Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon Chuck Palahniuk Crown Journeys 176 pp. ISBN: 1-4000-4783-8 Available from Powell's Books.

Palahniuk presents his city as a haven for eccentrics, bohemians and other fringe-dwellers (and be honest -- would any urban artist willingly present his home as a haven for accountants, sales reps and SUV-driving yuppies?). He suggests that American society's increasing expansion and homogenization has inspired its outsiders and artists to move west, away from the crowds, and concludes that Portland is as far away as they could get (assuming, of course, that none of them had decent boat-building skills). It's an interesting, albeit overly romantic theory that works best of you don't think too hard about it; surely, for example, there are plenty of States, like Montana and North Dakota, with lots of empty land on which hipsters could settle and be as weird as they wanted? Regardless, Palahniuk presents his Portland as a fiercely independent and slightly shopworn enclave of crackpots, dreamers and free thinkers -- a city just as endearingly eccentric as our favorite off-center TV towns (see Ed, Northern Exposure, etc.), full of multilayered characters, but with an adult-oriented, HBO-friendly edge.

The bulk of Fugitives and Refugees is tied up in a series of topical chapters categorizing Portland's numerous quirks and attractions. These tackle everything from Portland-specific vocab (because the locals love it when tourists clumsily attempt to toss local slang into their chatter), restaurant recommendations (complete with recipes) and photo-op landmarks to lists of odd museums, unusual stores, haunted spaces and, of course, opportunities to get laid, or at least see some naked people. Some of the book's most interesting material comes in these section; the chapter entitled "Haunts: Where to Rub Elbows with the Dead", while presented matter-of-factly, is oddly chilling (I read the bit about "The Haunted Bathrooms" while I was in a rather creepy bathroom, which helped), while "The Shanghai Tunnels: Go Back in Time by Going Underground" will make you want to explore the city's abandoned tunnel system, or at least pick up a few longer books about it. Palahniuk brings a superior class of authorial "muscle" to many of these sections, presenting them in a more earnest and interesting manner than you'd find in a run-of-the-mill guidebook. If you can read about the Self-Cleaning House in "Quests: Adventures to Hunt Down" and not want to see it in action, consider yourself a confirmed homebody.

Between the various topical chapters, Palahniuk has scattered numerous "postcards" -- one- to five-page tales of his life in Portland, arranged chronologically. We first meet him in 1981; he's a stoned nineteen year-old at a planetarium laser show, where a powerful LSD tab inspires him to eat the sleeve of a woman's fur coat. Later, we encounter him on the raw meat-laden set of a local band's music video, tag along as he and a roommate attempt to fuck with the Rose Festival's Starlight Parade, watch him dodge the unwanted advances of a marine architect while exploring a decommissioned, dry-docked cruise ship, and join him for an insider's view of Portland's semi-annual post-holocaust potluck, the Apocalypse Café. Late in the book, he mounts a spectacular New Year's Eve party-turned-showing of Fight Club at the haunted Bagdad Theater -- how's that for metatextual?

One of the "postcard" interludes, set in 1986, almost justifies the purchase price on its own. In this vignette, Palahniuk is working as a hospital orderly; he's been charged with looking after the mother of a dying AIDS patient while she attempts to comfort her son in the final minutes of his life. Her ministrations are interrupted by the profane screams of a crazed junkie down the hall, whose screams are clearly distressing the dying son. The mother walks down to the naked junkie's room with Palahniuk behind her, and without ever losing her "Minnesota Mom" calm, uses an item from her purse to...silence him. If Palahniuk truly experienced these events -- and there's certainly no reason to believe he didn't -- he's done a masterful job of distilling them into four pages, cycling quickly through sorrow, love, anger, horror and sorrow again in a handful of paragraphs. It's a perfect character sketch, and a dead-on summation of maternal love, and it may well make you cry your eyes out.

That's part of the problem with Fugitives and Refugees: Palahniuk seems so much more comfortable with his "postcards" that he sometimes slogs joylessly through the book's more overtly touristy chapters. Perhaps he really needed the money? The "postcards" read like the quasi-novel he may have wanted to write -- and I wish he had. He's clearly more interested in characters than settings, so Mochika, the Oregon Zoo's boot-fetishist Humboldt penguin, comes to glorious life in a handful of words, while much of Palahniuk's chapter on odd museums reads like a better than average in-flight magazine article. (Palahniuk freely admits to being more interested in collectors than collections, but that's tantamount to saying "The next chapter will suck because it didn't interest me much. Move along.")

Like any attraction-specific travel narrative, Fugitives and Refugees is always at time's mercy; in all likelihood it was out of date before it hit store shelves. Any guidebook that lists actual phone numbers and addresses for its attractions is going to be obsolete within a couple of years, but this seems like a particularly ignominious end for an author accustomed to penning more enduring works (and I can't see him updating Fugitives on a regular basis, can you?). That story about the mother and her dying son deserves to endure, regardless.

The verdict? Fugitives and Refugees is a flawed but mostly interesting read. It goes by quickly, is easy to enjoy a few pages at a time, and clearly conveys the author's affection for his adopted home. It also has a hell of a dual personality, and might have worked better as a fictionalized memoir steeped in Portland lore and culture. As to Palahniuk's success at summarizing the city...I'll leave that to you to decide.

-- George Zahora

Crown Journeys is the travel narrative division of Crown Publishing, which in turn is part of Random House. Actually finding any information on them online is surprisingly difficult.