Review: Fight Club
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club was kind of a thing. It caused a bunch of excitement and some hand-wringing when it (and the movie adaptation of it) appeared. I’m just acknowlegding that it is tough to talk about it knowing what it became.
I think a lot of the power of the novel is in Palahniuk’s prose. It is sharp, disorienting, and propulsive. He starts in media res and then gets confusing. I spend a lot of the book mentally off-balance in a good way. It is a lot of fun be dragged along with.
Fight Club is very much of its moment. I think a lot of the book is intended to be funny, and a lot of the jokes are references anchored in the 1990s. Palahniuk isn’t name-checking celebrities or anything so blatant, but part of the drive of his writing is referring to a movement or a mindset in a couple words that are evocative to a 1990s reader.
I’m curious how that will work as the book ages. I had no trouble playing along, but I was a young man in the 1990s. I can imagine English professors my age assigning this book to their classes assuming the students will be compelled and receiving blank stares from modern readers. But who knows? My fortunetelling abilities are not supporting my retirement.
Recommended.