Diary - A Novel

Chuck Palahniuk

Author of Fight Club and Lullaby

Anchor ISBN 1-4000-3281-4

Read: 2006 August 1 – sometime in September

Reviewed: 2006 November 23

When John and I went on our father-son trip in August 2006, he was finishing this book during the first day or two. Like a mystery, it took him over at the end and he didn’t want to do anything else but read in the book until he was finished. When he was done, and this was either at the hotel at Weed, California or in the campground below the rim of Crater Lake, he tossed it to me saying something like, “Dad, read this, I have some questions.” In the few spare moments I had between driving, loading, unloading, and doing other things, I did read the first few chapters. By the time we were in Seattle, however, the effort had been stalled by other things. Later, back home, I did put it on top of the stack, having started it, and eventually finished.

As one might expect from the author of Fight Club, this is a dark novel, full of sarcasm; biting, angry curses; and highly detailed anatomical description.

It is the story of a supernaturally talented artist, Misty Wilmot (married name) who grew up with her mother in a trailer park painting incredibly exact depictions of houses and locations on Waytansea Island, a place she’d never been or heard of. When Peter Wilmot discovered her in art school it was (as it turns out) his duty to marry her and bring her to the island where she would save it from the tourist intruders for another three generations.

What we are reading is, in a kind of loose sense, her diary. It turns out that it is also the diary of two other artists who have lived the same life in past generations, trapped. Sometimes we read Misty’s diary, sometimes a past artist’s diary, sometimes a narrator’s voice describing and yelling at Peter Wilmot who lies in a medical facility a three hour drive away (counting the ferry trip) in a coma. He was supposed to be dead, but things have gone wrong in this re-living of the island’s supernaturally repeating history. Not wrong enough to break the cycle, wrong enough to give us a chance to learn what being in a coma for years is like.

Misty went from being a trailer park girl to a socialite wife of privilege on the island, then all the money runs out and all the occupants were renting all of the properties to tourists and working as their servants. Billboards and litter are everywhere. Misty works as a waitress in the restaurant, a degrading and demoralizing existence. She thinks everyone around her is crazy. We get a good inside look at the cesspool life of a waitress to the outsider privileged.

Misty and Peter have a daughter Tabbi. Through flashbacks we get the whole story, but she is a teenager when the climax comes. It is, essentially, that Misty supernaturally, and under great duress, paints a great mural. Everything is perfect, just as her pre-seen depictions of places on Waytansea Island were perfect. A hundred individual paintings are collected up and formed into a mural that no one can see until the great unveiling. The devil on the island is the doctor. He gives Misty strong drugs to facilitate this all happening. A ruse is made to make her think her leg is broken and he puts it in a cast and fixes her to where she can’t move from her bed upstairs in the hotel where she paints day and night, without even looking, everything perfect, everything unknown.

The painting to the climax begins in a clearing, a park on the island where there are some statues of Greek figures. Misty thinks they are people at first and is terrified. Tabbi has played here all the time, it turns out. They set Misty up with paints and an easel and give her food poisoning and, through the delirium and vomit, Misty paints the first perfect print. There are footprints of the statue in the mud. Did Misty hallucinate them? What was their literary purpose? These were John’s questions. True, they didn’t seem to have any purpose in the plot outside of that episode. I didn’t know either.

Tabbi is blindfolded at the great unveiling. A fire starts and burns everyone to death. They cheerfully go, people climbing in the windows to be with the marvelous mural even though it means climbing into fire and death. But Tabbi, practiced and not beholden to the picture, finds her way out. This is part of the plan. Peter was supposed to die, but is in a coma. That was not in the plan either but isn’t a big enough diversion to upset the plan.

Misty figures out what is going on, cuts off her cast (a chance for more detailed anatomical description) and tries to escape. She does not go to the opening but escapes to the mainland where she finds herself in a jail cell where her predecessor artist, three generations ago, has scrawled on the wall something like, “if you are here you are still stuck.”

There are other bizarre Fight Club like literary devices. One thing Peter seems to do obsessively is to go to people’s houses as a handyman and build out certain of their rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and so forth. They are just missing, behind a wall he puts up. Inside, he has spray painted epithets against them, the tourists who defile his home island. They will be leaving; Misty and the deadly cycle guarantee that. As various homeowners discover this, Misty and another character, Art, go and document these constructions. Except that it gives us another viewpoint on the action, or perhaps diversions from figuring it out, I don’t know what the dramatic purpose of this is either.

After the fire, there are many insurance settlements. Advertisers pay extra to have their billboards removed. They don’t want to be associated. This gives the next generation the fortunes to carry on following the great suicide pact of the past generations.

Unless you just like the dark, piercing grit of Chuck Palahniuk, you wouldn’t want to read this book. I’ve just spoiled all of the big surprises for you anyway excepting the one in the epilogue. However, I did watch Fight Club twice, the second time to see if I could figure out what had actually happened. Or maybe I’m just drawn to the dark, acerbic prose, when I’m in a nihilistic mood….