Fight Club: A Novel (Paperback)

The only person who gets called Ballardesque more often than Chuck Palahniuk is, well… J.G. Ballard. So, does Portland, Oregons “torchbearer for the nihilistic generation” deserve that kind of treatment? Yes and no. There is a resemblance between Fight Club and works such as Crash and Cocaine Nights in that both see the innocuous mundanities of everyday life as nothing more than the severely loosened cap on a seething underworld cauldron of unchecked impulse and social atrocity. Welcome to the present-day U.S. of A. As Ballards characters get their jollies from staging automobile accidents, Palahniuks yuppies unwind from a day at the office by organizing bloodsport rings and selling soap to fund anarchist overthrows. Lets just say that neither of these guys are going to be called in to do a Full House script rewrite any time soon.
But while the ingredients are the same, Ballard and Palahniuk bake at completely different temperatures. Unlike his British counterpart, who tends to cast his American protagonists in a chilly light, holding them close enough to dissect but far enough away to eliminate any possibility of kinship, Palahniuk isnt happy unless hes first-person front and center, completely entangled in the whole sordid mess. An intensely psychological novel that never runs the risk of becoming clinical, Fight Club is about both the dangers of loyalty and the dreaded weight of leadership, the desire to band together and the compulsion to head for the hills. In short, its about the pride and horror of being an American, rendered in lethally swift prose. Fight Clubs protagonist might occasionally become foggy about who he truly is (youll see what I mean), but one thing is for certain: youre not likely to forget the books author. Never mind Ballardesque. Palahniukian here we come! –Bob Michaels