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"    Remember those moments in middle school-smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster; drinking Gatorade after football practice; stealing baseball cards from K-Mart-when you told nasty jokes with a wicked smile and a punch to the shoulder? What&amp;#039;s grosser than gross? When the head cheerleader does the splits and five class rings fall out. What&amp;#039;s grosser than that? When one of the rings belongs to her brother. Back then, there was no such thing as too far, too much. Now there is. It&amp;#039;s called Chuck Palahniuk&amp;#039;s latest novel, Snuff (Doubleday, $24.95). By no means am I a Palahniuk-hater. Fight Club is an important, ballsy novel. Invisible Monsters and Choke are well worth your dollar. There is such manic energy to his writing-such switchblade precision to the way he turns a sentence. And I can&amp;#039;t help but marvel at how he has become a prophet to so many teens and twenty-somethings, speaking their language with his constant allusions to pop culture, his fuck-the-establishment sensibility, his rapid-fire paragraphing like a stream of text messages from a pimply English major hopped up on a diet of Adderall and Mountain Dew. I&amp;#039;m glad he&amp;#039;s out there, shaking things up, pissing people off, making the grim-faced rheumy-eyed literary moles nervously chew their fingernails. But I often can&amp;#039;t help but feel he needs to slow down and force his work into deeper waters. Never has this been more evident than in Snuff. The novel concerns Cassie Wright, an aging porn star who has been ridden hard and put away wet, as my grandfather used to say. She plans to cap her career with the ultimate slumber party-600 men on camera-thus breaking the world record for serial fornication in World Whore Three: The Whore to End All Whores. During the filming she hopes she will die-from a vaginal embolism (I&amp;#039;ll spare you the explanation)-making the film a guaranteed blockbuster the revenue of which will go to the child she long ago gave up for adoption (the result of a &amp;quot;wasted&amp;quot; money shot). Snuff progresses from the shifting perspectives of Mr. 72 (who may or may not be her son), Mr. 137 (a scandal-hounded television star looking to rejuvenate his career), and Mr. 600 (a too-tan washed-up porn legend with saggy pecs, an enormous package, and a history with Cassie), who await their turn with the other 597 &amp;quot;dudes&amp;quot; in a green room stocked with bowls full of pretzels and condoms. And though we&amp;#039;re in alternating first-person, I never got to know these people. Or maybe believe is a better word. I never believed in them. Perhaps because they all spoke with the same voice. Or perhaps because their brains seemed similarly hard-wired for self-loathing and destructiveness. Shuffling between them felt a little like shuffling through back issues of Hustler-what might have initially shocked or stimulated you begins to make you feel bored and vaguely sick. You could say that&amp;#039;s the point-a roulette wheel of human despair-but having read so many of Palahniuk&amp;#039;s novels and having encountered this same voice and same perspective and same devices no matter what the circumstances, I would equate it more with his seemingly maniacal hurriedness to get out another book. Palahniuk often employs repetition-choruses, he calls them. Sometimes this comes in the form of pop-trivia-or images-or behavioral or conversational quirks-and sometimes it works. But in Snuff the cyclical devices wear out their tread quickly. Consider the unremitting references to porno flicks with cheeky titles: Chitty Chitty Gang-Bang, To Drill A Mockingbird, The Da Vinci Load, The Postman Always Cums Twice, The Tale of Two Titties. It&amp;#039;s funny the first few times-but after the fortieth and then the sixtieth porn-pun, I&amp;#039;m counting how many pages I have until the novel ends. Palahniuk uses the same trick with Sheila, the stage manager of World Whore Three, who apparently cannot refer to a man without using some masturbatory play on words: pud-pullers, pud-pounders, jerk-jockeys, etc. Razor-sharp wit this isn&amp;#039;t. I&amp;#039;d equate it more to getting your eyelid caught on a nail. There are many things that Palahniuk could have done that could have made this novel more full-bodied and muscular. He brings up feminist theory-the possibility of female empowerment via porn-and then drops it entirely. He brings up a character struggling with his sexuality-reduces the struggle to a kind of gag-and then drops it entirely. Whenever things start to get complicated and knotty, he drops them. He hurries. And if he would only slow down, I know that I would too, reveling in his pages instead of hurrying to get past them. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/reviews/a4764/chuck-palahniuk-snuff-review/>