Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk
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W. W. Norton (New York): August 1996. Trade paperback: 208 pages. ISBN-10: 0-393-32734-5 Suggested retail price: $13.95 (US) Tags: anarchy; castration; made into movie; Mainstream; multiple personality disorder; soap; split personality Tactical strength: [4/10] |
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Our narrator, who remains nameless, works as a recall campaign coordinator for a major automotive company. He decides if a known automotive defect warrants a recall or if the company would save more just by dealing with the individual law suits. Although the narrator has a good job and a nice apartment, he doesn't seem happy with his life and suffers from terrible insomnia. To get a sense that he's alive, the narrator attends support groups, such as one for men recovering from testicular cancer. At the support groups, the narrator can feel that his life isn't nearly as bad as some of the nearly-dead people at his group meetings. Two things happen to throw the narrator's life into complete turmoil. First, he meets Marla at his support groups. Since she too attends multiple recovery groups, they both know the other pretends to have an illness. Second, he meets Tyler Durden, and together they start fight club -- a weekly meeting where guys can have a few drinks and beat the crap out of each other in a no holds barred street fight.
Fight club becomes so popular, that Tyler has to start branches in many cities and uses the fight club to recruit members for an escalated anarchy organization, Project Mayhem. Members of Project Mayhem perform minor acts such as peeing in the soup at a benefit dinner for the rich and famous to castrating police chiefs that threaten to shut down fight club. The book begins and ends with the narrator and Tyler on the roof of "the tallest building in the world" in which Project Mayhem has placed explosive charges intending to bring the building town. Tyler considers his actions social terrorism meant to liberate the common man from the television promises of equality and prosperity.
Fight Club relies on a certain gimmick that needs to remain secret (from the characters and the reader) until nearly the end. I have to say, I figured out the gimmick about a third into the story, so the surprise ending didn't work for me. Since I had figured out the secret, the story drug for me during the escalation of Project Mayhem and the ending landed flat.
After reading Invisible Monsters and Fight Club, I can see some common thematic and stylistic elements in Palahniuk's writing. He likes to deal with characters who have a pretty good life, and through their own dissatisfaction with themselves destroy their own success. Fight Club gives this dissatisfaction a more definite explanation -- the dissatisfaction of middle-class success in the face of the promises of the American Dream. Invisible Monsters takes a characters who has achieved an American Dream -- child of a farmers makes it big as a fashion model -- and self-destructs.
Stylistically, Palahniuk likes to use single line blurbs to evoke an emotion. In Invisible Monsters, he invokes the directions from a fashion photographer: "Flash, give me anger." "Flash, give me pouting." In Fight Club, Palahniuk at least varies the blurbs to about four or five different types. The most common relate to a series in old Reader's Digest magazines that told the stories of body parts by telling about Joe, their owner. So we get sentences like, "I am Joe's Clenching Bowels," and "I am Joe's Cold Sweat." These stage directions evoke the desired emotions, but also display the disjointed view of reality these characters have where everything they think and feel has a foundation in someone else's product or directions. These directions also work better in Fight Club because of the variety of directions, instead of the single "Flash" directions in Invisible Monsters.
For content and characterization, I found Fight Club the more interesting of the two books. I had more desire to know what made the narrator go over the edge, but the story in Fight Club drug on too long without continuing to develop the story beyond escalating the severity of the "mayhem." I had an overall more enjoyable time reading Invisible Monsters.
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Fight Club directed by David Fincher
