Fight Club: A Novel Paperback – May 1, 2018

First rule of Fight Club reviews is we don't talk about the Fight Club reviews... If you've seen the movie, read the book. If you've read the book, see the movie. If you've done both, then you know what I'm talking about. This book is ground-breaking and probably one of the best books written in the last 100 years... not the easiest read because Chuck doesn't tell a straight-forward story, but that's part of the fun.

REVIEWSHaving watched the movie was the strongest reason why I didn't feel the need to read the book. It always bumped in my mental vault, the fact that someone had come up with such a powerful and compelling idea, executed it impecably on screen (Norton's and Pit's acting was phenomenal; perhaps Pit's finest performances). I finally gave the book a try. I was surprised to see that the book was short. It didn't put me off at all, it was just an observation, especially after having watched the movie I expected a lengthier book.As I read through the pages I was aware of the nuances with the movie, something that made my neurons glitch from time to time, for I expected one thing, yet found something else. Yet, Palahniuk's mastery of his unique style and narrative kept me reading and reading, constantly trying to decipher why the writing style was so good and so bold and so... damn original.The story itself is strong, consistent to the bone and detail oriented without being overwhelming. I figured Fight Club was very successful because it defined a putrid, rotten world that exists within the human realm. Fight Club gave this world a face, a personality, a tangible morphology we could finally grasp. This world occupies the mind of the bluest, the raw material of hatred towards the organized, paved by those who seek to control through the creation of rules that determine a beings reality. This reality has a big blind-spot, and the world Palanhniuk described in Fight Club defined this blind-spot and exploited it. This blind-spot is an individual's need to feel unique, and yet, the opposing desire to feel he is part of a movement, a group, to be part of a collective. To be part of Fight Club one had to slay one's reality, to lay naked midst the ugly and emerged reborn, only to join a new set of dogmas. This is portrayed as the idea of propagating organized-chaos, an idea that spread through the mediocre like a virus. The virus lived among society cloaked under the veil of working men, men who seemed to follow a set of social rules; the virus unveiled during the night, during Fight Club. An integrant of Fight Club was a menacing soul in search of freedom, from social expectations and the boxed-in sensation felt by binding rules of how one must supposedly behave midst peers. The soul within Fight Club sought freedom, even from itself, only to be lured by its desire to belong, to be part of the clan: the paradox of wanting to be unique and yet, the inevitability of desiring to be part of cult, to be part of the change. Man's demise is served cold in Fight Club, for example, when Tyler makes soap out of fat rendered by liposuction--society's shame--, sold back to the thinned as soap, purchasing what once was thought as biological waste, now regarded precious and a standard of "high society".To leave aside the story, I would like to mention Palahniuk's writing style. To achieve the deliverance of a message so profound, in such a raw manner, using short sentences and explicit imagery is indeed a literary achievement. I truly enjoyed this read, far better than watching the movie. The movie, however, is also an achievement in itself.

First things first: Palahniuk has a profound gift for language. His writing is poetic and punchy (no pun intended). Some reviewers have complained that Fight Club is difficult to read because Palahniuk doesn’t tell a straightforward story in a straightforward way, but I love a novel that forces me to do some of the work. Palahniuk lays out the dots and tells us to connect them. He sets a pace and demands that we keep up.Palahniuk is also a master storyteller. The plot of Fight Club unfolds incrementally, at just the right pace. Pieces gradually click into place until everything gels at the end—and blessedly, Palahniuk knows exactly when that end should come. He doesn’t drag out things for hundreds of superfluous pages. His writing style is as spare and fit as his characters.That said, I’m not sure how well Fight Club has aged. That’s not because of any “un-PC” elements in the plot (although those definitely exist). It’s more because of the book’s fairly naive view of how the world works and how it can be changed.Fight Club purports to be—at least to some degree—a response to capitalism and consumerism and their “emasculating” effect on society. It’s no stretch at all to compare the community of men created by the book’s fight clubs to today’s real-life Proud Boys. Like Tyler’s “space monkeys”, the Proud Boys have generated attention and taken some action, like helping to launch a failed coup of the US government on January 6, 2021. But ultimately, the actions of both groups—the space monkeys and the Proud Boys—seem like futile, misguided attempts to reclaim some fabled masculine identity.If the book were written today, all of Tyler’s explosive know-how would have to be channeled into screen-friendly social media campaigns. The Proud Boys have shown that, at least in America, brute force alone can’t compete with the power of influencers, the vast budgets the fuel consumer culture, or the other complexities of capitalist society.