Review of Beautiful You by Chuck Palahniuk [video]

Beautiful You seems to be Chuck Palahniuk’’s response to and commentary on the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey series and the proliferation of commercial erotica born from that series. But Beautiful You never rises to the deep social analysis that Palahniuk’s early stuff does. Beautiful You remains simply clever and superficial, becoming more a book belonging to the commercial erotica genre rather than a commentary on it. But still, it’s a damn fun read.

While the book is stylistically a departure (more on that later) the crazy concepts are in full force as always. We’ve got sex toys modeled after human bones, women pleasuring themselves into near death, and women being controlled for nefarious purposes by way of sexual secrets taught by a haggard old wise woman living in a cave in Nepal.

Perhaps where Beautiful You fails is that instead of using these concepts as character traits to be leveraged for larger social commentary–as he does with Survivor, for example–Palahniuk stretches the concept into an entire novel, reducing its impact to laughable levels. In Survivor, one such trait is that a character buys names for drugs that haven’t been invented yet so that he can profit by reselling those names to drug companies. The idea reaches its funny conclusion when the broker and the protagonist sit in a limo popping fake pills with names like ChemoSolv, a non-existent cure for cancer.

With Beautiful You, Palahniuk takes a similarly funny idea–controlling women with sex toys–and forces it to novel length.

Now, about the stylistic departure, Palahniuk foregoes his trademark chorus one-liner formula for a more traditional presentation. In fact, for the first half of the book I probably wouldn’t have thought it a Palahniuk book had I not already known. I applaud him for doing something new. It works.

Even though Beautiful You isn’t perfect, after Palahniuk’s last two awful books–Damned and Doomed–I’m happy to at least have something readable and enjoyable.