A summary, analysis, review, or whatever of 'The Invention of Sound' by Chuck Palahniuk
I finished this book a few minutes ago, so I'm going to stream-of-consciousness my thoughts onto the page. No edits. Just writing then posting. True Writer's Brain.
Complete spoilers for The Invention of Sound ahead.
I’ve never finished anyone’s books faster than Palahniuk’s
The first one I read was Fight Club back in high school after watching the movie a thousand times in a row. That one actually took the longest. A couple months if I remember. Mostly because I was so petulant about reading back then. Also because I basically knew the ending I was far less invested.
The second book I finished on a single plane ride. Survivor. Coincidentally, that entire book is presented as a black box recording retrieved from a crashed airplane (which the main character hi-jacks).
This new one, The Invention of Sound, I finished in a little more than a week. Probably about four hours of reading. Maybe a little less. If I remember correctly, I finished Survivor on the plane from Minneapolis to LA. Which is about four hours, too. The book is also a similar length. 304 in hardcover according to Wikipedia.
I burn through his books because he is the master of engagement. Everything from the way the books are structured to, of course, his gripping plots. I actually can’t put them down…even if I’m not fully aware of what’s going on.
That’s the feeling I had after I put down The Invention of Sound a few minutes ago.
It wasn’t a pure, “What the fuck just happened?” He doesn’t use esoteric language or layer 400 different characters in one book like Pynchon did in Gravity’s Rainbow (finishing that book is on my list of life goals).
I could follow the plot, for the most part, just fine. Foster is obsessed with finding his daughter, Lucinda, whom he doesn’t believe is dead after she disappeared from a building when they were playing elevator tag.
Mitzi is a foley artist who, apparently, murders people in order to record their screams to be used in movies. She makes millions doing this. She is queen of screams in Hollywood.
In his search through the bowels of the dark web (literally watch child porn constantly in the hopes that he would see his daughter being sodomized so he could get some closure on the situation), he finds a low-rent horror movie in which a woman is brutally murdered…but the scream is that of Lucinda.
As expected throughout the story, Mitzi “murdered” Lucinda and recorded her scream.
Mitzi and Foster eventually collide, and we find out that Mitzi didn’t actually murder Lucinda. Mitzi, when she was 12 (now 30 in the book) found Lucinda when she was lost during her game with Foster. She brings Lucinda to her father…who was also a famous Foley artist.
Mitzi brought Lucinda to her father to help her, but he murdered Lucinda for her scream. Mitzi, so enraged and racked with guilt, murders her father to record his scream. Thus taking her father’s place as the murderous Foley tzar.
The climax comes when Mitzi, forever cursed with guilt about Lucinda, tells Foster that she murdered his daughter, and then Foster murders her.
Pretty nuts. Most of the book is Mitzi “murdering” (I’ll get to why that’s in quotes in a sec) people for their screams and Foster searching for answers about his daughter. At first searching the internet, then after hearing the scream, searching for Mitzi.
Palahniuk swaps back and forth between their stories without chapters. Just one then the other only separated by line breaks. It’s a different kind of suspense. It’s not two people looking for each other. One (Foster) is looking for the other and the other is completely unaware. We’re watching the other (Mitzi) “commit” these heinous acts and slowly descending to guilt-ridden madness (One of her screams also destroys a couple movie theaters and kills all the people inside. Imagine a scream that breaks a glass but macro).
There’s no way to tell what will happen when they collide. There is the moment of revenge at the end as I described, but it’s latent. Foster finds out that Lucinda’s scream came from Mitzi’s vault (that is also filled with the screams her father recorded), and so Foster has to find out if his information is accurate. They spend hours, days, weeks, sitting together listening to old tapes, sitting next to each other in Mitzi’s studio…where she “murdered” all these people.
It’s a different kind of suspense, but one I relish. It’s unique and human. Any slasher film can conjure basic suspense. We see a killer in the woods. Two teens go into the woods to fuck. When is the killer going to come kill them? Hmmmmm? It’s suspenseful by definition, but not interesting.
By sitting together and listening to these tapes, we see how both Foster and Mitzi are conjoined by Lucinda. Yes, there is the literal aspect in that Lucinda is Foster’s daughter and Mitzi brought Lucinda to her death unintentionally. But more than that, Lucinda is their emotional driving force throughout the book.
Foster is filled with denial and rage over the disappearance of his daughter. Mitzi is filled with guilt and shame over her role in Lucinda’s death, which is why throughout the book she is constantly engaging in self-harm or feeding an addiction to alcohol and Ambien to erase her memories.
She engages in brutal sexplay to where her coital counterpart is literally stepping on her head while he’s fucking her. He pushes her head so hard into the floor that she breaks her nose.
When she’s in the midst of every “murder” she drinks wine and takes Ambien so she doesn’t remember what happened the next morning. Of course, it’s merely part of a larger scheme to try and help her forget her past completely.
So when Foster murders Mitzi, it’s the collision that sees their emotional bond through Lucinda counteract one another. Foster murdering in rage. Mitzi dying in guilt.
As I was reading it was powerful. All the other murders in the book are assumed. There is an incredible anxiety before the actual death happens. Palahniuk describes the scenarios Mitzi concocts to torture and murder her screams with the same granularity that a coder uses to select individual characters, and because she’s recording these deaths he describes the placement of microphones with the same granularity.
So when he uses his mastery of description and depiction to actually present a murder it’s like 200 pages of pressure released. We knew a murder was coming. But it’s years of emotion released between the two characters. It’s beautiful, chilling, and I could feel it as a reader…
But that’s not all that was going on. There are actually three elements to this story. The first two and Mitzi and Foster, and the third is one that I couldn’t quite grasp. Because apparently, underneath their tale of emotional release there is also a Hollywood conspiracy going on.
Palahniuk alludes to it lightly throughout the story, but he mostly drops it on you at the end.
To back up a bit, when Mitzi and Foster are in their period of shared listening, Mitzi decides to teach him how to be a Foley artist like her, and the conspiracy is that Hollywood manipulated Foster into killing Mitzi so he could take her place as Foley artist who delivered these screams.
Throughout the book, they mention other famous screams like the Wilhelm Scream. Palahniuk extrapolates in the book that if whoever produced the scream (no one knows who the voice actor is) received royalties for all the times it’s been used over the last 70 years, they would be a billionaire.
Top-notch screams are worth money to Hollywood. First, it was Mitzi’s father who was delivering them. His first scream came from when he killed his wife for having an affair. Oh yeah, he’s not actually Mitzi’s father. Did I forget to mention that? Her real father is some producer with whom his wife had an affair. The producer hears the first scream, sees the potential profit, and Hollywood uses its nebulous omnipotence to coerce Mitzi’s presumed father to keep killing people and recording them.
Presumably, if Mitzi hadn’t brought Lucinda to her presumed father that day, he would have continued to kill for screams and make tons of money for many more years. But because of Mitzi’s guilt over Lucinda, she killed her presumed father…but that was the only person she killed. That’s why there are quotes around the word whenever I reference her.
None of the other murders that Palahniuk sets up throughout the book does she commit. It’s actually some doctor guy, who, frankly, is not that important to the story. Mitzi would take her Ambien and drink her wine, blackout, and in the gaps in her memory she would be unable to will herself to commit the murder so this doctor would come in and do it.
Emotion remains the underlying import. Mitzi’s presumed father killed out of rage, and so Hollywood could manipulate him into killing more. Mitzi killed out of guilt. She felt bad for what she did, so she couldn’t do it anymore.
Enter Foster.
Because Mitzi can’t be the reliable money maker like her presumed father, Hollywood needs someone else to take her place. So, Palahniuk writes in this layered and understated conspiracy involving Comic-con, a kidnapping, a support group for people who lost children, and Foster’s ex-wife. The twist is that basically everything Foster did throughout his side of the story was set up by the nebulous force of Hollywood.
See, like Mitzi’s presumed father, Foster is angry and vengeful. He wanted to kill all those pedophiles he was watching in his search for Lucinda, and he did kill Mitzi. He was Hollywood’s perfect choice, but the way it all played out was kinda confusing. I had to go on Reddit after between finishing the book and writing this piece to understand.
The structure is not uncommon. Like any story with a twist, there are hints looking back. It’s just this time because the scale is so grand, it’s hard to grasp. Or rather, because the meat of the story — Foster and Mitzi’s emotional development — is so enthralling, those tiny little details get overpowered to the point they don’t seem relevant. Then he drops some major development through a recording that Foster hears while sitting next to Mitzi in their studio. Essentially, people in the support group were in the studio commenting on one of the doctor’s murders.
It’s not like when Michael Shamus Wiles calls Edward Norton “Mr.Durden” in Fight Club. It’s not an “a-ha” moment where everything falls into place. It’s like an introduction, but at the end. It’s like Palahniuk saying, “Oh also this has been happening.”
Then there’s this weird moment where they ask for an “asset” from Mitzi which we presume is a recording of a scream? But why do they want it? I’m honestly still not clear. I’ll have to let my right brain work on it for a little while.
What it seems to me Palahniuk was trying to accomplish was insert an atmospheric theme about the nature of Hollywood itself. That Hollywood will do literally anything to keep the profit machine going. Hollywood will cover up murders for profitable screams. Hollywood will launch dense conspiracies just to manipulate someone into doing their bidding.
At the end of the book after Foster has made a name for himself as a Foley artist (who murders on the regular) he says, Palahniuk writes:
“Gates Foster would never be stopped because he worked for the people who did the stopping.”
(Oh yeah Foster’s first name is “Gates.” He is referred to as “Foster” from the third-person omniscient perspective throughout the book).
Basically what that quote means is that Hollywood controls everything. He is blithely murdering people for profit, but he would be able to do it forever because Hollywood is what could stop him and Hollywood wants him to keep going.
I wonder if Palahniuk had an experience with Hollywood that put a bad taste in his mouth? Could the Fight Club movie have somehow rubbed him wrong? Or perhaps something more recent. The Invention of Sound came out over 20 years after the movie.
As someone who’s had my own seedy interactions in show business, the idea kind of resonates with me. Show business, whether music, movies, or TV, is known for attracting people who only look out for themselves. The Harvey Weinsteins of it all.
To be honest, it reminds me of the story Dave Chappelle told about Iceberg Slim to use as a metaphor for why he quit Chappelle's Show. In that story, Iceberg Slim, who was a pimp, predicated a wild mind game to convince his bottom bitch to keep working for him after she had run up her mileage (Sorry if the terminology seems offensive. Pimps like Iceberg Slim had their own dictionary so the words I used were actually the best way to describe what happened).
Given the story Dave Chappelle told is true, perhaps Hollywood does have some secret cabal catalyzing murders trying to find the next Wilhelm Scream. I wouldn’t be totally surprised if I found out it was true.
But it’s also completely possible that something sparked an idea Chuck Palahniuk’s mind about the evil of Hollywood (maybe it was the #MeToo movement?) and went to work using his one-of-kind brain to make a story about it that is also guided by thrilling emotion.