Chuck Palakniuk’s latest novel Tell All has been hailed as ‘vintage Palahniuk’, marking a shift away from his later works such as Snuff and Pygmy towards his earlier more thought provoking novels. It is an ironic title for an author whose career is founded on brutally parodying the post modern and the falsities and corruptions of our society. However set along side a generation of authors with a fascination for the excess and debauchery, and hyper reality of the super modern world, his work like that of Coupland, Sedaris and Easton Ellis has already become ‘vintage’, these writers have been around for over ten years, and mark an epoch of writing which perhaps we are ready to move away from.

Tell All is a novel about immortalisation, and the lengths people will go to to live forever. Using his usual mode of operation, Palahniuk chooses to rely on endless name dropping (highlighted in bold through out text) and splitting the novel in to acts rather than chapters to give the piece his characteristic style. The novel is set in the hey day of Hollywood glamour, and follows Miss Kathie (Katherine Kenton), a Hollywood star of immortal fame, as she is slowly degenerating into old age, under a front of plastic surgery, drug abuse and extensive pampering, administered by her maid and the mastermind behind her stardom, Hazie.

Palahniuk references Dorian Gray, the ever youthful man, who hides his aging portrait in a locked attic. Miss Kathie keeps a self inflicted image of herself in the form of a mirror; kept in a vault alongside her dead pets, husbands, numerous vintage champagnes and her ancient diaphragm. Hazie marks all of Miss Kathie’s wrinkles and other flaws into the mirror with a diamond ring, her own record of her ageing, marking the excess of a life of indulgence.

When Miss Kathie meets the handsome Webster Carlton Westward III, her latest suitor and soon to be seventh husband, she finds a manuscript in his possession, a tell all biography, a memoir of her life, including how she will die, in his possession. Turning against the young lathario, Miss Kathie foils numerous would be attempts on her life, until the final climax of the novel when we uncover who the perpetrator really is.

Although the characters of Palahniuk’s novels are purposefully depth-less, his novels are starting to follow suit. After novels such as Lullaby and Invisible Monsters with their clever twists and complex plot, his latest work has paled in comparison. Has he already said everything there is to stay about his epoch, and have we already deserted him?

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