Fight Club is Chuck Palahniuk’s first prominent literary success. He wrote this novella in the mid-1990s, as the United States had become an unrivalled superpower. In a way, the future looked bright for the American white male. Nevertheless, what Palahniuk expresses here is a deep disgust and struggle, intense angst, a rumbling rage against a society that can only offer endless consumerism, a sluggish form of happiness, around-the-clock slavery to an unsatisfying job that ends up getting you to buy IKEA crap, and to sum it up, a life devoid of meaning. This feeling of discontent and radical thinking (a sort of late absurdism) has since been creeping over large parts of public opinion.

The “Fight Club”, depicted in the book, is like an inverted Dead Poets Society, where depressed, disaffected Gen-X men meet in secret to beat the shit out of each other. It is both a potent stimulant and a way for these middle-class working men to let off steam, to feel alive. It’s brutal, it’s ugly, it’s self-destructive, suicidal even, but in a way, it’s fortifying and liberating. The next step in the story, of course, beyond the fight club, is “Project Mayhem”: to blow everything up, terrorise everybody, unleash civil war, end civilisation as we know it. A diehard version of The Man Who Was Thursday, with a distinct and slightly unpleasant whiff of fascism.

Palahniuk has a rough, tough sort of style, almost a form of dark but invigorating poetry. In a way, he writes like a fighter, with short catchphrases, punchlines, kertwangs, quick jabs with line breaks, combinations (alternation of 1st and 2nd person), enumerations, repetitions and countdowns (the famous rules of fight club, among other things), strong blows and head-butts and uppercuts in the reader’s chin, that leave him/her mindblown or in stitches.

The storytelling is somewhat messy, though, and feels a bit made up as we go along, possibly because this is an extended version of an original couple-of-pages story. And so it is as if it has been growing like some vine, with a few weaker bits here and there: the food-tampering sections, for instance, come across as a schoolboy prank; the soap made of boiled liposuctioned human fat is a tad gratuitously offensive as well; the schizophrenic twist towards the end is undoubtedly a funny wink to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but feels like a slightly evasive way to conclude the book.

There is, in a way, a sort of brotherly relationship between this short novel and David Foster Wallace’s sprawling masterpiece, Infinite Jest. Both books were written around the same time by men of around the same age. Both have extensive scenes of group therapy and more generally disconcerting stuff. Both reveal a rebel and loud attitude towards literature. Both are full of dark humour. Both are fierce satires of contemporary American culture. But where DWF spreads his expansive vision all over the place, Palahniuk is an extremely stocky straight shooter. His novella also harks back to a French tradition of unbowed, transgressional writers, that goes at least from Louis-Ferdinand Céline to Michel Houellebecq.

Edit: David Fincher’s movie, adapted from Palahniuk’s novel, is lively, funny, gritty, visually stunning, and the Norton / Pitt / Bonham Carter trio is absolutely amazing. One of these instances where the film is actually more compelling than the book — it has, in fact, become a sort of cult movie over the years.

Re-reading this book in 2021, at least five or six years since my last read, I was wondering if it would feel dated, if the angry Gen-X energy would feel somewhat stale. It hasn't. In fact, I found it unnervingly relevant...

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“Nihilistic Zen” would have been a great subtitle for “Fight Club”. I have to admit this is the only Palahniuk I’ve read, and while I am not really tempted to read more (I get the point Chuck, I don’t need to discuss the most disgusting things humans are capable of over and over again, but thank you for your valiant efforts), I absolutely loved this one.

It’s a weird, transgressive book, full of dark humour and it sounds like something Hemingway would have written while tripping on amphetamines. It’s a book about what happens when you realize that buying stuff will not make you nearly as happy as the ads said it would, when you realize that you are not destined for greatness, when you realize that the world is completely fubar and that while you can try to do something about, it is unlikely you will ever see tangible results. When all of that hits you, the only thing that might make you feel better is having someone else hit you in the face as hard as they can. It’s a book about what happens when you let your pessimism and your nihilistic urges take over the wheel and drive you straight into a wall. It’s a restless, angry book: but Gen-X is an angry and restless generation, and it really captured something about the apathy and disillusionment that plagues it.

Consumerist culture is something that drives me completely insane. I’ve worked in offices for a decade, and sometimes, while I listen to my colleagues talk about their slow-cookers, their frontal washer and dryer sets, their fancy cars and Heaven knows what else, I hear Tyler Durden’s voice in my head:

“And the things you used to own, now they own you.”

Don’t get me wrong: I have plenty of crap I don’t need, we all do. And I really don’t like it… I don’t feel the need to punch people, but it used to be an attractive idea, and I can see why after this book (and the brilliant movie adaptation) came out, short-lived fight clubs were created here and there. This brilliant and gritty statement about our lives being governed by a hollow materialism that only seeks to distract us from the meaninglessness of existence touched a nerve in way too many people to be ignored. Of course what you are supposed to get out of this is that people need a purpose – not to mention genuine human connection – to be fulfilled. Otherwise their brains are easily subverted to the point where they think that ganging up to blow shit up “just because” is a great idea.

When you look at it from a psychological perspective, Tyler is pure Id unleashed; the devil on your shoulder that wants to destroy everything. The narrator’s ego asserts itself through violent acts, and it spirals out of control brutally fast, with the Fight Club turning into Project Mayhem in what seems like the blink of an eye. Of course all of this is only an illusory escape, and when Tyler punches the narrator in the face, it’s really the narrator punching himself the same way that the ego’s violence is only ultimately directed inwards. But if I am going to be totally honest, I am not sure if Palahniuk even knew that he was writing a psychological allegory. Or that he gives a fuck about whether or not people see it as such.

Whether you see it as a cautionary tale, as an allegory of spiritual rebellion gone bad or as a middle-management revenge fantasy is irrelevant, as far as I am concerned. I believe it to be an important book because it broke the mold when it was first published and while we are way more jaded now, the jab at consumerism and traditionally defined masculinity (or lack thereof) still rings awfully true. It remains darkly funny, completely absurd and terrifyingly plausible.