Diary by Chuck Palahniuk, Doubleday, 260 pages, $35.95

Saying too much about Diary, a suspense novel with Literary Ambitions, risks exposing its numerous "gotcha" moments that double as plot points. The rush of curiosity is, as usual, what frog-marches the reader through another grotesque carnival courtesy of the febrile, flippant mind of Chuck Palahniuk.

From the first few pages onward, the text is smothered in menace; nothing is quite as it appears -- or, in the words of protagonist Misty Marie Kleinman, "What you don't understand, you can make mean anything."

Misty, 41, has much to clarify in short order. Her diary covers a few turbulent months, beginning on June 21 and ending September 3 of the same year. Her husband Peter is freshly comatose due to a botched suicide attempt and her tweenaged daughter Tabbi is growing ever more distant. Her journal -- more accurately a j'accuse -- is meant for her vegetative husband, should he ever regain consciousness (unlikely, given he ranks a paltry 3 on the Glasgow Coma Scale). Misty, angry at the various messes she now faces alone, describes Peter as "a selfish, half-assed, lazy, spineless piece of crap."

Unspooling her life story, one indignity at a time, Misty explains the circuitous route that whisked her from art school to Waytansea Island, due in part to an unplanned pregnancy and promises from Peter of happy ever afters. Instead, she receives the decaying grandeur of an aging aristocracy (described as "local sea turtles") who are in danger of losing their quaint retreat to the "summer people" -- indolent and idle rich who invade the island and are heard to comment: "What's the point of being rich here if there's nothing to buy?"

An overworked hotel maid, her paint brushes as clotted and mangy as her graying hair, Misty is prodded by an evil mother-in-law, die-cut from central casting, into regaining her desire to paint so as to get the blue bloods out of the red.

Palahniuk riffs repeatedly on the idea that great art requires great suffering; Misty's pessimism siphons the romance from both the canvas and her remaining love for Peter, reducing both to a collusion of sciences: "Her million smears of paint put together the right way. The urine of cows eating mango leaves. The ink sacs from cuttlefish. All that chemistry and biology."

This is not a pretty book -- the stink of nihilism and bodily fluids waft though each chapter -- yet Diary is "nicer," than any of Palahniuk's previous four novels, if only by degrees. No necrophilia (Lullaby) nor soap manufactured from liposuctioned human fat (Fight Club) nor sexoholic scam artists (Choke) nor drug addict drag queens (Invisible Monsters).

Still, Palahniuk crunches into his selected targets with bare knuckles, ambushing overzealous branding schemes and having Misty comment on art school futility, where trust funders posing as students fill teddy bears with excrement, puree wet concrete in kitchen blenders and masturbate into piggy banks: "If anybody she knew still painted at all, they used their own blood or semen. And they painted on live dogs from the animal shelter, or on molded gelatin desserts, but never on canvas."

Here Palahniuk's satire is relevant and sadly accurate. As Mark Kingwell noted in a recent Harper's essay, "Conceptual art has become a winking insult, a condescending piece of self-indulgence dressed up as a radical challenge to the staid old art world, where things had to be painted and displayed and maybe even the result of talent."

Palahniuk freely mixes talent with indulgent bombast, his confidence and force of narrative stick-pinning together a story that would implode in the hands of most authors. The language is muscular and minimal; it's a pulp novel with flashes of literate respectability.

The weakest moments revolve around Misty making decisions so ill-formed that credulity evaporates. The reader, like a rowdy audience at a horror movie, shouts aloud at Misty, telling her to heed the heavy foreshadowing and warning signs written -- quite literally -- in large black letters by her husband, shortly before his near exit. If Palahniuk is commenting on the intractability of fate, he fails.

More problematic are his sloppy shifts in point-of-view, from third-person to second-person, and an ending that employs a literary conceit sure to make innumerable creative writing profs grind their teeth into fine, snortable powder. Given that Diary is constructed only to transport the reader toward the final payoff, this concluding flaw is difficult to overlook.

As an attempt to shake the "cult author" label, and gain a fan base beyond the Angry Young Men who clot the message boards at chuckpalahniuk.net, Diary lacks the artistry and philosophical heft necessary to convince us there's something more profound lurking beneath the anger and shock humour.

Bonus Paragraph

Palahniuk still enjoys repeating phrases to create rhythm and tone, a sloganeering habit that began with his debut novel Fight Club. Misty frames her numerous workday coping mechanisms as a drinking game, constantly cites the relevant facial muscles for various expressions ("his triangularis pulling both corners of his mouth down") and presents her moods meteorologically: "Just for the record, the weather today is partly soused with occasional bursts of despair and irritation."