Its first two-thirds are dreary and dreadful: once Tyler vanishes it finally picks up (its final act). Let’s be clear, though: I didn’t enjoy Fight Club until its last chapters (and even then). Fight Club isn’t a novel inasmuch as it’s reporting on the beat of 90s anguish. The advertising and consumer culture makes the men feel uncomfortable about their masculinity and drive fight clubs and white-male terror groups in the text (and reality). The novel feels like a Generation X tale of angst seeking an authentic life through the escalation, rather than the resolution, of trauma. My tastes as a reader are disposed against writers like Palahniuk, who use a minimalist, journalistic style for their writing: short paragraphs, copious dialogue, a story which, intentionally or not, translates well to the silver screen. I’ve never read Fight Club before (or wanted to) despite seeing the film adaptation when I was a teen, like many boys my age in the early 2000s did. It’s an unconventional work: Fight Club doesn’t have much of a plot and lacks an ending, the characterization is paper-thin, beyond the vapid yet trash-filled consciousness of its unnamed narrator. Norton, a literary publisher behind many literature course anthologies in North America, published Fight Club in 1996 – the debut novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Get your stuff out of the street and come in.” On the third day … still there, and Tyler goes down and just tells mister angel, “Come in. And his clothes are still in the gutter. Tyler says he’s going to call the police if the guy won’t leave. Then, six hours later, Tyler goes out and says he’s sorry, but no. The next day, the guy is still there, and Tyler goes out to go, “I’m sorry.” Tyler says he’s sorry he told the guy about training, but the guy is really too young, and would he please just go.

Come back in a couple years and apply again. After lunch, I go out and beat mister angel with a broom and kick the guy’s sack into the gutter and scream. So I tell mister angel he’s too young, but at lunchtime he’s still there. You tell the applicant to go away, and if his resolve is so strong that he waits at the entrance without food or shelter or encouragement for three days, then and only then can he enter and begin the training. Black, he’s too black.” / This is how Buddhist temples have tested applicants going back for bah-zillion years, Tyler says. “If the applicant is young, we tell him he’s too young. “He’s too young.” / I ask how young is too young? / “It doesn’t matter,” Tyler says. Sample: “Get rid of him,” Tyler tells me. TL DR: A good book that reads like a B-movie: the narrator is a trash-can consciousness which gains a bit of substance, despite himself, by the end – the novel’s aesthetic victories feel hollow. Finished copy borrowed from the local library.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk