Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock
Sunday, July 10, 2005. A few days ago I finished “Fight Club,” by Chuck Palahniuk, and now have seen the DVD. I’ve been dancing around reading more of this extraordinary writer since he was interviewed on NPR, mocking their style more acutely than something on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” or any of several “Saturday Night Live” skits featuring Alec Baldwin’s small businessman Pete Schweaty.
I appreciate the strengths and flaws of his novel “Diary.” His essay collection, “Stranger than Fiction: True Stories,” is well done. Finally, there have been enough recent references to his debut novel “Fight Club,” that I began looking for it. (This is how I often choose books and old movies, when current articles refer to them.)
Funny thing. The book is always sold out. The library’s copies are lost. It’s almost always rented out at the video store, where six years after its 1999 release it remains on the top-dollar Top Renters’ shelves.
I special-ordered the 1996 book, finally, and checked the video aisle every time I was looking for something else. Finally the two-disc set was in.
Go online to Amazon or a general Google search for comments and analysis. I just wanted to note that “Fight Club” in both media likely will go down at the last great satire of the 20th century. This in a half-century of Orwell and Strangelove and Salinger, not to mention John Kennedy Toole and Charles Portis.
You can’t find it because it is that popular. The book I got had a new forward where Palahniuk considers how people have taken the book very seriously. Well, as long as it’s read and seen and people question materialism and modernity, even if they suffer bruises and question restaurant food, no one should complain.
Satire is not opposite-ville. Satire is taking a concept, an idea, then pushing it to its logical conclusion.
We can accept this, and some of us can appreciate the genre, because we know that life gets weird and people are strange, or vice versa. But the best satire can be appreciated on lower levels, that is to say, by taking it as straightforward.
Sure, desperate guys can find a hobby in self-destruction. There’s always been drinking, right? And wars large and miniature. Meanwhile, the straightforward story forces us who don’t see the satire to question plot, motives and characters. Which eventually can amount to the same thing, with luck.
That new introduction, titled “There Was a Book,” offers a peak behind the Wizard’s curtain in Oz. Palahniuk says all he did was gather anecdotes of friends in a writing circle, add a few what-ifs, and viola!
Fiction ain’t autobiography. “Fight Club” is not non-fiction. It’s just maddeningly realistic, both in print and film, even where the two diverge in just a little dialogue and plot points.
I plan to miss Palahniuk’s current novel because summaries and reviews indicate it’s not for me. But I bet I’ll like his next one. -30-
