This book’s been reviewed to death but let’s take a swing at it, because I love it. Cue rant:

Fight Club achieved a bit of an underground following when it first came out, but it wasn’t until the film came along to further draw attention to its brilliance that it was allowed back out of its corner where it had been told to keep its hands to itself. As I’m likely not going to be spoiling this thing for anyone, I’ll dredge up some death here…

Palahniuk is frequently held up as a torch bearer of transgressive literature: that is literature which focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society, and who use unusual and/or illicit ways to break out of those confines. Fight Club is commonly quoted as his masterpiece, which might not be true but it’s undeniably his most successful, and this is in part because Palahniuk attacks an element of our world that is genuinely corrupted and corrupting, if you wipe off the gloss: commercial culture. He dips from electric first person into autloetic second person, addressing the reader directly to make us think about his philosophy not just applied to his fictional character, but to us.

That it’s a fact about life.

Fight Club tells us that people who try to find meaning in their lives through commercial culture (that is to say ‘anyone with an income’) will ultimately find their sense of monotonous isolation is reinforced by the consumer products, because they standardize rather than individualise. Commercial culture is all about making things appear to have substance, when they are in fact only condiments, not food.

It’s about the penis too, the bonnet ornament of literary theory. Palahniuk asserts that job insecurity and the entry of women into traditional positions of male power and privilege have transformed the male body from an agent of production to a receptacle for consumption. Thus, from masculine into feminine. Can anyone else hear the chorus cry of ‘emasculation’?

The notion that contemporary culture has caused a crisis in masculine identity is believable enough, and looking around we can find evidence for it, but Palahniuk pushes the idea to an absolute extreme. This leaves Fight Club dark, surreal and sinfully foreboding. Delicious. Let’s go a step further and say that Palahniuk even goes so far as to demonstrate that globalized capitalism is not only emasculating but also dehumanising, turning us all into IKEA-buying automatoms. Funny how Tyler’s targets, whilst symbols of consumer culture in the chic coffee shop and pretentious company sculpture, do not include IKEA itself.

There’s also a lot said about the rise of the beta male in society – men who will never achieve male God-like status in Hollywood, the music industry or in organised crime, but who society and media keep assuring will. However, stepping away from the economised, money-driven hierarchy of the world, he can be a man just like all the other men. Fighting is the pure form, when a social reject, loser or simple underachiever can be just as powerful and perhaps even stronger than one of these so called modern alpha males. They all have the same power. Please imagine yourself punching Richard Branson in the face. Feel good? Yeah, that’s what reading Fight Club feels like.

The med and arguable disastrous emergence of Project Mayhem from Fight Club is fuel on the fire. Fight Club just promoted a sense a sense of individuality and gave men their balls back. Project Mayhem collapsed the financial market and got people shot, thus showing through this nihilistic and apathetic attitude that in this exaggerated world, men wanting to be men are basically fucked. There’s no such thing as balance here. And don’t forget that Palahniuk has us comparing his world to ours…

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 3:58 am and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.