God just doesn't listen anymore! (The Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk)

Member Name: KingHerrod

Product:	The Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Date:	17/04/02 (420 review reads)
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Some people are pissed off - there is nothing to fight for anymore. The social fabric of our world is splintering and the taboo is now not taboo. My generation has little direct contact with the horrors of war. There is little struggle in the Western Democracies for food. People have disposable income for films; for furniture from Ikea and other such luxuries - there is little struggle in order to live and so there is a void. There are no causes anymore - with the exception of the slightly anarchist anti capitalist brigade and George Bush's manic struggle to embolden our generation with a crusade against terrorists - which fails to spot the fact that people may not want to live by the American ideal and may just want to do things their way.

Chuck Palahniuk, in his 1996 debut novel, Fight Club, attempts to capture the nothingness of my generation, the feeling that we are somehow lost in big flabby folds of consumerism - we are fooled to be quiet, fooled to want and need better furniture and a cosy life of pap TV. What means anything anymore? ".....when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you are ever proud of will be thrown away."

"You know he was too young to fight in any wars, and if his parents weren't divorced, his father was never home?.."

Due to the hit movie of the same name most people are aware of the plot of this book - centring around disaffected middle class males who meet in basements to beat each other to within inches of their lives in order to try and re-establish some masculinity in the face of jobs they hate and lives that seem to mean nothing. The story is told by a narrator (whose name we never catch) who suffers from such insomnia that the world has lost its sharp edges and remains a blur "everything is a copy of a copy of a copy". Our joyless narrator works for a major motor company and coordinates recall campaigns for them - natu
rally models are only recalled if the company would lose more money from the lawsuits initiated by a non-recall (reflecting the author's despair at the greed and immorality of modern capitalism). The narrator is so out of touch with his own feelings that he attends support groups for all manner of hideous diseases, which he does not have, just so he can get in touch with the pain and suffering which goes on in the world. This contact means he finally sleeps. However, his joy of sleeping is punctured by the arrival of Marla, another lost soul - who has an obsession with death as she gatecrashes these groups in order to satisfy her morbid urges. Finally the narrator's apartment blows up in mysterious circumstances and he ends up living with the flamboyant anarchist Tyler Durden in what can only be described as squalid conditions. From here on in Fight Club explores the bizarre and the shocking, women's fat is used by Durden and the narrator to make soap; Marla engages in lewd sex acts with Tyler; and the narrator and Durden make small and large stands against the establishment and of course there is Fight Club.

"Fight club is not football on television. You aren't watching a bunch of men you don't know halfway around the world beating on each other live by satellite with a two-minute delay, commercials pitching beer every ten minutes, and a pause now for station identification. After you've been to fight club, watching football on television is watching pornography when you could be having great sex."

I get the feeling that Mr Palahniuk is not a fan of commercial TV.

Fight Club seems to reflect the dissatisfaction of my generation:

""We are the middle children of history, raised by the television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we are just learning this fact," Tyler said. "So don't fuck with us.&qu
ot;"

"You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs that they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need...."

Fight Club struck a real chord with me, we don't need all the rubbish that advertising tells us we need, yet we still buy it. Why? To be accepted in some ridiculous drive for conformity and normality - to feel safe and loved and one of the crowd. Nobody can be different anymore without the scorn of society and Fight Club makes this point in a vicious and shocking way. Fight Club is about breaking free of the chains of conformity, the need to earn money to get along and is about pursuing your ideals and desires. This is superbly characterised by the narrator's spree of finding people in dead end jobs, asking them at gun point what their dream job would be and forcing them to challenge life's everyday tedium by threatening to shoot them if they do not pursue their desires. Sure this is idealistic, but how many people are stuck doing something they hate and are desperate to escape the boredom? Just make sure that you know who you are.

In the end Fight Club seems to conclude that to really be free, you have to have known the worst that life can throw at you, you needed to have hit real rock bottom and of course Palahniuk is right in saying that very very few of us know what even close to real rock bottom feels like. He has a point.

Fight Club is written in short terse prose, with short sharp and cutting sentences. It is written to shock in what can only be described as a minimalist fashion, if Palahniuk needed two words he used one. Fight Club is bloody and violent, it is clearly written to raise the hackles of the narrow minded of this world. But despite the minimalist nature of the language, Fight Club flows w
ell, it is easy to read in a language sense, but may not be easy to read if you are easily shocked or offended. Parts of this book are pure rage - rage at what Palahniuk sees as the pointlessness of it all.

I enjoyed this book for its originality, it is like little I have read before - the closest comparison would be Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, but even that is not as shocking or as close to the bone as Fight Club.

Fight Club is bleak, dark, anarchist (a cause I don't necessarily agree with), violent and very very unsettling. Sometimes the most pertinent points are uncomfortable to hear. This is a true black comedy, with sharp satire and irony and the novel is impressive in its scope and construction. There are times when the narrative loses its way and seems to jump, but Palahniuk's message of get up out of your cosy pointless lives and do something is punched through to the reader.

"We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are and what happens just happens.
And God says "No, that's not right."
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything."

This book will make you think and everybody needs to think and challenge.

I know this because Geoffrey knows this.

Fight Club is published by Vintage, costs £6.99 and is a short but punchy 208 pages long.

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