The first rule of fight club is, obviously, not to talk about fight club, which is going to make writing this rest of this review something of a challenge- but, I'm going to give it the old college try anyway. ('I want you to write about this as hard as you can.')
Wow. I really don't know where to begin with this book- I've seen the movie, of course- and this book made me desperately want to watch it over and over again and I think right up until the very end I was subconsciously comparing the book to the movie before the full weight of Palahniuk's brilliance sort of slapped me in the face and woke me up. But first:
The plot centers on an unknown narrator (maybe named Joe- there are lots of references to 'Joe's boiling point' and 'I am Joe's wasted life') who works as a product recall specialist for a car company of some kind (though I think it took me awhile to piece this together, I eventually did)- because of the stress of his job and jet lag from numerous business trips he suffers from crippling insomnia and in an attempt to cure it starts attending various support group to share his problems. He doesn't actually have any of the ailments that the support groups are for, but it does help his insomnia.
This works until he meets Marla Singer who's pretty much doing the same thing he is- being a 'tourist' at various support groups. After a tense standoff where they both threaten to rat the other one out, they both agree to schedule their visits to avoid each other- but the insomnia returns and then, while at a nude beach, the narrator meets Tyler Durden. After the narrator's condo is destroyed in an explosion, he asks to stay with Tyler, who agrees but on one condition: 'I want you to hit me as hard as you can.' Both of them enjoy the fist fight that ensues so much that soon the start a fight club and the idea spreads.
Soon its all over the country and Tyler is using it to spread his anti-consumerist ideas and forming the dedicated members into something called Project Mayhem, which is an army Tyler wants to bring down modern civilization. As the mental state of the narrator deteriorates, he starts to question his own sanity as his insomnia returns only to find out the shocking truth, that he himself is Tyler Durden- and Tyler is not, in fact, a separate person, but a separate personality that came alive whenever the narrator was sleeping and his plots and plans reach a terrifying climax that threaten the lives of Marla, The Narrator and the future of Project Mayhem itself are at stake.
The climax of this novel reveals the power of this story, to me. You can take anything you want away from it. You can see it as an anarchist call-to-arms against mindless corporate drone/slave existence and excessive consumerism. You can see it as a critique of repressed masculinity or a commentary on masculinity and violence. But I think more importantly, it's about life and living. It's about taking a chance and doing something crazy, something so extreme that you feel utterly alive doing it. What the narrator/Tyler Durden does is a bit extreme (well, very extreme) but the point remains: in a society that places so much value on materialism, it's easy to become trapped in a box- Fight Club, to me, ultimately is about breaking free from that box.
Overall: Palahniuk is on my list of 'must read more books by this author' list of authors and I can't wait to read more of his stuff. What an incredibly powerful book and it turns out that we do still have the movie lurking on our shelves, so maybe, this weekend, I might sit down and watch it again. **** out of ****.
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