A Book A Week - Week 44: Damned

This week's book:
  Damned    by Chuck Palahniuk

Grade:   ... I don't really know...

Well, at least it's short.

I'm stumped.  Honestly stumped.  I have no idea if this is a work of towering genius I just can't see, or the worst piece of crap pastiche I have ever read.
   One thing I know for sure, it's either one or the other, and nothing in between.

This is the story of Madison, who is dead and in Hell.  She writes to Satan - somehow, maybe in a journal we never see? - at the start of each chapter like the just-teen protagonist of a Judy Blume novel.  She's newly arrived in Hell, stuck in a filth-smeared cage out on an infinite plain, near four other Breakfast Club members.  They break out and go for walkabout in Hell, as the facts of their damnations are slowly made plain.

Yeah...   it is definitely a pastiche, call it 'homage' to make it polite, of a Judy Blume novel.  Thirteen-year-old Madison goes on a voyage of self-discovery that is thinly-disguised as a travelogue of Hell, and then later is not even thinly-disguised when she discovers that, as a dead person, she can reinvent herself into whatever she wants.  You know you're in trouble when the author abandons the metaphor and just states things plainly.
    There are parts, little passages and entire themes, that are really, really good.  But but those tiny bits and brief moments are surrounded by half-assed writing compounded by half-assed editing.  Reading Damned was like sifting through all the gunk in a drain pipe to find the tiny diamond engagement ring your sweetie dropped.  Sure, you get the diamond, but was the kitchen smeared with sewer juice really worth the effort?

This is the problem as I see it: Chuck Pahlaniuk the Best Selling Author doesn't get edited nearly as rigorously or as thoroughly as Chuck Pahlaniuk the Relative Unknown.  In actuality, as we see with many authors over and over and over again, the Best Selling Author needs a great editor even more than the Relative Unknown does.  The Relative Unknown has had years of obscurity to hone his craft, and to nurture his manuscript through the stage of outline to terrible first draft to slightly less-terrible second draft and so on to something worthy of publishing.  The Best Selling Author has to work under time constraint, he has to produce according to his contract, and the editor has to edit to a release date and printer schedule.  Things the Relative Unknown could never get away with are the things the Best Selling Author gets a free pass on.
   And that's how you get something like Damned.

Like I said, there are themes that merit exploration, existential stuff that we're all interested in like free will and how our earthly lives affect those around us.  But...  the whole just doesn't hang together.  It reads to me like what I strongly suspect it was, the author noodling at the typewriter coming up with pages without a clear road map or plan where to go with the story.  Just a dude gettin' a little finger exercise.  Then, when he had to put it into a complete - though mercifully short - novel, the author tacked on bits and pieces to try to make a coherent story, without smoothing the rough edges and making everything neat and tidy.  You can see where he had to add a few lines or pages to something he wrote earlier.  His writing style from later in the book matches those patches, which do not match to the style he had earlier in the book.
    Same thing with the characters, they're established as contemporaries of Madison - they appear in the same plain of infinite cages - and they behave as her contemporaries.  Until the author decides it would be cooler if they weren't.  Character details don't match from the beginning of the book to the end, their behavior isn't consistent, and their demeanor doesn't match what the author has told us of souls who have been in Hell for a long time.  Sloppy.

Who should read this book?  Well, if you read and liked 'Fight Club,' first let me offer condolences, then let me tell you that you will not like this book at all.  If you liked Judy Blume books you might like Damned, as long as you go into it with the proper expectations.  This is not Judy Blume, there is no truth here, even though the author kind-of tried to put some in.
   Read it or don't.  I don't know.  Whatever. 

Next week:
  The Wolves of Midwinter    by Anne Rice
I think this is my second Anne Rice novel.  My first in a very long time.  This is about werewolves, I'm guessing.  I hope it's not werewolves who put on way too much Axe body spray.