The New Canon focuses on
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time. In
this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews
Fight Club by Chuck
Palahniuk.
great works of fiction
published since 1985. These
books represent the finest
literature of the current era,
and are gaining recognition as
the new classics of our time. In
this installment of The New
Canon, Ted Gioia reviews
Fight Club by Chuck
Palahniuk.
Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
The novel of youthful rebellion ain't what it used to be.
When Holden Caulfield renounced prep school conformity
in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he was content to shout
out "Sleep tight, ya morons!" before leaving the premises.
Six years later, Sal Paradise stirred the pot in On the Road
by hitchhiking and listening to jazz—tame stuff by today's
standards. By the time we arrive at the 1960s and 1970s,
transgressive books pushed the limits a bit further, usually
with the help of that grand triumvirate: sex, drugs and
rock and roll.
But by the 1990s, authors needed
to reach for stronger stuff to stand
out as rebels. In his 1991 novel
American Psycho, Bret Easton
Ellis finds his path to literary
transgression via the grisly
depiction of murders committed
by a serial killer. And what Ellis
did for sadism, Chuck Palahniuk
achieved for masochism five
years later in his disturbing novel
Fight Club. We are now light
years ahead of Holden Caulfield
and Sal Paradise—wimps who never experienced the joys
of cracked ribs and dislocated shoulders.
When I consider that future generations may judge us
by novels such as these, I can’t restrain an involuntary
shudder of dismay bordering on disgust. Yet Palahniuk
did tap into something here. Even though he is a baby
boomer (born in 1962), Palahniuk understood the main
paths of rebellion and self-assertion that Gen Y (born
after 1981) noncomformists would follow in their teen
years and early adulthood. Piercings, tattoos, self-
mutilation, all black attire, the goth obsession with
death, Columbine-esque acts of random violence,
quasi-accepted brutality under the guise of the
Ultimate Fighting Championship and other mixed
martial arts—certainly elements of these dark
cultural themes existed before Fight Club, but they
were barely visible in mainstream society. And in
literary fiction, this emerging subculture was all but
ignored.
Palahniuk, in contrast, not only captures this ethos,
but literally charts its paths of dissemination into
mainstream society. During the course of Fight Club,
the scars and mutilations spread from city to city, from
profession to profession. What starts as a rebellion of
the down-and-out turns into a pastime of the up-and-
coming.
Palahniuk recalls the circumstances that gave birth to
his now famous book: "At the time, I had a lingering
black eye, a souvenir from a fist fight during my summer
vacation. Nobody I worked with had ever asked about it,
and I figured you could do anything in your private life if
it left you so bruised that no one would want to know the
details." This starting-point gave birth to a short story;
the short story served as a springboard to the novel; the
novel grew into a movie, with Brad Pitt, Edward Norton
and Helena Bonham Carter. Along the way, Fight Club
became a byword, an emblematic symbol of our troubled
times.
In Fight Club, the hard knocks come in late night battles
between bare-fisted combatants, who gather in the
basement of a bar to test their mettle and assert their
manhood. The rules of fight club are simple:
1. You don't talk about fight club
2. You don't talk about fight club (in case you didn't hear
the first time)
3. When someone says stop, or goes limp, the fight is over
4. Only two guys to a fight
5. One fight at a time
6. They fight without shirts or shoes
7. The fights go on as long as they have to
8. If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight
What starts as an informal sporting event, soon becomes
an underground national pastime. Clearly many partici-
pants are violating rules and one and two, since the fights
are now drawing turn-away crowds and more and more
venues are hosting the illegal events. A lot of people must
be talking about fight club.
The twisted visionary behind fight club is Tyler Durden,
a movie theater projectionist and part-time waiter who
combines the most salient characteristics of the anarchist,
the nihilist and the masochist in one charismatic package.
He spouts off aphorisms to inspire his growing cadre of
disciples:
Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-
destruction is the answer.
or
If you're male and you’re Christian and living in
America, your father is your model for God. And if you
never know your father, if your father bails out or dies
or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
or
You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around
the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the
skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-
degree angle.
As the Rockefeller Center comment perhaps makes clear,
Durden's plans get more and more ambitious as the novel
progresses. At first he is content to stage fights, sabotage
the meals and movies at work, and inflict chemical burns
on the people he loves. But soon Tyler has progressed to
explosives and murder.
Palahniuk has the unenviable task of building a big finale
in a story that started out with a litany of outrages,
blasphemies and despicable acts. The end result is a
mind-numbing piling up of transgression upon
transgression.
Let me be blunt: I don’t find this kind of story titillating
—although I’m sure many of Palahniuk's fans are
entranced by it. But I do recognize that, behind the
exaggerations of fiction, resides a certain true-to-life
quality in the personalities depicted here. A real sub-
culture exists that matches, to some degree, the rule-
breaking ethos depicted in Fight Club. I'm not surprised
that, in the years following the publication of this novel,
the author was frequently approached by fans who either
(1) believed that many elements in it were based on
actual events, or (2) were determined to turn them into
actual events. From this perspective, Palahniuk has at
least surpassed Bret Easton Ellis, whose Harvard-MBA-
turned-serial-killer is pure hokum aimed to gain
notoriety through sheer shock value.
Is that a sufficiently redeeming quality for this nasty
book? Well, if you seek redemption on any level, from
the spiritual to the metaphorical, this book is thin gruel
indeed. But you may walk away from it better informed,
especially when your kids come home with bits of metal
embedded in various soft tissues, or your coworker shows
up at his desk with a black eye and a hole in his cheek.
If you've read Palahniuk, you won’t need to ask. Even
more to the point, you won’t want to.
by Chuck Palahniuk
Reviewed by Ted Gioia
The novel of youthful rebellion ain't what it used to be.
When Holden Caulfield renounced prep school conformity
in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), he was content to shout
out "Sleep tight, ya morons!" before leaving the premises.
Six years later, Sal Paradise stirred the pot in On the Road
by hitchhiking and listening to jazz—tame stuff by today's
standards. By the time we arrive at the 1960s and 1970s,
transgressive books pushed the limits a bit further, usually
with the help of that grand triumvirate: sex, drugs and
rock and roll.
But by the 1990s, authors needed
to reach for stronger stuff to stand
out as rebels. In his 1991 novel
American Psycho, Bret Easton
Ellis finds his path to literary
transgression via the grisly
depiction of murders committed
by a serial killer. And what Ellis
did for sadism, Chuck Palahniuk
achieved for masochism five
years later in his disturbing novel
Fight Club. We are now light
years ahead of Holden Caulfield
and Sal Paradise—wimps who never experienced the joys
of cracked ribs and dislocated shoulders.
When I consider that future generations may judge us
by novels such as these, I can’t restrain an involuntary
shudder of dismay bordering on disgust. Yet Palahniuk
did tap into something here. Even though he is a baby
boomer (born in 1962), Palahniuk understood the main
paths of rebellion and self-assertion that Gen Y (born
after 1981) noncomformists would follow in their teen
years and early adulthood. Piercings, tattoos, self-
mutilation, all black attire, the goth obsession with
death, Columbine-esque acts of random violence,
quasi-accepted brutality under the guise of the
Ultimate Fighting Championship and other mixed
martial arts—certainly elements of these dark
cultural themes existed before Fight Club, but they
were barely visible in mainstream society. And in
literary fiction, this emerging subculture was all but
ignored.
Palahniuk, in contrast, not only captures this ethos,
but literally charts its paths of dissemination into
mainstream society. During the course of Fight Club,
the scars and mutilations spread from city to city, from
profession to profession. What starts as a rebellion of
the down-and-out turns into a pastime of the up-and-
coming.
Palahniuk recalls the circumstances that gave birth to
his now famous book: "At the time, I had a lingering
black eye, a souvenir from a fist fight during my summer
vacation. Nobody I worked with had ever asked about it,
and I figured you could do anything in your private life if
it left you so bruised that no one would want to know the
details." This starting-point gave birth to a short story;
the short story served as a springboard to the novel; the
novel grew into a movie, with Brad Pitt, Edward Norton
and Helena Bonham Carter. Along the way, Fight Club
became a byword, an emblematic symbol of our troubled
times.
In Fight Club, the hard knocks come in late night battles
between bare-fisted combatants, who gather in the
basement of a bar to test their mettle and assert their
manhood. The rules of fight club are simple:
1. You don't talk about fight club
2. You don't talk about fight club (in case you didn't hear
the first time)
3. When someone says stop, or goes limp, the fight is over
4. Only two guys to a fight
5. One fight at a time
6. They fight without shirts or shoes
7. The fights go on as long as they have to
8. If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight
What starts as an informal sporting event, soon becomes
an underground national pastime. Clearly many partici-
pants are violating rules and one and two, since the fights
are now drawing turn-away crowds and more and more
venues are hosting the illegal events. A lot of people must
be talking about fight club.
The twisted visionary behind fight club is Tyler Durden,
a movie theater projectionist and part-time waiter who
combines the most salient characteristics of the anarchist,
the nihilist and the masochist in one charismatic package.
He spouts off aphorisms to inspire his growing cadre of
disciples:
Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-
destruction is the answer.
or
If you're male and you’re Christian and living in
America, your father is your model for God. And if you
never know your father, if your father bails out or dies
or is never at home, what do you believe about God?
or
You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around
the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the
skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-
degree angle.
As the Rockefeller Center comment perhaps makes clear,
Durden's plans get more and more ambitious as the novel
progresses. At first he is content to stage fights, sabotage
the meals and movies at work, and inflict chemical burns
on the people he loves. But soon Tyler has progressed to
explosives and murder.
Palahniuk has the unenviable task of building a big finale
in a story that started out with a litany of outrages,
blasphemies and despicable acts. The end result is a
mind-numbing piling up of transgression upon
transgression.
Let me be blunt: I don’t find this kind of story titillating
—although I’m sure many of Palahniuk's fans are
entranced by it. But I do recognize that, behind the
exaggerations of fiction, resides a certain true-to-life
quality in the personalities depicted here. A real sub-
culture exists that matches, to some degree, the rule-
breaking ethos depicted in Fight Club. I'm not surprised
that, in the years following the publication of this novel,
the author was frequently approached by fans who either
(1) believed that many elements in it were based on
actual events, or (2) were determined to turn them into
actual events. From this perspective, Palahniuk has at
least surpassed Bret Easton Ellis, whose Harvard-MBA-
turned-serial-killer is pure hokum aimed to gain
notoriety through sheer shock value.
Is that a sufficiently redeeming quality for this nasty
book? Well, if you seek redemption on any level, from
the spiritual to the metaphorical, this book is thin gruel
indeed. But you may walk away from it better informed,
especially when your kids come home with bits of metal
embedded in various soft tissues, or your coworker shows
up at his desk with a black eye and a hole in his cheek.
If you've read Palahniuk, you won’t need to ask. Even
more to the point, you won’t want to.
| The New Canon |
| The Best in Fiction Since 1985 |
The New Canon
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
Oscar Hijuelos:
The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.
Home Page
Gabriel García Márquez:
Love in the Time of Cholera
David Foster Wallace:
Infinite Jest
Margaret Atwood:
The Handmaid's Tale
Toni Morrison:
Beloved
Jonathan Franzen:
The Corrections
Don DeLillo:
Underworld
Zadie Smith:
White Teeth
Roberto Bolaño:
2666
Mark Z. Danielewski:
House of Leaves
Cormac McCarthy:
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth:
American Pastoral
Jonathan Lethem:
The Fortress of S0litude
Haruki Murakami:
Kafka on the Shore
Edward P. Jones:
The Known World
Ian McEwan:
Atonement
Michael Chabon:
The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
Philip Roth:
The Human Stain
Mario Vargas Llosa:
The Feast of the Goat
Marilynne Robinson:
Gilead
David Mitchell:
Cloud Atlas
José Saramago:
Blindness
Jennifer Egan:
A Visit from the Good Sqad
W. G. Sebald:
Austerlitz
Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Donna Tartt:
The Secret History
Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient
Saul Bellow:
Ravelstein
A.S. Byatt:
Possession
Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum
Cormac McCarthy:
The Road
David Foster Wallace:
The Pale King
J.K. Rowling:
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone
Arundhati Roy:
The God of Small Things
Roberto Bolaño:
The Savage Detectives
Paul Auster:
The New York Trilogy
Per Petterson:
Out Stealing Horses
Ann Patchett:
Bel Canto
Ben Okri:
The Famished Road
Joseph O'Neill:
Netherland
Haruki Murakami:
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Marisha Pessl:
Special Topics in Calamity
Physics
Jonathan Franzen:
Freedom
Colm Tóibín:
The Master
Denis Johnson:
Tree of Smoke
Richard Russo:
Empire Falls
Alice Munro:
Runaway
Martin Amis:
London Fields
Mark Haddon:
The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time
John Banville:
The Sea
Chuck Palahniuk
Fight Club
Jeffrey Eugenides:
Middlesex
Junot Diaz:
The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao
Aravind Adiga:
The White Tiger
Tim O'Brien:
The Things They Carried
Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting
Tobias Wolff:
Old School
Tim Winton:
Cloudstreet
David Foster Wallace:
Oblivion
Oscar Hijuelos:
The Mambo Kings Play
Songs of Love
More to come
Recommended Links:
Great Books Guide
Conceptual Fiction
Postmodern Mystery
Fractious Fiction
Ted Gioia's personal web site
Ted Gioia on Twitter
American Fiction Notes
LA Review of Books
The Big Read
Critical Mass
The Elegant Variation
Dana Gioia
The Literary Saloon
The Millions
The Misread City
Page-Turner
Page Views
Disclosure note: Writers on this site and its
sister sites may receive promotional copies of
works under review.