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Synopsis:
From the bestselling author of Fight Club comes a hilarious horror satire about a family of professional killers responsible for the most atrocious events in history and the young brothers that are destined to take over.
Meet Otto and Cecil. Two brothers growing up privileged in the Welsh countryside. They enjoy watching nature shows, playing with their pet pony, impersonating their Grandfather…and killing the help. Murder is the family business after all. Downton Abbey, this is not.
However, it’s not so easy to continue the family legacy with the constant stream of threats and distractions seemingly leaping from the hedgerow. First there is the matter of the veritable cavalcade of escaped convicts that keep showing up at their door. Not to mention the debaucherous new tutor who has a penchant for speaking in Greek and dismembering sex dolls. Then there’s Mummy’s burgeoning opioid addiction. And who knows where Daddy is. He just vanished one day after he and Mummy took a walk in the so called “Ghost Forest.”
With Grandfather putting pressure on Otto to step up, it becomes clear that this will all end in only two a nuclear apocalypse or just another day among the creeping thistle and tree peonies. And in a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, either are equally possible.
Review:
Not Forever, But For Now, the latest book by Chuck Palaniuk starts with brothers, Otto and Cecil, watching a nature show about kangaroos. The small joeys have to climb up the kangaroo mother and into the pouch to find shelter and milk. This becomes the metaphor of the entire novel. Otto and Cecil are the baby kangaroos, born into a family of assassins, trying to get up their mother’s leg, to find shelter and warmth from her. They try to accomplish this by doing disgusting and evil things to the help (the maids, governesses, chauffeurs, and tutors), to strangers, and to each other. Otto, the oldest, wants nothing but to be noticed, doing whatever he can to get this accomplished. This includes escaping the estate to dress up in drag and dance for the drunks at the local tavern, be pen pals with pedophiles, serial killers, and the criminally insane (letters that explicitly tell these killers that he wants to have sex with them while they murdered him, or after they murdered him, whichever they prefer), corrupting the Jesuit tutor, and of course having continuous sex with his brother. These calls for attention get more and more drastic and depraved, and eventually Otto and Cecil do not have many other things they can do except blow up the world.
This story is not for everyone. Chuck Palaniuk has never been for everyone, and he is also working hard on getting rid of the people who just like him because of his earlier novels. Fight Club was released when I was nineteen years old, and it was a great novel for a nineteen-year-old. This was 27 years ago. I am not the same reader as I was then, and Palaniuk is not the same writer. Sure he uses some of the same techniques he has always used (depravity, repeated terms and phrases, deep dives into a certain subject that his characters use as coping mechanisms, etc), but his stories, particularly this novel and his last, Invention of Sound, feel like he is trying to write stories that are more for the grown fans of Fight Club, those who are now older and have different concerns. Whereas Fight Club is about trying to change the world, Not Forever, But For Now is about family, about trying to get the attention of absentee parents, and about leaning on each other when the whole world is against you.
I have read many Chuck Palaniuk books, and for the longest time, I thought I had outgrown his writing. I still do not think he is flawless, but I feel a glimmer of hope in his future books. Fortunately his last two novels have brought me back into the fold and make me more excited than I have in years about what Palaniuk might do next.
*Spolier-ish theory*
This also feels like a final send off to Fight Club and the early writings of Chuck Palaniuk. We have Otto and Cecil. They were five and three when their father disappears and their mother tells them that they will no longer age in their estate, no longer celebrate birthdays or get older. Thirty years have passed since then. In those thirty years, they get to the point where they still do the horrible stuff, but they also grow up even though they’re told they are not supposed to. They steal cars. They dump them into a lake. They corrupt the staff around them. They invent an app that is clever and sad at the same time. The crimes get more and more outlandish but they also get to where they are bored with things, where they will not do certain things (like killing animals), and this “maturity” happens whether they want it to or not, until they have to plot to destroy the world. They start doing some of the same things Tyler Durden was doing, and this final meltdown echoes the same meltdown in Fight Club. This could be a send off to Fight Club and the book that many people have tried to use to keep him from aging as a writer for, well, thirty years.
I received this as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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