Dark satire 'Beautiful You' takes on modern erotica
Sex is on the mind of author Chuck Palahniuk, and it is taken to extremes and tweaked to outrageous lengths in his latest novel, Beautiful You.
50 Shades of Grey this isn't. In fact, the book is almost a middle finger to "mommy porn" and the popularity of modern erotica — while also being a smart, satirical take on misogyny, fame, the fashion industry, self-help and science.
With works such as Fight Club, Damned and Choke, Palahniuk is infamous for taking a sharp scalpel to whatever he's thinking about at the moment. In this case, sex is on the docket with the tale of Penny Harrigan, a girl right off the bus from Nebraska trying to make it in a stuffy boys' club of New York law firms.
There's nothing really special at all about her until she meets C. Linus Maxwell, a billionaire tech magnate with a history of sexual conquests — thus his nickname "Climax-Well."
Maxwell's little black book contains British royalty, an Oscar-winning actress and even the president (who is female and apparently a saucy minx outside of the Oval Office). Yet there's something about Penny that — ahem — excites the enigmatic playboy so much as to embark on a whole Pretty Woman-esque fling with her. Penny becomes the toast of the town and earns her own "the Nerd's Cinderella" moniker in the tabloids, though she has folks warning her it's too good to be true.
Behind closed bedroom doors, things get very weird for Penny, as she becomes a lab rat in Maxwell's erotic experimentation. He's obsessed with increasing sexual pleasure for women, even pushing it to a near-fatal level, and Penny gets embroiled in a larger conspiracy when the release of Maxwell's "Beautiful You" sex-toy line is just the start of his nefarious plan.
The novel is full of explicit sex used for narrative and lampooning purposes, and not in an erotic way at all. He wants sex to be uncomfortable and weird — here, an orgasm is not a good thing but instead a metaphor for pleasure as an enslaving, controlling device.
Palahniuk's graphic storytelling is bound to ruffle puritanical feathers — which is probably part of his point — but it's essential to the societal takedown. Nothing is sacred and everything gets torched, from pop culture (at one point vampire novels are used as thrown weapons, an obvious Twilight reference) to celebrity.
In Palahniuk's world, potatoes are engineered for sexual purposes and you have to go to Nepal to find an ancient master of "erotic training," a sex Yoda of sorts, who helps Penny when too much pleasure sickens women across the globe.
If that's a turn-on, then you'll enjoy Beautiful You from beginning to satisfying climax.
Beautiful You
By Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday, 240 pp.
Three stars