Projected Mayhem- A book review of Fight Club

PROJECTED MAYHEM

The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about fight club…

The second rule of Fight Club is that you do no talk about fight club!

In case you are wondering, why a book review should begin like this, it is because this is how Chuck Palahniuk writes; he lets his prose do the talking. He says show don’t tell…less adjectives more nouns and verbs…less details more crux. So am not going to tell you about Fight Club, am going to try and show it to you, in Palahniuk’s own characteristic relentless hypnotic rhythmic style.

In case you are wondering again, that just by reading the title of the book that this is some plot driven, third person narrative, run-of-the-the-mill pulp fiction action thriller that you buy as chewing gum to chew on long train journeys, you couldn’t be more wrong. Fight Club is one of the most different novels you’ll ever get to read.

In case you are wondering about the Brad Pitt-Edward Norton starring 1999 movie, you couldn’t be more right. The cult movie was perhaps one of the best movies to capture the spirit of a novel in its entirety. David Fincher really did for Fight Club what Francis Ford Coppola had done for The Godfather. Sadly, the movie won acclaim a little bit later than it deserved, the book even more so.

The book was released a good three years before the movie, which was based on a seven page short story Palahniuk had written a few months ago while sitting bored on his office-desk. The short story was published in an obscure magazine. The story later became chapter 6 of the novel. Palahniuk says that he needed a matrix to bind all the different ideas together, to keep a character walking from one scene to another. That’s how fight club the novel was developed. That’s how the rules came into being. Palahniuk got a 6000 dollar advance for the book and when the book was published only three people showed up at three different readings.

The third rule of Fight Club is that when someone says stop, or goes limp, the fight is over.

Then David Fincher and Brad Pitt and Norton happened, Palahniuk went to California and lived in expensive hotel suites as script advisor, critics did what they did the best - over-analyzed and criticized, audiences particularly male audiences upheld the movie as a coming of age film…soon people started forming secret underground fight clubs all over the world, waiters started purposefully polluting customers food..Anarchy just got cooler and made sense...Tyler Durden became a known name amongst movie geeks…the book was re-released and became a best seller…the age of transgressive fiction had began.

But Fight Club is not merely transgressions for transgressions sake, not merely anarchy for anarchy’s sake, just like the character of Tyler Durden; there is a method to this madness.  

The unnamed narrator of the story has a gun shoved in his mouth by his close friend Tyler Durden when he his recounting us the events that led to this situation. It of course all begins with a girl, a girl named Marla Singer.

The fourth rule of Fight Club is only two guys to a fight

The narrator works as a product recall specialist for a major car company. He lives in a high-rise condominium apartment, buys all kinds of things from expensive shopping catalogues or tele-shopping channels. Due to his frequent business trips and a constant jet lag, he leads a boring, monotonous, materialistic life and hence suffers from Insomnia.

When you have Insomnia, everything seems like a copy of a copy of a copy

His Doctor declines him medication citing that if he wants to experience ‘real pain’, he should go visit a therapy group for men with testicular cancer.