http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/09/12/RV197135.DTLINVISIBLE MONSTERS
By Chuck Palahniuk
Chuck Palahniuk's stories don't unfold. They hurtle headlong, changing lanes in threes and banging off the guard rails of modern fiction. This time he has really done it. Incredibly, ``Invisible Monsters'' makes the author's jarring first novel, ``Fight Club,'' seem like a leisurely buggy ride.
The main character of Palahniuk's third book is a former fashion model who's had the lower half of her face shot off. No, it's not pretty. The book begins and ends in a surreal inferno, as the ruined beauty Shannon McFarland confronts her ex-friend Evie Cottrell on Evie's wedding day. It's a shotgun wedding, with the shotgun in the wrong hands and a fire raging upstairs.
In between those bookend flashbacks, Palahniuk takes his characteristic liberties with storytelling, dashing haphazardly from one episode to another with little regard for chronology. ``Don't expect this to be the kind of story that goes: and then, and then, and then,'' warns the narrator early on. It isn't. ``Jump to the day they cut off the bandages,'' begins one section. ``Jump to the Canadian border,'' reads another.
All this roughhousing will make readers punch-drunk by the book's climax. It's Palahniuk's least successful effort to date, yet there are more than enough moments of insight to recommend ``Invisible Monsters.'' Just not in polite company.
At its core, ``Invisible Monsters'' satirizes the fashion industry and the surface appearances of everyday life. The author's greatest gift is this knack for zeroing in on the ideas that define the modern era. ``Fight Club'' tackled complacency; his second novel, ``Survivor,'' weathered fame and religion.
His observations are brutally precise. ``No matter how much you think you love somebody,'' he writes, ``you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.'' In its own deranged way, ``Invisible Monsters'' is about the quest for family and community in a world too gruesome to let either succeed. Shannon and her road buddy Brandy Alexander have kidnapped Shannon's wayward ex-boyfriend, Manus Kelley. The outrageous threesome hightail it from city to city, posing as celebrity confidantes at million-dollar houses for sale, where they distract the real estate agents and raid the bathroom cabinets for prescription drugs. Along the way, the true identities of the main characters gradually reveal themselves, like the side effects of pills in unmarked containers. The ringleader, Brandy, is a master of reinvention. For starters, she's a transsexual. She gives her companions new, outrageous names at each pit stop: Nash Rambler, Hewlett Packard, Bergdorf Goodman. ``Tell me your sad-assed story all night,'' Brandy urges Shannon, ``and then we'll figure out who we're going to be.''
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