Fight Club
 |
| Vintage |
Chuck Palahniuk
1996
“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank.
You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet.
You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap
of the world.”
In 2013 it would be incomplete to talk about Chuck Palahniuk's most famous novel without constantly and incessantly referring to the 1999 Hollywood adaptation from David Fincher, so if there's anybody out there reading this who hates the entwined nature of virtually all film and literature in popular culture, then you're out of luck. Furthermore, if my passive/aggressive assault on books that slightly annoy me but I nevertheless like also irritates you, then you should probably leave this one, since I kind of like Fight Club, but I also kind of don't like it too.
Fight Club is another book I first read as an academic (not to study, just for fun) about six years ago and I'm just returning to. My initial memories of it were good, if a bit disconcerting, but by no means a classic. Since then I like to think I've expanded my reading context a bit, enabling me to find new levels of insight when discussing literature with a bit of depth. With that in mind, my updated thoughts about Fight Club: The Book Version are that I quite liked it, but not that much... but for much better reasons, probably.
The plot of Fight Club and its essential twist is so well known I don't think spoiler warnings are necessary. Palahniuk's unnamed narrator meets a mysterious and extremely cool man named Tyler Durdan, who teaches him through extreme ways how to let go of his consumerist worldview and become a stronger, much more dramatic individual with control over his own life. This involves the forming of something called fight club, where a disenfranchised group of men- which is essentially what this whole book is about; the frustration of first-world nobodies who live comfortably but pointlessly and need to feel capable of effecting their own lives- come together to mutually fight like manly men. Fight Club is just the beginning of Tyler's plot though, and it transforms into blatant organised urban terrorism with Project Mayhem, which is where things really begin to spin out of control. Then the narrator finds out something important about the relationship between himself and Tyler. There you go, I didn't spoil it.
Anyway, I must admit that the power of the 1999 film unfairly takes away credit from Palahniuk's ideas through its ubiquitousness. Fight Club the movie is so good, and the performances by Edward Norton and Brad Pitt so memorable that I instinctively associate the title with that film before I do the novel (which is something I never normally do). Obviously this is unfair, since the vast majority of ideas, lines, and plot twists from the film are taken directly from the book, from the imagination of Palahniuk. These ideas are genius, as proved by the movies' popularity and influence on pop culture as a whole, and the author deserves every royalty payment he gets from just having these ideas, and presenting them in such a direct style as to appeal to everyone. In this respect, I really like Fight Club.
The problem is- and this is going to annoy purists- that in terms of the presentation of the ideas, the film does it much, much better. Reading this novel felt like I was reading a slightly beefed-up premise for an idea, a sort of bizarrely presented screenplay to be expanded upon. Partly this is due to the style of Palahniuk's narration. As represented by Edward Norton's onscreen unenthusiastic tones,the narration is stripped down and intentionally understated. In fact the whole book is a very short read, as the author writes in short outbursts of thoughts, one line at a time; like an obsessive compulsive stream of consciousness. Almost every sentence in the book is a potentially memorable line, which, again, translated perfectly onto the screen. 'I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.'
On paper, though, it wore thin for me and was inconsistent in quality. Mostly I was put off (though not greatly) by stylistic similarities to authors who, I feel, do this sort of thing a lot better. The most prominent in my mind are Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut (who I'll actually review something by, one of these days). two authors with a far greater talent for putting down one memorable, powerful line after another. I've yet to read anything else by Palahniuk, but it seems clear that he's comfortable as a counter-culture writer like many other great names before him, paying homage to William Burroughs and such with his style and intent. As a nineties writer my closest comparison would be to Bret Easton Ellis, in particular comparing Fight Club to American Psycho. I guess the problem with this type of literature in this decade is that it's just not as interesting or progressive as the counter-culture movements of the 1960's. I'm not saying it's any less relevant; as someone who grew up in the nineties it's even more relevant than something like Slaughterhouse Five, for example, which actually serves to make it seem more depressing rather than shocking.
But seeing as I could probably ramble on about Fight Club all day and I have a bunch of other stuff I need to catch up on, I should probably round these rambles off a little bit. First of all, I absolutely recommend Fight Club to anyone with an interest in the history of counter-cultural literature (including postmodernism and other hippy phrases) and to anyone who really loves the film; that's a no-brainer. If you're not naturally inclined towards that style or philosophy, than Fight Club will more than likely annoy you because of how hard it tries to be cool all the time. Its philosophy is extreme and uncompromising, and shouldn't be taken at face value, but it is powerful and deep-routed. Perhaps the real key to this story's worldwide success is that it appeals to the psyche of those similar to the protagonist, which is essentially a lot of people, and creates an undeniable atmosphere of chillingly realistic tension, though through a (probably) very unrealistic plot. It's unlikely to be the best book you've ever read, but it would be amongst the most memorable, and for mostly good reasons too.
In 2013 it would be incomplete to talk about Chuck Palahniuk's most famous novel without constantly and incessantly referring to the 1999 Hollywood adaptation from David Fincher, so if there's anybody out there reading this who hates the entwined nature of virtually all film and literature in popular culture, then you're out of luck. Furthermore, if my passive/aggressive assault on books that slightly annoy me but I nevertheless like also irritates you, then you should probably leave this one, since I kind of like Fight Club, but I also kind of don't like it too.
Fight Club is another book I first read as an academic (not to study, just for fun) about six years ago and I'm just returning to. My initial memories of it were good, if a bit disconcerting, but by no means a classic. Since then I like to think I've expanded my reading context a bit, enabling me to find new levels of insight when discussing literature with a bit of depth. With that in mind, my updated thoughts about Fight Club: The Book Version are that I quite liked it, but not that much... but for much better reasons, probably.
The plot of Fight Club and its essential twist is so well known I don't think spoiler warnings are necessary. Palahniuk's unnamed narrator meets a mysterious and extremely cool man named Tyler Durdan, who teaches him through extreme ways how to let go of his consumerist worldview and become a stronger, much more dramatic individual with control over his own life. This involves the forming of something called fight club, where a disenfranchised group of men- which is essentially what this whole book is about; the frustration of first-world nobodies who live comfortably but pointlessly and need to feel capable of effecting their own lives- come together to mutually fight like manly men. Fight Club is just the beginning of Tyler's plot though, and it transforms into blatant organised urban terrorism with Project Mayhem, which is where things really begin to spin out of control. Then the narrator finds out something important about the relationship between himself and Tyler. There you go, I didn't spoil it.
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| Also no tag backs. |
On paper, though, it wore thin for me and was inconsistent in quality. Mostly I was put off (though not greatly) by stylistic similarities to authors who, I feel, do this sort of thing a lot better. The most prominent in my mind are Charles Bukowski and Kurt Vonnegut (who I'll actually review something by, one of these days). two authors with a far greater talent for putting down one memorable, powerful line after another. I've yet to read anything else by Palahniuk, but it seems clear that he's comfortable as a counter-culture writer like many other great names before him, paying homage to William Burroughs and such with his style and intent. As a nineties writer my closest comparison would be to Bret Easton Ellis, in particular comparing Fight Club to American Psycho. I guess the problem with this type of literature in this decade is that it's just not as interesting or progressive as the counter-culture movements of the 1960's. I'm not saying it's any less relevant; as someone who grew up in the nineties it's even more relevant than something like Slaughterhouse Five, for example, which actually serves to make it seem more depressing rather than shocking.
But seeing as I could probably ramble on about Fight Club all day and I have a bunch of other stuff I need to catch up on, I should probably round these rambles off a little bit. First of all, I absolutely recommend Fight Club to anyone with an interest in the history of counter-cultural literature (including postmodernism and other hippy phrases) and to anyone who really loves the film; that's a no-brainer. If you're not naturally inclined towards that style or philosophy, than Fight Club will more than likely annoy you because of how hard it tries to be cool all the time. Its philosophy is extreme and uncompromising, and shouldn't be taken at face value, but it is powerful and deep-routed. Perhaps the real key to this story's worldwide success is that it appeals to the psyche of those similar to the protagonist, which is essentially a lot of people, and creates an undeniable atmosphere of chillingly realistic tension, though through a (probably) very unrealistic plot. It's unlikely to be the best book you've ever read, but it would be amongst the most memorable, and for mostly good reasons too.
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