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No thread yet for non-ARC reviews?
Me, I was slightly disappointed. I read it last night, and really just didn't get it. I mean, all the usual Chuck-isms were in there, from medical facts to choruses to talking a lot about piss and Missoula. But the plot was lacking, I felt. There wasn't really any resolution, the ending was abrupt, muddled, and lacked significance.
Is it me, or are the strange hobbies Chuck invents for his characters getting less and less believable? In Fight Club, I could believe that groups of young men would vent their frustrations through underground boxing clubs. In Haunted, rich people acting as homeless people caught me off guard but I could kind of buy it. Then in Rant, party crashing seemed ridiculous, like Chuck wanted to write another fight club, but ended up with something stupid that people would never do. I liked Rant, really I did, but party crashing irked me. Now in Snuff, we have middle aged men creating train sets with realistic gang members and slums? What? While he may have actually met/heard of people doing this, it's completely uninteresting as a plot device. And less believable is that the adopted son of a man who does this would spend enough time watching/helping to himself learn all about every gang in the country.
--spoiler--
Question: why would 72's adopted mother tell him he was Cassie's son when he wasn't? Was she lying? Did she really think that? Did I completely miss something at the end where we found out that he was Zelda's brother? If his adoptive mom was lying...why? To me it just screams of a half-assed way to cover up the eventual plot 'twist', which itself wasn't all that a)surprising or b)interesting.
I really just didn't see the point of this book, other than Chuck really wanting to write a porn book. What was the satire? Where's the message? Please tell me what I missed.
So it was a fun read, which I guess is all you can ask for. But I expected more.
____SPOILER____
I think that she said that because it was her way of getting her son to stop...as a woman that is extremely conservative, i.e. not even sleeping in the same bed as her husband, it seemed like that was her way of dealing with it, without really having to deal with it...she doesnt want to sit down and talk with her son about pornography, but if she can manipulate him into thinking that he is looking at his mother, then he will stop out of respect....
and maybe even an underlying idea for mothers in general, that all these kids that were adopted, and maybe brought up in conservative homes, their mothers told them that was their real mother, in hopes that they would stop looking at pornography...cassie seemed completely aware that a lot of her audience was boys thinking that they were her son...
I could be completely wrong on that, but it seemed like a great story telling device, to contrast this ultra conservative upbringing, ie a father who builds trains, a mother goes to decorative cake making, they sleep in seperate beds, and yet they have such a mysticism with the things they feel they shouldnt be apart of...the dad makes trains with gang members around and the mother makes erotic cakes...sort of a play on the double standard of conservatives (oh the examples we could share),and yet still their adoptive son has this same fascination with something percieved as immoral...
not a very concise answer, but my two cents nonetheless
By the way...
You mustn't have searched very far.
When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?
You mustn't have searched very far.
You're right, I didn't search very far. In fact, I didn't search at all, because my eyes could read all 10 or so of the threads in the Snuff forum, and none of them were it. Why would I search the New Members welcome center for a thread on Snuff reviews? That thread probably belongs here.
Apologies.
The thing with his adoptive dad doing the train sets i think has something to do with how unfulfilled his life is. His wife dosent fuck him and he has no real interactions. So he goes around searching through the most urban of the cities looking for real life gangsters, prostitutes, all of this disgustingess that he wasnt exposed to and tries to relive it through the train sets.
Or.
You could take it how Mr. 72 calls it. They're hypocrites. They are conservatives and all that bullshit but they lead a double life of baking penises and painting prositutes and tattooed gangsters.
Or.
You could interpret it as everyone looking for the realest of the real. The adoptive dad aint different from all the other "pud-pullers" who want to see movies with audio, or movies with high definition (im refering to sheila's rant here).
"The audience only wants a limited amount of honesty. (48)"
In this case his adoptive dad wanting the full proof honesty not knowing what he's getting himself into...
Or.
You can interpret it as being some dumb, stupid idea that has no connections at all to anything in the entire book and was just a half-ass way to teach about gang tattoos and signs...
I'm actually kind of leaning towards the last option. It just gave the impression that Chuck had all these interesting gang facts and really wanted to throw them in the book, so he made up some ridiculous hobby for the dad.
I think 72's adoptive mom was a hypocrite, but not his dad. There's nothing dirty about knowing details about gangs. That was just a hobby, and I don't think it fits well with the "lonely people need the best" theme. As far as themes go, that's a pretty lame one to begin with. I understand that people in general want the best, and when they can choose between movies with sound and movies without sound they'll choose sound, just like most people have replaced books with movies. But that's human nature, and I don't think loneliness ties into it at all.
Another repeated theme in the book was physical pain people endure to make them look/sound/act better. From Lucille Ball's hair, to Marilyn Monroe's heel, to Rock Hudson's voice, self-mutilation for the sake of pleasing other's was a large motif. But all of that was already covered in the 'Post-Production' story by Tess Clark in Haunted. So it wasn't new ground for Palahniuk at all, making it much less interesting.
Good points, but consider this... I think i stated this in another thread.
I think the point of his dad's hobby, aside from having the interesting gang facts, it was used to reestablish that theme of dudes claiming turf. Like what Mr. 600 said in the beginning, "Dudes have a million ways of peeing on what they claim as just their own." So giving the adoptive dad this hobby gave him the ability to display one of the million ways dudes pee to claim was is theres. Specially that mexican with the number 206 slapping that other dude saying, "Is mine!"
So I think property claiming was the theme he was trying to show here through the dad's hobby. He gave him that hobby to say, "Look at the different way's guys claim whats theres. Tattoos, symbols, gangs..." but thats just one aspect. Because theres also the potatoe chip stuff the guys were doing, the jizz sprayed on Cassie wright, Mr. 600 wanting to claim the fame by popping the cyanide pill, and im sure there are other instances that i can't remember at the moment...
But yeah, maybe that was the point...
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