Tell All: A Must Read All

“No, none of us seem so very real. We are only supporting characters in the lives of each other. Any real truth, any precious fact will always be lost in a mountain of shattered make believes.” ~ Hazie Coogan, Tell All

Voila! And there I found her at last! Hurled and hidden beneath a stack of second hand literary classics she had been gasping for a breather when I met her first and thus started a somewhat unlikely camaraderie.

It was one of those walks I usually take across College Street just to get over my frequent lows. The smell of brittle, sepia turned pages has always proved a cure. With no particular book in mind I had just been browsing through the shops pretty aimlessly until I chanced upon her.

Reading Joyce and Lawrence over months can be quite like being on a diet of the best made biryani for days until it starts tasting bland. And she was for a change rather ‘mainstream’ and agreeably so. A simple and yet tastefully done cover with just the title and the name of the author first caught my attention. While some may complaint that she is a tad too thin to spend your bucks on, I won’t mind a sleek and smart quick read. And thus Tell All by Chuck Palahniuk hit my tote.

Thrillers seldom make it to my ‘to be read list’ since I am more into comics for pleasure reading. My first Chuck Palahniuk book was Fight Club, which I read after watching the flick. That got followed by Choke and by the time I could finish Lullaby the fad had faded. And yet I picked this one up for no apparent reason or perhaps it was a subconscious desire to lay my hands on a book that for once won’t demand any ‘discourse analysis’ ( jargons sicken me these days).

I started reading immediately after I could board my train to home and by the time I reached, I was already half way through. Palahniuk’s inimitable style kept me engrossed for two whole days and Tell All, if I may use the chic lingo of the media savvy, was literally ‘unputdownable’!

So what makes Tell All such a gripping book? Set against the backdrop of the Hollywood in the 1940s it is a murder mystery built up around a screen diva, past her prime. With it obvious resonance to Sunset Boulevard, the plot itself is not one that would the strike the readers with novelty. The subtexts deal with issues like the grim behind the glamour of showbiz, the sham beneath the sheen, addiction, deceit and the almost obsessive neurotic desires of a woman to be loved. All these have been seamlessly joined together into an adherent whole that can sure keep the readers engaged over hours. But then again, these have already been themes in literary works over and again. What makes Tell All exclusive is not quite its matter but Palahniuk’s riveting ways of telling the tale. It is one of those books one seldom gets to read, where the sheer brilliance of storytelling gains precedence over the subject and makes the readers crave for more.

Hazie Coogan has been working for Katherine Kenton since the time Miss Kathie was yet to make it to the galaxy and it is she who narrates the story. Palahniuk adapts the conventions of a shooting script to write his story, implying that Kenton’s life has been a deftly scripted screenplay fashioned by Coogan. While the technique adds to the effect of the thriller, it simultaneously becomes suggestive of the author’s view about reality per say. The polarity between fact and fiction stands dissolved. The notion of truth stands precariously edged as reality is stripped off its sense of certainty and made naked as a manipulated potpourri.

Very much in mimic of Hollywood blockbusters the book opens with an intriguing subtitle: ‘Boy meets girl. Boy gets girl. Boy Kills girl?’ Our expectations thus stirred, Palahniuk henceforth won’t make any effort to speed up the tempo. Unlike in other thrillers, there is no hurry to reach a climax. And strangely it is this rather bizarre slow pace in which the story unfolds that eggs the readers’ imagination and holds them on. As we are left pondering over what shall happen next, the book itself does very little to aide our anticipations.

While for some reviewers Tell All is Chuck Palahniuk’s great ode to the golden days of  Hollywood, to me it came across as a lampoon, almost a parody. Crowding the book with the names of so many stars from yesteryears might have proved to be a spoiler for many who grumble, it also effectively creates a sense of claustrophobia that is perhaps an unavoidable actuality of showbiz. Palahniuk himself mocks at this tendency to names drop. As the book makes fun of Lillian Hellman’s Tourette’s syndrome, isn’t it self-reflexive as well? Love Slave, Katherine Kenton’s tell-all-biography, apparently by her beau Webster is ridiculed to no end. As the very title to Palahniuk’s book suggests, his is a guffaw aimed at the illogicality of these bestsellers on the lives of stars, which are ever so popular with the gossip readers. The utter stupidity that passes off as intellect is mercilessly attacked through the caricature of Lillian Hellman, a scriptwriter with her ‘concerns’ for fidelity to the course of history and political correctness.

Palahniuk’s quirky sense of humour finds a fine display in this book. Right from his use of animal sounds to suggest the gibberish that Lillian Hellman and Miss Kathie spoke, the funny puns used by the yellow journalists, and the ever ludicrous, self aggrandising last chapters of Love Slave; this book offers a riot of laughter. The author ingeniously brings up the issue of how pornographic writings were used as a ploy to malign the reputation of the French monarchy, after the French Revolution by the antiroyalist to draw an analogy to what was being done to Miss Kathie. But as he does so, he uses those bawdy talks for his own book as well. Well, ahem, this book has a copious amount sex that might make some readers a little jittery. Beware.

To conclude, I would say Tell All is not another Fight Club for sure. Not being an avid reader of the genre, I won’t know whether it at all qualifies to be called a very well written thriller or not. But the book definitely has what it takes to keep the readers engrossed. It has a curious way of showing things in a newer perspective. So if you are on a look out to read something for some clever entertainment, this book is what you have been looking for.

-- Priyanka Mukherjee.