Fight Club
7/10: Good. Because Palahniuk is one of my favourite living authors, and upon agreeing with W to make it the inaugural novel of our book club.
Fight Club is a quick read revolving around an unnamed first-person narrator whose apartment explodes. He shacks up with an acquaintance, Tyler Durden, and they start Fight Club. The rules are simple:
1. You do not talk about FIGHT CLUB.
2. You DO NOT talk about FIGHT CLUB.
3. If someone says “stop” or goes limp, taps out the fight is over.
4. Only two guys to a fight.
5. One fight at a time.
6. No shirts, no shoes.
7. Fights will go on as long as they have to.
8. If this is your first night at FIGHT CLUB, you HAVE to fight.
Unfortunately, nothing is ever really that quick or simple. Tyler Durden turns out to be the narrator’s alternate personality, Fight Club turns out to be a front for an anti-establishment-fascist movement called Project Mayhem, and Fight Club turns out to be a messy post-modernist-stream-of-consciousness satirical take on alienated middle-class males. At least that’s what I think it is. I don’t think I would have been able to follow along if I hadn’t seen the film.
I probably would not have started reading Palahniuk if I didn’t know he wrote Fight Club. I judge books by their covers, and by their covers, his novels didn’t look literary or fun. But I did, and both Lullaby and Adjustment Day were hilarious. And although they weren’t exactly literary, they were well written and culturally relevant. So, I decided that I would have to read Fight Club.
And then, disappointment. Fight Club fell below my admittedly high expectations.
It is written in fashionable prose: haphazard and incomprehensible. I don’t think any style guide necessitates that good modern writing is difficult to understand. In defense of Fight Club, it arguably gives the reader insight as to how the narrator perceives the world. It also serves the purpose of hiding that Tyler and the narrator are the same person. The narrator can even go so far as to mention that his love interest, Marla, and Tyler, never appear at the same time, and Marla confuses things she’s done with Tyler with him. The reader is none the wiser, but the surprises were spoiled for me because I had seen the movie. When the narrator speaks, there are not any quotation marks to indicate what he’s said. This further conceals the narrator’s relationship with Tyler, but also makes it difficult for the reader to tell what’s real and what’s not. Words directed at other characters are written in the same breath as words directed at the reader, and words simply describing events as they occur. We’re easily drawn into the unreliable world of the narrator and become habituated to it.
Despite the crude (or sophisticated, depending on the reader’s preference) narration, the book is surprisingly quotable. In my experience, most authors tend to use pithy statements sparingly. Generally, they are used to emphasize the wisdom or wit of the speaking character, or emphasize the wisdom or wit of the author after a lot of action. Palahniuk eschews this practice à la Wilde and fills the book with various dubious observations about our society (“What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women”), and impressive sounding assertations (“We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them and show them courage by frightening them”). He probably had a lot of fun writing the book, and the reader doesn’t get annoyed because of two reasons. The first is the structure of the novel. The narrator is a rambling madman with multiple personalities and insomnia. Sharing his twisted observations with the rest of us just adds to madness, and also makes his behaviour closer to Tyler’s because both of them enjoy speaking in truisms. The second reason that these observations and assertations don’t bother us is because they ring true. Here are a few more of my favourites:
“Ever since college, I make friends. They get married. I lose friends.” This resonates with me as all my friends are getting hitched and going on double dates without me.
“Being tired isn’t the same as being rich, but most times, it’s close enough.” As a child, no one enjoys bedtimes. But sleep is really nice. I’m actually publishing this post very jetlagged from recent travels (which is why it is late). I can’t wait for sleep.
Furthermore, Tyler’s observations about society are scary relevant today. Fight Club was published in 1996, around the time I was born. Some parts of the novel, such as the explicit instructions on how to create homemade explosives show its age. I don’t think that would have been allowed to fly in a post 9/11 world. Other parts have aged well. The subjects listed alongside the publishing information are: “1. Millennialism-United States-Fiction. 2. Young men-United States-Fiction. 3. Apocalyptic fantasies.” The subjects are all well worked into the novel, and this leads me to conclude that either millennial and masculine anger were already very present 22 years ago, or Fight Club was prophetic. Tyler is to Jordan Peterson as Malcom X is to Martin Luther King.
“The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world.”
“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
“Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”
“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression. What we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression”
In the afterword, Palahniuk claims that Fight Club could have been a love story, similar to how Danielewski asserts that House of Leaves is a love story. Good thing contemporary literary criticism is more about what the reader takes away from the book. Just as House of Leaves is some of the most terrifying horror I’ve read, Fight Club is satire. Out of what Wikipedia classifies as satire, I’ve read: Gulliver’s Travels, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Clockwork Orange, Catch 22, Lord of the Flies, Candide, Alice in Wonderland, and recently, Dead Souls. But I didn’t think I ‘got’ any of these. I enjoyed reading them because of the world they depicted, the prose, and the humour. Sure, I was also able to grasp the crux of whatever they were lampooning, but I don’t think I had enough context for any of these novels. I didn’t live in the period, and although they are still relevant and revelatory, I didn’t find the ideas, arguments or characterizations novel. Orwell is probably the only satire that I’ve read that I would say resonated with me, mostly due to the knowledge of the relevant historical issues, and the easy connection to the world today.
However, Fight Club is a satire on today, a satire on our generation. It enumerates issues with contemporary society in modern English. And although the prose is admittedly confusing, its list of woes is understandable. It rails against social mobility, consumerism, political correctness, and the rat race.
Fight Club disappointed me because it raises the above issues, but it doesn’t address them properly. It acknowledges that they are issues, but doesn’t take a stance one way or the other. It’s very much descriptive as opposed to prescriptive, and really leaves the reader confused. I read somewhere that Palahniuk responded to people starting their own fight clubs with: “If you read Fight Club, and you decide to start your own fight club, then you’re reading it wrong”. Unfortunately, Palahniuk didn’t provide much reference for guidance on what to do.
As I read it, Fight Club describes what ails millennials, especially male millennials today. The previously mentioned problems make existence pointless, and their impact on society is shown by the eagerness of these young men to participate in the fight club and join the anarchist activities of Project Mayhem. Of course, Fight Club doesn’t condone fight clubs or anarchist movements. Far from it, it shows how disillusioned millennial men are so unsatisfied with their lives that they are willing to find release in violence and become brainwashed by a deranged anarchist. But it doesn’t suggest an alternative. It merely shows how angry these people are, and how pervasive these problems are.
Midway through Fight Club, Tyler drops this piece of wisdom: “All a gun does is focus an explosion in one direction.” How profound-ly ironic. I think Palahniuk manages to accurately capture the explosion that is going on, but doesn’t do a good job of focusing it. Adjustment Day is more focused, but with quite a different thesis. Maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, it’s only because I like Palahniuk so much that I have such high enough expectations. I shouldn’t be disappointed when someone writes something like Fight Club for their first book. This leads me to hope for something like Ayn Rand’s progression from We The Living to Atlas Shrugged. From unfocused explosion to directed shot. I’m content to wait until that comes eventually.
