Book Review : Chuck Palahniuk - The Invention of Sound (2020)
Chuck Palahniuk is the last of a dying breed of entertainers. Carried throughout his career (for better or worse) by the success of his immense debut novel Fight Club, he gained a cult following in popular culture for being a subversive figure. An original thinker and a top shelf provocateur. No topic is ever hot enough to keep him quiet. In his latest novel The Invention of Sound, Palahniuk tackles… uh, sound (and other stuff) and it turns out there’s a lot to say about it.
The Invention of Sounds has two protagonists: jaded and self-destructive sound engineer Mitzi Ives and Gates Foster, a man who has been devoured alive by the disappearance of his daughter for seventeen years. He has been literally searching for Lucinda all these years, but also symbolically looking for her in every young woman. That includes paying sex workers to impersonate an adult Lucinda. What does Mitzi have to do with it? Well, everything and nothing.
Passion and the illusion of control
You’ve already guessed it, The Invention of Sound isn’t ONLY a novel about sound. There’s a lot more to it. One thing that made it work is how completely out of his mind with grief protagonist Gates Foster is. His segments are a spectacle of self-destruction. Foster is trying hard to regain a semblance of control over his life by resolving Lucinda’s disappearance, but he is surrounding all control over the present in the process. Everyone else takes control of him.
The illusion of control is an important theme in The Invention of Sound. Foster’s singe-minded obsession about finding what happened to his daughter makes life worth living for him. It makes him feel like he’s in control, but he’s not. Because he’s so hellbent on figuring that one mystery, he is ruthlessly used by other characters. From the sex workers making easy money out of him to… well, I’m not going to tell you. But remember that going in. It’s important.
Because Gates Foster is the character you’re both supposed to judge and empathize with. Emotional pain turned him into a lunatic, but he has a clear reason to live. He’s experiencing passion in the original sense of the term: he’s suffering for what he perceives to be a righteous cause. He’s the only character in the novel who does. All the others are pursuing financial goals in one way or another. His quest is personal, while everybody else’s is professional or systemic.
In the end, you feel for Gates Foster because his moral quest for justice leaves him vulnerable to those who don’t feel this level of passion. What he feels is real, but it’s been coopted by the bored, jaded people working for an industry that manufactures make beliefs. If that doesn’t feel like something that happened over and over again in the last couple years, maybe you’ve been living with your eyes closed.
The nuts-and-bolts of Chuck Palahniuk
It’s the natural order of things to progress towards decay: people die, fruits rot, great bands break up or ultimately become shitty. Chuck Palahniuk has evaded this fate for close to three decades now. Although his novels vary in quality, they are never boring and it’s always difficult to anticipate what they’re going to be about. His anticonsumerist message has been heard so loud with books like Fight Club, Choke and Invisible Monsters, it’s hard to reinvent yourself from there.
In The Invention of Sound, Palahniuk mines inspiration from what his life is probably about these days: producers, movie agents and shitty, jaded and drugged-out Hollywood people looking to make a quick buck out of the passion of the innocent. There’s some pent up anger in this book coming out as disgusting and exploitative characters like producer Schlo. If you’ve read Bret Easton Ellis, The Invention of Sound navigates the same dreamscapes a bit.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from a ripoff or anything like that. It’s quite different from Ellis, but it feels like these characters could’ve lived in the same fictional Los Angeles, attended the same shows, drank in the same bars, etc. You have to have a voyeuristic appetite for that kind of superficiality to enjoy The Invention of Sound, but I’m a sucker for it. What makes Chuck Palahniuk still so pertinent today is the crushing honesty about his life in his work.
Whatever he is up to.
*
I liked The Invention of Sound. Part of me is unsure whether I liked it more or less than I anticipated, but it keeps growing on me since I’ve finished it. Its cleverness is still unfolding. You’re going to learn a lot about microphones and sound recording. You will also be enlightened on ways to get obscene sounds out of people. Both typical and out of this world weird. Chuck Palahniuk is done changing the world, but he hasn’t given up on his own creative integrity.
