DiaryA Novel

A crude but gripping tableau of trailer trash drifters, failed artists, intervening tourists and the struggle for integrity against class-based limitations.
If this audiobook is not likely to inspire the same mass faintings as Palahniuk's bookstore readings of his short story "Guts," Diary at least reminds us that Palahniuk's work, for all of its oft-predictable sensationalism, strikes a blunt yet effective iconoclasm at odds with most popular literature. Sidestep the shock value and you'll find a crude but gripping tableau of trailer trash drifters, failed artists, intervening tourists and the struggle for integrity against class-based limitations.

The odd Trojan horse here is Martha Plimpton, who reads in the hard, husky manner of a woman who's witnessed too many ineffable banalities. Seven discs may be too much for such an approach. Pimpton's vocal affectations occasionally grate, particularly when shredding through large chunks of dialogue. But flitting through Palahniuk's run-on, instructive sentences with a slam-style timbre, Plimpton sustains the urgency in the novel's many four-letter words and negotiates the book's tricky second-person voice without drawing too much attention to Palahniuk's stylistic showboating. And that's no small feat.

Diary may be about as emo as an audiobook can get, but listeners searching for a hard, bitter pill to swallow will likely be satisfied.