Palahniuk pens ‘Lullaby’ of modern times
By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times
Ranting against consumerism and all the noise of the material world may seem passé, but what doesn't, these days? The novels of Chuck Palahniuk ("Fight Club") are here to say that alienation, despair and general weirdness are never really out of fashion.
"Lullaby" (Doubleday, $24.95) is Palahniuk's fifth novel in six years. His herky-jerky prose makes Stephen King seem like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but he knows how to spin together whacked-out stories particular to our times.
Carl Streator, a middle-aged journalist, is researching a story on SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He discovers that children are dying when they're read a bedtime poem, a "culling song" contained in an anthology.
Streator further learns this poem is so lethal that he can kill people simply by reciting it in his mind. Bodies then start dropping: his boss, a neighbor, a stranger. Anyone who annoys him is in danger.
"But, no, I'm never going to use the culling song again.
"Never again.
"But even if I did use it, I wouldn't use it for revenge.
"I wouldn't use it for convenience.
"I certainly wouldn't use it for sex.
"No, I'd only use it for good."
The power of knowing this poem initially appeals to Streator, of course. As he puts it: "In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.
"In a world where the culling song was common knowledge, there would be sound blackouts. Like during wartime, wardens would patrol. But instead of hunting for light, they'd listen for noise and tell people to shut up. ... It would be a world where each word was worth a thousand pictures."
However, he comes to recognize that the poem can't be controlled and must be wiped out. The survival of civilization depends on it, and all that.
So he teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle, a real-estate agent with pink fingernails who also knows the secret of the poem. They are joined by her secretary Mona, a Wiccan, and Mona's idiot eco-terrorist boyfriend. The four of them embark on an apocalyptic road trip, conning and murdering their way through libraries and houses, searching for the remaining copies of the anthologies that include the killing poem.
There you have the setup for the story which develops a few nifty twists, but sometimes seems to exist primarily to carry along Palahniuk's many rants.
"Old George Orwell got it backward.
"Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed ...
"Big Brother filling me with need.
"Do I really want a big house, a fast car, a thousand beautiful sex partners? Do I really want these things? Or am I trained to want them?
"Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?"
Palahniuk also proposes a few pet theories: "Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown out into the air. ... Too many advertising jingles commingling could be behind global warming. Too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. AIDS."
Throughout the ranting and theorizing, Palahniuk employs a playfully perverse wit and a good eye for repellent details. Though the modern world may be plagued by information overload, as Palahniuk suggests, the richness of his imagination in the face of this proves that the plague isn't fatal or even debilitating.
At least not yet.
