Reading groupChuck PalahniukFirst rule of Fight Club: no one talks about the quality of the writing
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel is a tantalising exploration of violence, male identity politics and therapy-culture – but let’s look at the skill behind the book
The first thing most critics talk about in relation to Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is politics. The second thing they talk about is politics too. Third and fourth come questions of male identity and violence (which are also, arguably, political questions.) After that, there might be discussions about father gods, Nietzsche, terrorism, therapy-culture, transgression and all the other ideas Palahniuk puts over so forcefully and provocatively.
The one thing they don’t talk about often is the writing itself.
I’ve seen dozens of articles about real life Fight Clubs, about “constructs of masculinity”, patriarchal power, and similar. I’ve also seen lots of political opinion purportedly built from the book, on the likes of the websites that mentioned in last week’s Reading Group article.
What I haven’t seen is much discussion of the book as a work of art. This is partly thanks to the fact that it came out in 1996, just before the internet started preserving book reviews for posterity. It’s also possibly because there weren’t that many critical reviews in the first place. It took a while for Fight Club to go big: when it came out, it was the debut novel from an unknown writer with an initial print run of 10,000 copies (which took years to sell).
The ideas and politics in Fight Club are so overwhelming, it is hard to focus on it simply as a piece of writing. The ideas in the book are all so fist-in-your-face, I didn’t pause to think about whether I should open the discussion on the Reading Group last week by asking about Fight Club’s politics - it just felt right.
But now, I’d like to redress the balance. After all, it’s the skill in the writing that gives all those concepts and ideas such impact. Tylor Durden may cause endless controversy, but there’s no arguing about how forcefully he expresses himself:
“This is your life and its ending one moment at a time.”
“I don’t want to die without scars.”
“The things you used to own, now they own you. It’s only after you lose everything that you’re free to do anything.”
“I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have.”
You don’t need me to tell you that this book is endlessly quotable - the chances are that you’ve heard all these lines repeated many times before. Fight Club is worth preserving for its aphorisms alone.
In an Observer interview with Palahniuk in 2005, Sean O’Hagan wrote: “If I were to hazard a guess as to why Chuck Palahniuk has so much money, and such a devoted global fan base, I would say that it is mainly because he writes novels for the kind of people who don’t normally read novels.” Dan Brown is also said to appeal to people who don’t normally read much - and the assumption I always take from that is that his prose is so bad, those poor people will never open another book. I have no such worries with Palahniuk.
“I like to cut to the chase,” the author told O’Hagan. “I try to tell a story the way someone would tell you a story in a bar, with the same kind of timing and pacing... I want that immediacy when I read a novel. I don’t want all that other extraneous stuff, all those abstract, chicken-shit descriptions.”
The result in Fight Club is sparse, fast-paced and direct. It isn’t just that there isn’t any hooptedoodle – there aren’t even many adjectives. But there are lots of prominent verbs: people are always doing things, the action is always moving forward. There is energy. The sentences are bold and percussive:
“I held the face of mister angel like a baby or a football in the crook of my arm and bashed him with my knuckles, bashed him until his teeth broke and through his lips. Bashed him with my elbow after that until he fell through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until the skin was pounded thin across his cheekbones and turned black.”
To write like that takes talent and Palahniuk demonstrates just as much craft in this book. It’s full of tricks and clever turns, but – and this is the real skill – not so often that you’d notice it. Nothing gets in the way of the vivid story. It even feels natural when he flips from first to second person, cleverly making you the reader feel complicit and suggesting the woozy confusion of the narrator:
“Am I sleeping? Have I slept at all? This is the insomnia.
Try to relax a little more with every breath out, but your heart’s still racing and your thoughts tornado in your head.”
This slipping and sliding narrative voice also paves the way for the big reveal that Tyler Durden and the narrator share more than their address and propensity for fighting. Cleverer still is the fact that Palahniuk hides this secret in plain sight, right from the first paragraph:
“Tyler gets me a job as waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the very first step to eternal life is you have to die. For a long time though, Tyler and I were best friends. People are always asking, did I know about Tyler Durden...”
When I re-read the book, I noticed how heavy these hints were. Palahniuk has great fun spelling out what’s happening, while also keeping the first-time reader sufficiently distracted that the surprise is never spoiled. And I did say ‘re-read’: Fight Club rewards extra attention, which is precisely why people will still be talking about it, long after all our current politics is nothing more than a bad memory.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e8GopqSrkqG8qHuRaWhvZ5SasHB%2Bj2idoqqjqXqzwcueZJqan6rBbrLIoJ%2BtZZOhwqN5zahkqKaVYsGiuMqsZJqan6rBbsDHnmSqrZGhtrXFjKidZqyYmnq4vsitoKef