Chuck Palahniuk (Choke; Fight Club) often illuminates the dark underbelly of human impulses, pushing the limits of taboo. In Beautiful You, he explores the relationship between sex and mass consumerism through a nobody who becomes a somebody by way orgasmic self-gratification.
Palahniuk begins with the story's grisly, remorseless end--a woman in a courtroom full of gawking men appears to be violated on the witness stand--and then jumps into the past, tracing his way back to that climax (so to speak). That woman is recent law-school graduate Penny Harrigan, who has failed the bar exam twice and now spends her days working as a girl Friday for associates at a law firm. After she trips and falls in front of tech magnate C. Linus Maxwell, the world's most eligible bachelor, he sweeps Penny off her feet and whisks her away to a secluded Parisian penthouse where he takes her to shockingly pleasurable heights using prototypes from his new business venture.
Penny soon discovers she was an unwitting subject in Maxwell's test of Beautiful You products, a line of male-engineered sex toys. His misogynistic plan involves playing on the consumerist impulses of modern women, encouraging them to indulge in their own pleasure (so they'll leave little time for anything else). Horrified, Penny becomes a sort of Erin Brockovich for the women suffering from the throes of erotic self-subjugation.
The fervor with which Palahniuk plays on "girl power" and feminism through his exploration of women's base desires is a role reversal that will certainly shock and provoke controversy. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant