Fight Club

by Chuck Palahniuk

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In a word: exhausted

In a sentence: The first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.

Synopsis: If you did talk about Fight Club, you would probably talk about the euphoria of destruction, or perhaps the futility of an economically motivated society. You might even talk about the long-term effects of mental illness, or the mob mentality of the dissatisfied worker.

Reactions: I chose Fight Club because I was in a nihilist mood induced by attempting to learn about economics, and wanted to take a moment to indulge. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun. Fight Club is funny. Fight Club is thought-provoking. Fight Club is the revving of society’s dissatisfaction into an unstoppable force. This novel is deliciously self-indulgent. After all, everyone loves to complain. Everything is terrible and nothing matters; nothing is joyous or beautiful or good. Fight Club taps into the inherent human practice of asking ‘why’ by simply stating that there is no reason for any of it.

My copy of Fight Club featured an appendix from Mr. Palahniuk himself that made me sad. He lamented the pop-culturizing of his novel which made fight clubs as trendy as they are today. Thanks to Brad Pitt, fight club tropes permeate our culture and vernacular. Mr. Palahniuk appears to suffer from a similar fate to Anthony Burgess and Vladimir Nabokov in that his book has received exorbitant attention from audiences who appreciate it for all the wrong reasons. Fight Club, like A Clockwork Orange or Lolita, while an exceptional work of literature, tiptoes tantalizingly close to the more repulsive side of human tendency. With all this flashy violence, it is all too easy for wider pop culture to ignore the point of this wonderful novel. Authors should be able to toy with the horrific side of human nature without having to regret the success of their art.

Read if: you hanker for a romp with the futility of society.