Source of book: borrowed from the library
The last year or so, a couple of online friends and I have formed an informal book club, where we read agreed upon books as schedules permit. Say what you like about all the downsides of social media and the internet, but I have also found a number of friends that way - several of which I have now met in person. That applies to one of the members of this club. After a decade of online friendship, we were able to meet this last spring, and it was a real pleasure.
I never saw the movie version of Fight Club. I’m not much of a movie watcher (although I do enjoy them when I do), and honestly, nothing about the movie appealed to me.
Not only that, but a certain generation of young men - a certain type - fawned all over the movie. It reminded me a lot of how certain kinds of teen girls read Wuthering Heights and think it is a romantic love story.
I agreed to read the book because my friend had read it and recommended it as better than the movie (books usually are) and because it fit with an ongoing discussion we have been having about toxic masculinity.
Having read it now, I think the Wuthering Heights comparison is even more apt. To admire and want to adopt the “fight club” ethos is to miss the point of the book, I think.
Chuck Palahniuk has had a rather interesting life. Before his writing career took off, he had a blue collar upbringing and a blue collar job as a diesel mechanic. In fact, one might say that his first writing experience was with repair manuals he wrote for Freightliner.
While working for Freightliner, he met his partner, who he has been with for over 30 years. Weirdly (although possibly understandably), Palahniuk hid that he was gay for years, referring to his partner as his “wife” in interviews. Subsequent inverviews show him pretty defensive about it; honestly his interviews reveal him to have a chip on his shoulder and a paranoia streak.
In light of the book, that is kind of interesting. There is some degree of biographical writing perhaps.
I am not sure how much of the plot to even include here. I knew some of it before I read the book, just from listening to other people and seeing the trailers in theaters and on TV. It probably can’t be spoiled at this point, except for the few people who studiously avoid popular culture.
The idea of “fighting as a means of radical psychotherapy” is practically a meme in our culture now, as is the idea of “fighting one’s self” in a very literal sense.
Palahniuk describes his style as “transgressive fiction” - and it definitely does run roughshod over taboo and social niceties. He isn’t the first, to say the least. One could consider “picaresques” of the 18th Century to be early examples. Such a genre is of course firmly rooted in the culture of its time - taboos change.
I haven’t really decided how I feel about the book. It certainly taps into a certain kind of toxic masculinity, a sense of male frustration about living in a consumerist society. Which I totally get. I’m not a big fan either, although I prefer to take my frustrations out making music or walking up mountains.
Another factor in why I didn’t find the book to resonate personally is that I was raised with a far healthier sense of masculinity than this book describes. The narrator first seeks emotional connection in attending deadly diseases support groups (perhaps inspired by the author’s volunteer work transporting members of these groups), and then in the fights at Fight Club.
My own upbringing allowed for a good degree of emotions for men and boys. I am grateful to my parents for that part of my upbringing. They wanted me to be healthier emotionally than they were, and I believe they succeeded to a significant extent.
(There were really only two issues I think that undermined this otherwise good approach my parents took. First, expressing negative emotions about them - and especially my sister - was off limits. So I ended up acting out rather than speaking out. Indeed, it took me into my 30s before I was able to actually express to them my negative feelings about their behavior - and they did not take it well. Second, after we got involved with Bill Gothard’s cult, expressing negative emotions was increasingly viewed as “rebellion.” You can guess all that flowed from that.)
Because of this upbringing, particularly before our cult days, I have been able to form emotionally close relationships with people - and not just my wife. I have friends, male and female, who I am able to be vulnerable, and I am glad of that. One could say that I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve, at least once I get to know someone.
Before American Evangelicalism became a Trump Cult, I felt that church was also a place where I could get that intimacy that all of us, male or female, need. I miss that, but have worked to expand my friendship circles and find my tribe in other ways.
To me, the point of the book isn’t that having fight clubs is a good thing, or that manly men need to engage in ritual violence to find emotional connection, or any of that rot. Rather, it is that, without healthy ways of finding emotional outlet and intimacy, humans act out in violent and antisocial ways. And, as a corollary, consumerism is no substitute for connection, as the protagonist discovers.
While I think the book has its flaws and its strengths, I can see how it would be popular with (and misunderstood by) a certain kind of surface reader. The style is deliberately simple, with short sentences and repeated mantras. I can all too easily be read as an uncritical paean to violent toxic masculinity - just like people read the Bible and adopt all of the worst of what it depicts. But to really understand Fight Club, you have to look at what is actually happening: the slow destruction of the narrator’s psyche as he self-medicates with violence against himself, others, and society - it is an analogue to heroin, with its highs, lows, withdrawal effects, and ultimate self-destruction.
There are a few lines I jotted down as being worth quoting.
For example, this description of the support groups.
Everyone clinging and risking to share their worst fear, that their death is coming head-on and the barrel of a gun is pressed against the back of their throats.
This is an obvious parallel to the final (and opening) scene in the book, with the narrator on top of a skyscraper with a gun in his mouth.
Much later in the book, he expands on what he likes about the groups.
This is why I loved the support groups so much, if people thought you were dying, they gave you their full attention.
If this might be the last time they saw you, they really saw you. Everything else about their checkbook balance and radio songs and messy hair went out the window.
You had their full attention.
People listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.
And when they spoke, they weren’t telling you a story. When the two of you talked, you were building something, and afterward you were both different than before.
It is sad to require the perception of dying to get this kind of intimacy. This is what friendship - even more than marriage - is for.
At the groups, he meets another “tourist” (one who is faking being sick) named Marla. Who is every bit as mentally unhealthy as he is. They recognize each other, but agree not to squeal - it is a mutually assured destruction situation.
There is another scene early in the book, that makes no sense until far later. The narrator’s apartment blows up, and his weirdly dissociated description of it is haunting.
Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbor lets the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the cliffside of the building.
These things happen.
While I disagree with the narrator’s solution to consumerism, I do find his diagnosis of the problem to be plausible. And this line, coming after a detailed, name-dropping description of his carefully curated crap is excellent.
And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
And then there is more detailed description.
Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds of capers.
That’s only a slight exaggeration of my own pantry. Sigh. I feel seen. At least I know how to cook with them.
After this destruction, he ends up crashing at the house of the anti-hero, Tyler Durden. (I won’t spoil the rest of the story about this.) Who lives in a decidedly different place.
This is the perfect house for dealing drugs. There are no neighbors. There’s nothing else on Paper Street except for warehouses and the pulp mill. The fart smell of steam from the paper mill, and the hamster cage smell of wood chips in orange pyramids around the mill. This is the perfect house for dealing drugs because a bah-zillion trucks drive down Paper Street everyday, but at night, Tyler and I are alone for a half mile in every direction.
The final line I want to feature is much more philosophical - perhaps even theological. It is part of a recurring conversation about transgression and meaning. This particular moment comes out of another recurring conversation, about how we tend to think that God is like our human father.
(This is one important thing I understand about my mother, is that her desperate need to make God love her is 100 percent an extension of her failure to get her father to love her.)
Tyler is perhaps the most nihilistic of the characters, but his perspective is certainly interesting.
“What you have to consider,” he says, “is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen.”
How Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all. Maybe because God’s hate is better than his indifference.
If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
This may be the core of the book, and the best explanation for the actions of its characters. Everyone wants to matter. Everyone needs and craves connection. A negative connection is better than nothing at all. Being bloodied by another man is more satisfying than sleepwaking through life. Blowing shit up and earning the wrath of society is more satisfying than society not caring about you at all. Better to be evil than indifferent.
It’s not my personal preference for philosophy, but then again, I believe I matter to at least a few other people, and that my life has meaning, even if I have to create it.
Fight Club was definitely an interesting book. I’m not sure I am eager to read more by the author, but I am glad I read this one.
***
Weird bonus fact: one of our otherbook club’s members works at a local library, and she says that Palahniuk’s books are the most stolen from the library. Tyler Durden would probably approve, I guess. But seriously? It’s not like they are that difficult to buy.
No comments:
Post a Comment