the infinitely plush Langham Hotel in the West End, waiting for a drooling, twitching psychopath. Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most out-there, testicle-squeezing novelists at work right now.

I am sitting waiting in the infinitely plush Langham Hotel in the West End, waiting for a drooling, twitching psychopath. Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most out-there, testicle-squeezing novelists at work right now. His books chronicle the rage that is crashing out of trailer-park America. Long before the Columbine High massacre, he wrote in his masterpiece Fight Club about a programme of nihilist destruction carried out by alienated men in trench-coats. Before Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber, was a household name, he showed how a programme of systematic destruction could paralyse America. Before September 11, he wrote a novel, Survivor, in which a religious fundamentalist tells his story from a hijacked plane. He even wrote a novel which opens with the deliberate destruction of "the tallest building in the world", told by a man sitting on the 171st floor. His style is not magical realism so much as psychopath-on-coke realism.

I feel slightly sick. I have just read an interview in which Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-Nick) explains that the two questions he is most commonly asked are, "Where do you get your ideas?" and "Why are you trying to kill me?" You might be smiling, but I'm not. Palahniuk's grandfather butchered his grandmother with an axe. The novelist's father had one main memory from his childhood: hiding under his bed while the murderer searched for him to pick off any witnesses. Oh, and, by the way, that father was then killed by a deranged far right-winger a few years ago, who then dissolved his body in his garage.

Perhaps I shouldn't have requested this interview. I love the novels but I have so much still to live for and - no! - I see his publicist walking towards me. It's too late to flee. Following behind her is a tall, square-jawed man, smartly dressed. He reaches out a hand. "Hi, I'm Chuck," he says, and takes a seat. I glimpse down at the author's photograph in his new book, Diary, where cold, baggy eyes look out from a gaunt, stubbly face. I look back at the man in front of me. "Oh gosh, can I order a drink in here?" he asks. He looks so clean. He looks so normal - almost preppy. He even seem to be wearing tweed. "Can I get you a drink?" he asks politely. Something feels wrong. This is like finding out that the Marquis de Sade was really a pseudonym for John-Boy Walton.

But after a few minutes of chatting, it becomes clear that the mainstreaming of Chuck Palahniuk is a new tactic. The man who had key scenes in his first novel based on felching (if you don't know, believe me, it's for the best) has made a decision. "I have switched to writing horror novels, because in America today, you just can't do transgressive fiction. Nobody wants to hear that message, and certainly nobody wants to laugh about it. Americans don't want to be criticised right now. They just won't hear it. The day of 9/11, I realised this was happening. You could not have published Fight Club on September 12 or since. The American public is not going to have any sympathy or understanding for subversive art or arguments for a long, long time."

But isn't this selling out? Is the author who wrote some of the most daring, smart anarchist critiques of American culture really happy to turn into Steven King? He insists that his message hasn't changed, just the medium through which he conveys it. "Protest has been thoroughly co-opted by companies like Diesel Jeans now," he says. "They use protest as a marketing tool for the very things it's meant to be a protest against. I mean - Madonna dressing as Che Guevara! When you get to that point, protesters have to put on a nice white shirt - " he waves towards his own white shirt, and very nice it is - "and try something different to get your message across. I do it through my novels. Michel Foucault [the French philosopher who died in the mid-1980s] said that protest needs to evolve into something fun, something that doesn't seem threatening, but does gradually change the way people think."

His message - which I happily found still peeking through in Diary - is indeed a radical one, and although I disagree with him, he speaks for a massive alienated constituency of angry American men who we can't ignore. "I realised in my twenties that the social model for happiness that my parents had brought me up with - based on trying to get money and property - just wasn't going to make me happy. I could live that life, but I'd be miserable. But I couldn't see anything beyond it. All they could tell me was, you know, get a nice house and pour all your energy into your garden. Work hard at having a really great yard. That's all they could say."

Eric and Dylan, who massacred their classmates at Columbine High, are good examples of this, he says. "They were disillusioned because they saw through so much of the American dream. The Columbine kids were affluent kids, and they saw that affluence doesn't translate into happiness. They saw that comfort doesn't translate into happiness. They couldn't see any road-map to happiness, and they knew the road-map they had been given by American society was bust. If people have no way of expressing themselves, no route out of misery, then they pick up a gun as a last, final gesture. It's the same with the Arab world. 9/11 was an enormous gesture, a huge piece of performance art. I remember thinking as a kid: I can spend all my time smiling and being charming and be famous like JFK, or I can just pick up a gun tomorrow and be as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald."

He continues, "Until somebody comes forward with a new sort of narrative, that kind of thing will happen more and more. There will always be a lower class - especially immigrants - who are struggling for affluence, but as more and more people achieve the dream and get rich and still find that they are unhappy - those are the people who will go berserk." As he wrote in Fight Club, "we don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."

Yet Palahniuk himself could be held up as a poster-boy for the American dream. His family in rural Washington State was so dirt-poor that his father used to wake up the kids to loot train-wrecks in the middle of the night. One time, they found crates full of an Israeli yellow pudding, and they had it for dessert for three years non-stop. Now, he is a multi-millionaire, but he rejects the idea that his life-story is an affirmation of the American myth.

"I only made good when I gave up on the model embodied by the American Dream. I packed in my job at the construction site [when he was nearly thirty]," he says forcefully. "I said, screw this: I'm going to dedicate my life to learning one self-expressive skill. Even if I never get published, I'll dedicate my life to writing one really good sentence. My whole life, my parents said, nobody will ever pay you to read books. Nobody will ever pay you to write books. It was only when I gave up their American model - work more hours, kill yourself working - and dedicated myself to the impossible thing that I succeeded. "

Palahniuk is a full-on critic of the idea that working class Americans, if they only work hard enough, can pull themselves out of poverty. Misty, the central character in Diary, is a classic study of a woman growing up in the America that Reagan built. "If you realize there's no way you can give your child a better standard of living - hell, you can't even give your child the quality of life that your trailer-park mom gave you - and this means no college for her, no dreams, nothing except waiting tables like her mom? well, it's down the hatch," she says, fast on her way to alcoholism.

Palahniuk's America is a far more accurate depiction that the American right like to admit. His stories are about the new service class in America - the trailer park children sealed off from any ability to climb up the social ladder, condemned to a life of minimum wage drudgery. Despite the American dream of the poor boy made good, the reality is that the US is a socially rigid society with far less class mobility than even Europe - and it's getting worse. Bush is cutting the estate tax, which falls almost entirely on the top 500 richest families in the States, while the poor get poorer.

This is brilliantly captured in Choke. The central character works in a theme park based on early colonial America. The boss - who can, of course, lay off his workers on the tiniest and most irrational whim - insists on an insane level of accuracy. The staff cannot wear deodorant, because the early settlers had none. They cannot wear underwear. The chickens that cluck around are horribly malformed, as they would have been in the eighteenth century. Denny, the narrator's best friend, spends all day at work in the stocks, being shat on by pigeons and unable to scratch his own ass. The satirical point, of course, is that US employment laws are so weak that for the poorest Americans, the eighteenth century doesn't seem so far away.

Diary even depicts a community that resorts to horrific violence in order to ward off an encroaching, aggressive capitalisation. Their little island - Waytansea - is being taken over by rich tourists and what the narrator calls "the clutter of signs and logos. Corporate graffiti. Competing immoralities." Whenever they complain, "it's anti-American. Selfish. Tyrannical. Evil? We're entitled to pursue happiness wherever we can drive to, fly to, sail to, to hunt it down. Too many people rushing to one place, sure, they ruin it - but that's? the way the market adjusts itself." To escape this, the residents stage a massive tragedy to make their island undesirable to the rich - and to return it to their own control. "Wrecking a place is the only way to save it," they say. "You have to make it look horrible to the outside world."

He explains that this was largely based on his own experience. "All over the US, wealthy people are buying up beautiful towns like my hometown, Portland, Oregon, and turning them into Acapulcos. This is what happened in Acapulco: rich people bought all the land and priced poor people out of the area, except as their servants. This is getting noticed now in America because it's finally happening to white people too. They're being pressed out of their towns and invited back after a long journey to be waiters and toilet-cleaners. I see it happening to my friends and they hate it."

Palahniuk's fiction returns repeatedly to the blanding out of American culture, and the idea that capitalism occupies and nulls the consciousness of individuals. In Fight Club, the narrator says, "Our culture has made us all the same. No-one is truly white or black or rich anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing." In Choke, a character says, "We're so structured and micro-managed, this isn't a world anymore, it's a damn cruise ship." In Lullaby, he reveals the philosophy behind this: "Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted?. He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix? With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."

His characters are repeatedly shown to be deluded in their belief that they are individuals: they are shown time and again to be products of a bland consumer culture that has tricked them into a bogus simulacra of individuality. Look, for example, at this passage from Lullaby: "Reading the monitor [of a computer the characters need to break into], Mona says, 'He changed the screen. I need to know his password.' No problem. Big Brother fills us all with the same crap. My guess is he was clever the same way everyone thinks they're clever. I tell her to type in 'password'."

There is a longing through-out the novels, reminiscent (disturbingly) of Martin Heidegger, for the authenticity of nature, of the pre-human, of the animal. Victor Mancini says as he is being strangled: "For the first time in longer than I can remember, I feel peaceful. Not happy. Not sad. Not anxious. Not horny. Just all the higher parts of my brain closing up shop. The cerebral cortex. The cerebellum. That's where my problem is. I'm now simplifying myself. Somewhere balanced in the perfect middle between happiness and sadness. Because sponges never have a bad day." The problem is to be a thinking thing; the solution is to revert to a prethinking state, and even - in the most extreme voices in his fiction - to disinvent humanity itself.

This best captured by Oyster, an eco-terrorist character in Lullaby who adopts a radical ecologist philosophy which believes that humans are worth no more than plants. He sees a world where "the only biodiversity we're going to have left is Coke vs. Pepsi," and sees the only solution as removing humanity from the picture. Armed with an African culling song that kills everybody who hears it, Oyster says, "The culling poem is a blessing. It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war? This isn't about guilt or innocence. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead? I want to be what killed the dinosaurs."

Later in the same novel, Palahniuk creates a disturbing myth of a 'Judas cow' - a term actually used in abattoirs for the cow who leads all the others into the slaughterhouse - who one day speaks and offers a message to the world: "It said human beings had destroyed the natural world. It said mankind must stop exterminating other species. Man must limit his numbers, create a quota system which allows only a small per centage of the planet's beings to be human." This enviro-nihilism is also voiced in Fight Club: "It's Project Mayhem [a mission to bring chaos and death] that's going to save the world," the narrator says. "A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the earth to recover."

Palahniuk does not endorse this view himself. ""It's a real natural thing to blame everybody else. It's very Sartre - hell is other people. That's one reaction. You conclude that the solution is to get rid of human beings. I am worried about over-population, but I don't think that killing everyone is the solution." We talk about the Society for the Voluntary Extinction of Man - a group that argues that human beings should all voluntarily sterilise themselves in order to allow the planet to recover from our thrashing of it. "They have a huge internet presence," he explains. "I love those guys."

He predicts an epidemic of angry, uncomprehending people taking violence into their own hands, as the weapons that can cause serious damage get easier and easier to acquire. Indeed, somebody doing just that shot his way into Palahniuk's life two years ago. The man who murdered his father (for sleeping with the killer's wife after they met through the personal ads) was involved in the white supremacist movement in Idaho. When he was sentenced to the death penalty (a decision that Palahniuk recommended to the court), the killer announced he had built five anthrax bombs and buried them across the city of Spokane, and that if the state executed him, he would never reveal their whereabouts. Eventually, he claimed, somebody was going to come across one of these bombs, they would dig it up and it would break and ten thousand people would die. "He's using this as a blackmail chip to not get the death penalty," Palahniuk explains.

"This kind of destruction is going to become more frequent," he says. "Right now there's a man in New Zealand who's built the first privately owned ICBM (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile) and thrown all these governments into disarray. He has no warhead, obviously. But they're realising that this can happen. Individuals are gaining these capabilities. It's happening."

Sometimes Palahniuk's anger - an anger that even makes this kind of mass destruction seem un-frightening to him - mutates into a bitter despair. His novels are filled with thoughts of suicide, and a leifmotif is the belief that - in far more circumstances than most people will admit - death is actually the least-bad option. "Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer," the narrator of Fight Club moots. "Maybe self-destruction is the answer." In Survivor, the central character sets up a Samaritans-style helpline and advises the distressed people who call him to commit suicide. Of one, he says, "The truth is this is a terrible world, and I ended his suffering." Later, he explains, "A girl calls and asks, 'Does it hurt very much to die?' Well sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to stay alive." In Lullaby, the narrator even says, "There are worse things you can do to the people you love than kill them."

Destruction seems almost a relief in much of his work. I ask Chuck if he ever feels suicidal. "Oh my god, on, like, an hourly basis," he says, with only half a smile. He doesn't do it though because, he explains, "First and foremost, I hate the idea of wasting drugs. And I hate the idea of dying with money in the bank. Those are the two things that constantly keep me alive. Oh, and my family."

He uses the anti-depressant Zoloft on and off, mainly in the winter now, but he believes they have a dangerous social function. "Anti-depressants are drugs that allow you to tune out and watch those lifestyle network shows. They're part of an America that tells you: Keep repainting the house. Keep dying your hair. Keep rooting for your football team. And then, sooner or later, you'll die."

Palahniuk is often described as a nihilist. It's not hard to see why when his central character in Choke says - typically - "We live and die and everything else is just delusion. It's just passive chick bullshit about feelings and sensitivity. Just made-up subjective emotional crap. There is no soul. There is no god. There's just decisions and disease and death." However, 'Choke' also contains within it a refutation of nihilism. Ida Mancini, the anarchist mother of the central character, admits as she is dying, "I spent my life attacking everything because I was too afraid to risk creating anything."

Indeed, his novels are all located in a world where ideas and visions are breaking down. In Choke, he writes that "the Enlightenment is over. We are now living in the Dis-Enlightenment." He adds now, "The one recurring theme of our age is that all the big narratives, all the big stories are breaking down. We don't have any stories to replace them yet. But we want a rule-book, we want a Bible." Yet when they belief systems are created in Palahniuk's novels, they are terrifying. They could almost be works from Weimar Germany, where despair is suddenly replaced by a blind, wild faith in a single strong man. "That's a big worry. Once you have the hunger and longing we have in America for a leader, there's a big danger. The best way to unify power is to create a common enemy. George Bush is doing that. Osama Bin Laden is doing that. It's the easiest way to pull people together."

Choke - his fourth novel - marks his shift from nihilism to existentialism. It is the point at which he starts to offer a positive philosophy; before, he only offered a diagnosis of terminal disease. Victor concludes at the end of that novel, "It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos." This philosophy stands in a clear line of descent that can be traced from Fyodor Dostoevsky through Herman Hesse and Jean-Paul Sartre. Palahniuk believes from this point on that once you hit rock bottom and see that there is no meaning in the world, you are entirely free, because then you get to create your own meaning. Soren Kirkegard - his favourite philosopher - said that once you accept nihilism, you are free to make a vast leap of faith to believe whatever you want.

The trouble with anti-depressants, he says, is that "they allow you to escape the moment when you have to face up to the failures of the social model you're living in. You never reach that nil point. You never hit despair, so you never come back from it. Kirkegard didn't count on Prozac. Prozac allows you to skim along and avoid reaching the crisis that forces you to make a leap of faith." It is, then, ultimately life-repressing. As the narrator says in Choke, "You have to get right from the edge of death to ever be saved." Prozac keeps you well away from the edge.

He looks down and fiddles with his shirt-sleeve. I'm worried about Chuck: he's troubled. He refers to a crisis in his personal life, but doesn't elaborate. He never discusses his wife of eight years in interviews, out of respect for her privacy. It's hard to resist visions of her locked in the attic, like Mrs Rochester. Tell me something funny, I say, to lighten the mood. "In my novel Choke, there's a waiter who ruins the food of any customers who jerk him around," he says, suddenly enthusiastic again. "He pees in the soup - that kind of thing. Last year, I was staying in [a very posh hotel here in London that we won't name for libel reasons] and, after a book event, one of the waiters said to me, 'Yes, that's totally true.' So I asked him what the worst thing he had ever done was. He said, 'No, no, I can't tell you about that,' but I insisted and, very quietly, he said, 'Margaret Thatcher has eaten my sperm.' I was just astonished, but he added, 'At least five times.'" I would be prepared to bet that not even the late Denis Thatcher could make that claim.

Palahniuk captures working class men's anger at feminism with distressing accuracy. In Choke, Victor Mancini says, "How many times can everybody tell you that you're the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy. I mean, a male chauvinist pig isn't born, he's made, and more and more of them are being made by women. After long enough, you just roll over and accept the fact that you're a sexist, bigoted, insensitive, crude, cretinist cretin. Women are right. You're wrong. You live down to expectations. Even if the shoe doesn't fit, you shrink into it."

Later, he continues, "They [women] think all men are obsolete. Useless. As if we're just some sexual appendix. Just the life support machine for an erection. Or a wallet? To Denny, I say, 'Women don't want equal rights. They have more power being oppressed. They need men to be the vast enemy conspiracy. Their whole identity is based on it? I could just killed the guy who invented the dildo. I really could."

Beyond that, Marla Singer - the only female character in Fight Club - is a vision of misogyny turned in on itself: a self-hating woman almost beyond help. "'I embrace my own festering, diseased corruption,' [she says as] Marla twists the cigarette into the soft white belly of her arm. 'Burn, witch, burn.'" This is partly the effect of anger at growing up in a matriarchal society without fathers. "What you see in fight club is a generation of men raised by women," the narrator says. "I'm a thirty year-old boy, and right now I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need." Women are blamed not only for their own oppression - as though they enjoy it - but also for failing somehow to involve men in the raising of their sons.

Chuck explains the root of this anger: "For a lot of white male Americans who were raised that they would become The Patriarchs, that they would inherit a certain place in the world, they're becoming angry because that world is gone and nothing has replaced it. They have no way to express themselves but through destruction and violence."

With that parting thought, Chuck is whisked away by his sleek PR woman. "Where are we going now?" he asks, a little bemused. "Radio 3. Night Waves," she says punctually as he dashes to keep up with her. So, yes, Chuck has put on a suit, shaved off the stubble and become Respectable. And yet, and yet? His writing reveals an obsession with the belief that ideas are like viruses. They contagiously shoot their way through our culture, insidiously entering our bodies and minds. People catch them without knowing. Underneath the smart clothes, he is still, I suspect, the man who described in his first novel how to make napalm. He has just found a new way to unwittingly infect people with the virus. As I walk towards the tube station past an awful lot of tall buildings, I don't know whether to be pleased or terrified about that.

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