E-Mail This Article to a Friend On the ropes Chuck Palahniuk’s disappointing Diary BY JONATHAN DIXON
	Diary By Chuck Palahniuk. Doubleday, 260 pages, $24.95.

A few years ago, a California computer geek claimed he’d written a program that could churn out prose in the style of Jacqueline Susann, author of the trashy Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. He could have just as easily invented a program to spew reams in the style of Chuck Palahniuk’s gothic sixth novel, Diary.

Palahniuk’s writing used to bristle; 1996’s giddily nihilistic Fight Club deserved every bit of the hype it belatedly received when David Fincher’s 1999 film elevated the novel from cult status, and 2000’s Survivor proved the debut wasn’t a mere one-shot deal. Authors Thom Jones and Robert Stone provided effusive blurbs for Fight Club, and Palahniuk’s initial public offerings had both Jones’s muscle and aggression and Stone’s drum-tight, apocalyptic-minded plotting. Palahniuk also famously claims to have read Denis Johnson’s elegiac and perfect Jesus’ Son some 300 times. And he did indeed emulate that volume’s compact prose and sense of rhythm — though without Johnson’s curious spiritual blend of William Blake and the DTs. But what Palahniuk had most of all, aside from a brace of really good story lines, was a singular voice. Unfortunately, as he churned out more novels at jackrabbit pace, that voice began to quaver and settle into mere style before finally cracking and becoming gimmick.

Diary, written in diary form by narrator Misty Marie Wilmot to her comatose husband, Peter (and to herself), has all the usual Palahniuk gimcrack, and it supplements them with a dud of a story. It’s difficult to describe the plot at any length without ruining the suspense — such as it is — but here are the bare bones. Trailer-park-bred Misty escaped the squalor and neglect of her childhood by drawing exquisitely detailed pictures of elegant, moneyed mansions she’d never actually seen. While in art school, she marries Peter Wilmot, a deeply weird society boy, and he squires her off to Waytansea Island, a gated bastion of old money. Take a guess what Misty’s childhood renderings turn out to represent. After giving birth to a daughter, Misty decides to give up her art in order to be a better provider than her own mother was. Although the early part of the diary recounts her past, it also posits the strange events of her present: Peter has apparently botched his suicide and wound up vegetative, and in a number of area homes, an extensive series of sackcloth-and-ashes jeremiads has been discovered spray-painted on the walls of hidden rooms. Meanwhile, the residents of Waytansea are showing an inordinate interest in seeing Misty paint again. That’s about as far as I can go without the risk of revealing a dull but confusing thud of an ending, but let’s put it this way: it’s a neat irony that one of Diary’s cover blurbs comes courtesy of Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby.

Palahniuk tends to select a couple of key phrases that he relies on for maximum impact and drama and then repeat them ad infinitum throughout a particular book; readers of Fight Club may recall "I am Jack’s . . . (fill in the blank)" and "Please put seats in upright position and prepare to . . . (ibid.)." Diary plays the same hand — "Just for the record, the weather today is partly suspicious with chances of betrayal." Or:

Dr. Touchet was the physician on the scene when they found Peter.

When they found you.

If they ever pull the plug, he’ll probably prepare the body.

Your body.

You get this stuff on pretty much every other page, and before 30 or 40 of them go by, your synapses start to smoke with frustration. An extended riff about which facial muscles control specific facial expressions comes in an early chapter and has a beautiful payoff at that chapter’s end; its subsequent use runs the effect into deficit. A perfectly paced chapter about class conflict ("June 28") attests to the mix of insight and skillful writing Palahniuk is capable of, but it winds up an anomaly in a wash of skin-deep ruminations on the nature of art, inspiration, and the relationship between suffering and creativity — all of it leading to a climax that’s equal parts too easy resolution and absurdity. Palahniuk has told interviewers that he tries to let each chapter in his novels function as its own short story — the influence of Jesus’ Son cropping up again. But whereas Johnson builds to a subtly transcendent finale, Palahniuk lays Diary’s chapters out like white lines on the highway: functional, regular, and arriving at a destination eventually, but without a whole lot of fanfare.

Chuck Palahniuk reads next Thursday, September 11, at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard Street in Brookline; call Brookline Booksmith at (617) 566-6660.