Beautiful You

by Chuck Palahniuk

Overview

Penny Harrigan is a low-level associate in a big Manhattan law firm. She has an apartment, but no love life. When C. Linus Maxwell, a mega-billionaire and international playboy, invites her to dinner and then whisks her off to a hotel in Paris, where he brings her to undreamed-of heights of sexual gratification for days on end, Penny is, well, pleased. However, when Penny discovers she is a test subject for a line of female sex toys so effective that women by the millions are lining up outside the stores to buy it on opening day, she understands the gravity the situation. A billion husbands are about to be replaced. What is Maxwell really up to? Erotically enabled world domination? Penny sets out to discover his motivations, and with a little help, stop him before it is too late.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345807113
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/21/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	221,690
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.94(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

CHUCK PALAHNIUK is the author of thirteen novels—Doomed, Damned, Tell-All, Pygmy, Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Diary, Lullaby, Choke, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, and Fight Club—which all have sold more than five million copies in the United States. He is also the author Fugitives and Refugees, published as part of the Crown Journey Series, and the nonfiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest. Visit him on the web at chuckpalahniuk.net.

Hometown:

Portland, Oregon

Date of Birth:

February 21, 1962

Place of Birth:

Pasco, Washington

Education:

B.A. in journalism, University of Oregon, 1986

Website:

http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net

Editorial Reviews

"[Palahniuk's] legion of fans will adore all its excesses. . . . Great fun..."—San Francisco 

"Genuinely shocking and entertaining." — The Times, London 

"Nothing  is sacred and everything gets torched.”—USA Today 

"Palahniuk continues to push limits in this satire of sex and consumerism. . . . There are some downright beautiful scenes."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

05/26/2014
Palahniuk (Fight Club; Doomed) continues to push limits in this satire of sex and consumerism, in which “the Nerd’s Cinderella,” Penny Harrigan, finds her average self in bed with tech megabillionaire Cornelius Linus Maxwell, dubbed “Climax-well,” the greatest lover ever known. What begins as Penny’s shy sexual exploration quickly becomes experimenting for Maxwell’s research into pleasure products. While enduring erotically induced comas and life-threatening orgasms, Penny moves up the social ladder, meeting Max’s former lovers, actress Alouette D’Ambrosia, and U.S. President Clarissa Hind. But as he did with his previous lovers, Maxwell dumps Penny on exactly day 136 of their relationship, and then releases his Beautiful You personal care products to the public—a revolutionary event that marks men’s obsolescence and turns women into titillated zombies. While women withdraw to their rooms for days and weeks, Penny learns that Max has much more power than anyone realizes. Men in suits following Penny and a Nepalese sex witch discuss the power of trends and brands, and the choice of self-pleasure over intimate human contact all contribute to Palahniuk’s satire. His cheeky wit is at its best in this grotesque novel; his semi-erotic writing is efficacious and there are some downright beautiful scenes. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

05/15/2014
Lowly law-firm associate Penny Harrigan is surprised to be wined and dined by C. Linus Maxwell, multibillionaire and squire to the world's most traffic-stopping women. But he has an ulterior motive: he's using her to test a line of sex toys so pleasure-inducing that women desert men in droves. What are men to do? Barbed social satire.

Library Journal

2014-08-24
Less macho than most of Palahniuk's work, this Cinderella-with-sex-toys parable is the transgressive writer's attempt at a feminist (or post-feminist) novel. Ever since he debuted with Fight Club (1996), the prolific Palahniuk has built a cult following by taking a series of provocative ideas and pushing them to the limit. And then past the limit. Here, the gimmick is a series of sex products designed for women, so effective that one satisfied customer exclaims, "Men are obsolete!...Anything a man can do to me, I can do better!" Women disappear from the public sphere to pleasure themselves in private, leaving "[a] world of furious, obsolete penises." Though sex saturates the novel, its description is more clinical than libidinous, and the protagonist isn't focused only on one thing. Penny Harrigan is something of an all-American girl, an obedient daughter who has moved from Nebraska to work in a New York law firm. She idolizes the nation's first female president and is told by the man who will change her life—and the course of the world—"I love you because you're so average." That man is C. Linus Maxwell, who "ran a group of corporations that led the world in computer networking, satellite communications, and banking" and who has become known in the tabloids as "Climax-Well." They make for an improbable pair, particularly after his series of highly-publicized relationships with glamorous women, but it turns out that the mogul has long had big plans for Penny, ones that will show her not only the aptness of his nickname, but reveal to her his commercial plans "to enter the empty field of vaginas in a big way." Their relationship ends, and they soon find themselves antagonists, as Penny warns the women of the world that their sexual liberation represents a more insidious form of coercion, based on "the idea of combining ladies' two greatest pleasures: shopping and sex." By Palahniuk's standards, this is actually a subtle and empathic piece of work.

Kirkus Reviews