Bibliophile 7/21/08: Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk

Snuff
Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday

Last week I was really taken by Mark Morford’s “Notes & Errata” column, which discussed the Internet’s effect on declining reading rates. According to Morford — although this is not really an original idea — the format of information on the Internet has, perhaps irreparably, hindered our attention span, making us unable to handle the longer format of books. This is why independent bookstores are closing and people are getting dumber, even as they think they’re getting smarter.
It’s not all neo-Luddite alarmism, though Morford says, “I am moderately sure a brain thusly amped on the wicked energy drink of the Web can, through honest time spent, through forcibly yanking the Ethernet cable out of your cerebral cortex, be re-rewired, untrained, readdicted to the deeper juice.” This can happen, as you might imagine, by turning the computer off and tucking into a sufficiently difficult book. A book that will force you to slow down your attention span and to think more deeply about a subject than might be comfortable.
Snuff is not that book.
In fact, the reason why Palahniuk is so intensely popular is that he writes in bite-sized chunks of information, just like the Internet. This style is what made Fight Club feel so revolutionary when it was published in 1996. The idea of combining a narrative with loosely related bits and pieces of facts (like how to make a bomb) made the book feel more relevant and in-line with a culture that was gaining speed at a rate no one could measure. But now, 12 years later, this style of writing is becoming a bit tired. Practically narcoleptic.

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