The book is broken up into twelve chapters. "Talk the Talk" presents the key bits of PDX slang you'll need to sound like a local (most of which were unknown to me). "Quests" lists fourteen different "adventures" or things to do in and around the city. Samples include visiting the famous self-cleaning house, or spending an afternoon in eviction court. "Chow" is on food, of course, and is probably the most disappointing chapter. "Haunts" lists sixteen places to commune with ghosts and spirits in places like haunted hotels and bathrooms. "Souvenirs" is a throwaway two-page chapter listing five offbeat places to buy stuff. "Unholy Relics" is a list of nine offbeat museums, like the Vacuum Cleaner Museum.

"Getting Off" is the longest chapter, and as one might guess, it's all about the city's sex scene, from strip bars to swinger clubs. Notable is the annual "I-Tit-A-Rod" race, in which the goal is to visit as many strip clubs in twelve hours as possible (no one has come close to making all fifty). A more genteel chapter follows this, highlighting the city's more interesting gardens and parks. "Getting Around" is a relatively tame hodgepodge of transportation related sights, including a decommissioned nuclear submarine. "Animal Acts" is almost entirely about the Portland Zoo, with small sections about the feral cats of Portland Stadium, and a few pug-related items. "The Shanghai Tunnels" is about Portland's legendary tunnel system and the
variety of tours one can take through them.

Palahniuk moved to Portland after graduating high school in 1981, and separating each chapter are "postcards" of his time in the city. These are brief stories and escapades that chart a chronological course of his becoming more and more involved in Portland. Particularly hilarious are his tales of the annual "Santa Rampage" (imagine several hundred Santas battling riot police), and an end of the millennium party at the old Baghdad Theater. As a whole, the book is not one likely to be endorsed by the Portland Visitors Bureau, which is kind of the whole point of it. Like any city, Portland's civic leaders would like to present a shiny, happy facade of bland progress. Fortunately, we now have Palahniuk's valuable unsugarcoated portrait, one which only someone who truly loves the city could have penned.


I like this book... but was it has some definite problems.   December 8, 2003
 19 out of 20 found this review helpful

This isn't a novel, it's something of a travel guide, just in case anyone was still uncertain about this aspect. This is almost like William Burroughs' "Junky" being a guide to New York City in the 1940s, except it's not in a novel format. It's not your traditional Fodor's Guide to Nonsensical Travel, this is a pretty loose, irreverent, and different take on the city Palahniuk calls home, Portland, Oregon. This is almost like William Burroughs' "Junky" being a guide to New York City in the 1940s, except it's not in a novel format.

I like this book because it introduces you to a side of Portland that is not often seen or written about in mainstream and tells the reader about the oddball characters, bizarre happenings and goings on, and provides a guide to some irreverent, half-assed, and often fascinating landmarks that you wouldn't find elsewhere, including many places special to Palahniuk himself.

That said, Palahniuk is flat-out misrepresenting his city. I've been to Portland frequently, and while it is an interesting place, Palahniuk really hams up his prose and descriptions here to the point of being disingenuous. Palahniuk manages to make Portland out to be as addictively seedy as a 1980s-era Times Square, as full of creative miscreants as pre-tech boom San Francisco, and as gloriously full of bohemian life as 1920s Paris. This is simply not the case, Portland exists on a much smaller scale, as I'm certain its residents would attest to. It is somewhat disappointing to see Palahniuk shill so badly for his city as to distort matters this far... reading this one would think you're going to run into a mad drunken artist every moment.

I also have to question the wisdom of Palahniuk writing this novel. Since it has been published, Palahniuk has publicly bemoaned that some of what he has written about has disappeared, or even been changed by the attention he's brought. It seems rather blind of him not to have anticipated this... as it's been throughout time with humanity, like in Alex Garland's fine novel "The Beach," when you bring relatively unknown things to wider audience, often they are ruined or changed for the worse.

If my feelings about this book seem mixed, I can assure you - they are.


An unusually funky guide to an unusually funky city   August 6, 2003
 14 out of 17 found this review helpful

Rare for American cities, Portland, Oregon is widely loved by its inhabitants despite the fact that the city has so few of the typical tourist attractions other American cities can claim. One of Portland's finest novelists, Chuck Pahlaniuk, had the great idea of celebrating the weirdness of the city in a guide book that emphasizes what makes Portland so singular a city: its odd urban legends, its ghosts, its ever-increasing and especially its ever-present opportunities for seaminess and sex. What you get in the end is a very funny look at a very funky city, enlivened by Palahniuk's sober wittiness. The book does seem a bit of a rush-job in that it doesn't sustain a narrative as much as it could have: many of the ideas seem tossed together, and the work could have benefitted from more historical material (Portland's history is every bit as weird as its present). But nonetheless this is an inexpensive delight.


half-baked   August 29, 2004
 10 out of 38 found this review helpful

I don't know, man. This book seems to have been either held up at the presses, or written over a period of several years, during which Palahniuk never actually frequented any of the places about which he was writing. Quite a few of the things highlighted in this book don't even exist anymore, and haven't for quite some time. Others are profoundly different from how he presents them.

Face it--Portland is a small city (and barely a city at all, more of a town, really) filled with yuppies, families, and young adults who have found a place to live that does not require much of them in the way of ambition. I am not saying that this is a bad thing, nor am I saying that Portland is a bad place to live. All I am saying is, Palahniuk either has no idea what he is talking about, or he just chose a "flavor" for the book and stuck with it, regardless of whether or not it happened to be true.

I may live in Chicago now, but I lived in Portland for fifteen years and still have family and friends who reside there. Having been in and out of Portland for twenty years now, I can comfortably say that this book reads like a half-baked work of fiction, filled with lousy embellishments and lazy filler. Very disappointing.


A walk with the Devil   August 2, 2003
 9 out of 10 found this review helpful

Being a huge Palahniuk fan, this book was a definate pick-up. I wasn't sure how I would like him as a nonfiction writer but I guess it's safe to say that good writing is simply good writing. Portland seems to be a very interesting city and it's easy to see where Chuck is in fact a little bit of Portland himself. I was really more interested in his Postcards though, maybe to get a glimpse of Chuck personally. If your interested in visiting Portland I'd definately recommend this book. And if your a Palahniuk fan you have better already have this.