. Spinning .

In my father’s house are many mansions.

Of course, when I pulled the trigger, I died.

Liar.

And Tyler died.  (pg. 206)

This is the opening of the last chapter. I wouldn’t call it a spoiler; it’s as vague in meaning as many of the greatest paragraphs taken out of context of the entire narrative.

The story grows, builds on itself in layers, gets bigger until the action and the movement started simply by an insomniac narrator is completely out of his control. Palahniuk has expertly used plateaus of absurdity so that the reader is likely apt to accept each and willingly moves on to the next, always keeping in mind the opening scene where the narrator is atop the tallest building with his friend Tyler holding a gun in the narrator’s mouth.

I took the theme to be one of the unrest of the average young man who is moderately successful in a career, yet is unsatisfied because he sees the corruption and manipulation of the middle-class and poorer segments of society by the powers of the rich and those in authority. The narrator takes his dissatisfaction to outlandish ideas and in appealing to others who feel, like him, powerless to stop the flow, taps into a basic brutality within all of us to fight the system and destroy to rebuild.

All in all, there are some great scenarios in Fight Club. Some are hilarious, some are terrible. The premise of rising up and changing things to feel good about the world and one’s self as an individual is appealing. The language and style of writing is skillful, handling time changes out of sequence with expertise. The voice of the narrator is straightforward and believable. It makes him honest and yet vulnerable even as we doubt his sanity. There is a wonderful exposure of his feelings of love versus sex as Palahniuk creates the triangle among the narrator, Tyler, and Marla.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, even in its most shocking concepts and scenes. There is blood and guts, there is much to make you squeamish. I also appreciated Palahniuk’s Afterword that gave some details of his writing of the book.

There are certain elements of human nature–instinct, desire, jealousy, cunning–that I have no doubt are fine-tuned by evolution, good or bad, but truly enduring.

This story at various points has hit me as a mix of A Clockwork Orange and Ferris Buehler’s Day Off but I think what’s making its mark is the underlying theme of discontent of the masses. Man’s inability to accept his own flaws but finding it necessary to blame society when it becomes overwhelming, and when seeking equality, most often go about it with the best of intentions but act in terrible ways.

“Remember this,” Tyler said, “The people you’re trying to step on, we’re everyone you depend on. We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve your dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We re cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life.

“We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re just learning this fact,” Tyler said, “So don’t fuck with us.”  (pg. 166)

It’s a twisted version of the 99% of today’s outraged. These characters, led by Tyler, have a plan. But it’s horribly wrong.

The fight club has expanded into Project Mayhem as its next step, and more and more guys are swelling the membership. They accept and live by the rules. Understandably, there are always people who will join the most outrageous movement if they are dissatisfied enough with their own lives.

I love this:

When I come home, one space monkey is reading to the assembled space monkeys who sit covering the whole first floor. “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

The space monkey continues, “Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”  (pg. 134)

 

I’m beginning to focus on a theme here, and I believe that this segment where the narrator is discussing Project Mayhem, may reveal it best:

When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to each each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world. (pg. 122)

Then, this:

What Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see.

I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.  (pg. 123)

My take on this is that the speaker, like every generation before him and since, feels unjustly saddled with the responsibilities of the earth and the world. To feel the burden of cleaning up what we’re always prone to blame on prior generations when all we want to do is enjoy life is tough if you take it seriously. What Tyler is suggesting is a wake up call that would begin with destroying it all and starting from scratch.

What is interwoven here, and reiterated in prior statements, is that there are those who don’t shoulder their share of the burden but keep taking, enjoying what they have without thinking, perhaps, of the future of mankind and his world. Unfortunately, this is all pinned on the rich instead of looking around at each and every human being and the waste he makes and leaves behind. There is also, as in all finger-pointing, the element of resentment and jealousy that keeps the fires burning and the passion for destruction high.

Instead of simply doing one’s best and being concerned with that. This is a typical reaction and one that endures in mass mentality.

There are many repetitive statements made in Fight Club, and I’m wondering if they qualify as leit motif.

Arson meets on Monday

Assault on Tuesday

Mischief meets on Wednesday  (pg. 119)

This is the schedule of Project Mayhem. Palahniuk also has used this with his support group meetings, and the whereabouts of Tyler, Marla, and the narrator in relation to each other and other events.

There are a couple of things that this tactic brings to mind. First, I’m still wondering if Tyler exists as a separate entity or an alternate ego of the narrator–there’s another “leit motif” in the book that I found:

I know this because Tyler knows this. (many places)

And secondly, it reveals a need for organization, for structure in a slowly unraveling world.

Palahniuk has taken much time in building the environment of the story, depending upon the reader to like the protagonist before hitting us with some less likeable characteristics.

What the narrator has done so far, for example, going to all these support groups, becoming friends with Tyler and being drawn into a world so different from his rather normal, responsible self and community, is laid down to his insomnia and the initial concept that his suffering didn’t compare to real pain that others go through. I wonder if perhaps he feels he has missed out on much, needs to go through the pain of the fight club just to feel alive. He certainly has lost much–his beautiful condo and all his possessions, and has placed himself in jeopardy with his boss.

But Palahniuk’s plotting has taken great leaps with each new experience he places in his character’s path. There is the ongoing personal conflict, the fight club, the love triangle with Marla and Tyler, and each contains some potentially explosive opportunities.

Tyler has gotten the narrator a job as a waiter. What they do is something that will bother you for a while whenever you go out to dine.

Tyler makes soap and teaches the narrator the process. Palahniuk has introduced it simply enough, with the same meticulous direction with which he gave us instruction on bomb ingredients. Tyler puts lye on the narrator’s hand and talks him through the sensation of pain. But what we find out about the soap-making process is one of those real eeww moments. Like how you would feel if you found the milk you drink was pumped breast milk. You know, you make a face just reading it.

Paluhniuk wields a gentle shovel. He makes sure we’ve accepted what he’s dealt out before he heaps more on.

Palahniuk’s use of a blunt voice in this book doesn’t preclude the beauty of his use of language:

The moment Marla is out the door, Tyler appears back in the room

Fast as a magic trick. My parents did this magic act for five years. (pg. 71)

Palahniuk has set this up previously, the fact that he does not see Marla and Tyler in the same room at any one time. It does many things, including having me wonder if the two are not each or both products of his imagination. But that’s not what I’m pointing out here.

What I love about the above image is that it uses the simile, “Fast as a magic trick.” and pairs it with the metaphor, “My parents did this magic act for five years.” which tells us so much about the narrator’s background. How evidently as a child he noticed his parents avoidance of each other; how they maneuvered around conflict. This is such a clear image of their marital relationship that most married people, or anyone spending time in a relationship that is close, can identify with even on a temporary, single event by event, brief state of being.

Most good novels have some relevance to the current atmosphere of society when written, whether political or of a social nature. The interesting thing is that these reference to conflicts, tensions, or topics uppermost in society’s minds at the time do not necessarily mark the story as of that particular era. It seems many of the same problems exist in every generation.

Tyler’s upstairs in my bedroom, looking at his teeth in my mirror, and says he got me a job as a banquet waiter, part time.

“At the Pressman Hotel, if you can work in the evening,” Tyler says. “The job will stoke your class hatred.” (pg. 65)

 

I really think I’m going to like this book.

The writing style, as I mentioned, is very much in the style of a first person detective novel. But the roughness of the voice is softened by a personality who is somehow vulnerable and becomes a bit endearing. In this second chapter, Palahniuk brings us backwards in time, the narrator at one of his many nightly group meetings, all different groups, always there on bogus terms. You’ve got to wonder why. What makes this guy so willing to pretend illnesses he doesn’t have to become part of the groups. In this case, it’s a testicular cancer support group. There’s a reason, but first, some fantastic writing:

Bob’s big arms were closed around to hold me inside, and I was squeezed in the dark between Bob’s new sweating tits that hang enormous, the way we think of God’s as big. (pg. 16)

You gotta love that bluntness that’s in conflict with the tender softness of the scene. And this:

Bob’s shoulders inhale themselves up in a long draw, then drop, drop, drop in jerking sobs. Draw themselves up. Drop, drop, drop.

(…) Bob loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed too.  (pg. 17)

And then we get the narrator’s reasoning on why he attends one of these types of meetings every night of the week:

This should be my favorite part, being held and crying with Big Bob without hope. We all work so hard all the time. This is the only place I ever really relax and give up.

This is my vacation. (pg. 18)

A few pages in and I could already see a huge difference in writing styles between Palahniuk and coming off Peter Taylor. Palahniuk punches out his words (no, I didn’t plan that metaphor, but it’s surprisingly in alignment with the title). Taylor rolls them out, like gently laying down a carpet.

Yet the dramatic conflict is immediate in both books. Here’s the opening of Fight Club:

Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

How’s that for grabbing your attention in the opening line? Yet Taylor did it as well, creating in the first couple sentences the characters, the plot, the crisis that promised to blow apart their world.

I’ve no idea what any of this means, the narrator on the roof with a friend (?) who is holding a gun into the narrator’s mouth. Further reading brings us some neat information on how to build various forms of explosives. The building itself is expected to blow up–and here Palahniuk steps up his pace–in ten minutes. Furniture comes flying out windows below. And here, even within Palahniuk’s detective-style staccato stream of consciousness style of writing, comes something amazingly lovely in its description, albeit a nasty bit of actuality in act:

One hundred and ninety-one floors up, you look over the edge of the roof and the street below is mottled with a shag carpet of people, standing, looking up. (pg. 12)

And the minutes continue to click away, the narrator in a strange mix of acceptance and story. Murder-suicide, he says. A love triangle. Then we’re down to three minutes and the chapter ends.