Fight Club packs a lot into a very short read. It critiques class and masculinity in America. It looks at mental illness in the forms of depression, insomnia, and the big one - dissociative identity disorder. It offers a number of love stories - the romances between the unnamed narrator (who sometimes refers to himself as Jack’s [insert body part here]) and Tyler Durden, Marla and Tyler Durden, and the narrator and Marla. It also offers its own philosophy – a combination of minimalism and barbarism – that is used to wage war against consumerism, the excesses of Capitalism, and the feminisation/oppression of men.
It is full of symbolism, some clearer than others – the soap – a cleansing of one’s past, but also a warning against blind consumerism (rich women buying back the fat they paid to have removed). Insomnia, dead phone lines, the giant shadow shaped like a hand on the beach, the birthmark that might have been cancer, Tyler’s kiss, Bob’s breasts, urine in soup, teeth in the earth, an apartment like a filing cabinet and a house like a wet living organism.
In contrast to the film, the narrator’s mental state and the question of Tyler Durden’s existence are constantly at the forefront of the book. In fact, if it takes you to the end of the book to figure out that Tyler is an aspect of the narrator, then you haven’t been paying attention.
The narration is mostly written in first person with shifts to second person at times. Often the prose reads like a stream of consciousness. Both of these features make for a sometimes challenging read, but they illustrate the mental state of the narrator perfectly and, in this reviewer’s opinion, are strengths rather than weaknesses.
It isn’t a perfect novel, but it’s damn close. 4.5/5 stars.
There are a couple of themes in the book of particular interest to me. I’ll say a bit more about these.
1) Fight Club and the Crisis of Masculinity
The terms toxic-masculinity (on the feminist side) and feminization (on the men’s rights side) are in common use in the twenty-first century. Fight Club describes a generation of men who have grown up without fathers and their struggle to discover what masculinity means. The book considers various forms of masculinity, some positive and others less so.
a) The Fighter - “Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.” Certainly the idea that men find their true nature when fighting each other could be considered abhorrent to modern sensibilities. Yet this is how Tyler Durden’s Fight Clubs begin, enlightenment through acts of violence. But the violence is carefully structured by the rules of Fight Club so that it never spirals out of control. The fighters in Fight Club can decide when they have had enough and their withdrawal of consent is always respected. “Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.” In this way Fight Club is a safe space. The camaraderie between members of Fight Club and the associated projects reminds me of the legends of Sparta. In fact there are overlaps between the physical contact between men at the testicular cancer support group and at Fight Club and in many ways the same people get the same benefits from both. However, when Project Assault grows out of Fight Club the violence becomes one-sided, dangerous and unpredictable.
b) The Father – We get a clear idea from the narrator that the greatest thing a man can be is a father, yet too many throw that away. Tyler Durden compares a father to God, yet neither he nor the narrator (okay same person with different histories) knew their fathers. “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?” It is telling that the crisis modern men face is tied more directly to fatherless families in Fight Club than to any other issue. The relationship between the narrator and Tyler Durden may begin with a physical attraction, but it quickly becomes a student-teacher/father-son bond with Durden guiding the narrator into manhood.
c) The Lover – Sex is relatively unimportant in Fight Club. There is Marla, but it seems to be her bottom-hitting brokenness that most attracts Tyler Durden. However, the non-sexual relationships between the men are the ones that are lovingly described. “I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.” In modern parlance – it’s a bromance, even though Chuck Palahniuk describes the book as a love story between the narrator and Marla.
d) Emotionally Stunted – The male/male relationships in Fight Club are far from emotionless. The narrator may succeed in intimidating his boss, but he admits to liking the man. Bob, with his large breasts, behaves like a maternal figure, holding and comforting the narrator while displaying nothing but strength. When the narrator first encounters Tyler on the beach the description is homoerotic, only later does that relationship become paternal. Fight Club lets its male characters display a wide spectrum of emotions, in fact that traditionally masculine emotion - anger is the only one that rarely gets space on the page and most of the anger seems to come from Marla.
2) Anarchism in Fight Club
There are hints of Anarchism in Fight Club, but it is not an anarchist group. Firstly it has a single leader – Tyler Durden, and his soldiers, or “space monkeys” follow his every instruction without question. The group is without doubt a dictatorship, a proto-fascist terror cell. Projects Mayhem and Assault are designed to disrupt the status quo but only in small ways, allowing the group and in particular its leader to enjoy moments of feeling powerful, or provoking fresh insight into people’s realities in the way a disturbing art exhibit might. It doesn’t actively seek to overthrow government or achieve equality for all. They are a bunch of pranksters who also blow up buildings and make soap out of rich women’s fat.
Even so, the book is quite clear about where power really lies in society, and that in itself is revolutionary -
“Remember this. 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 are 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. So don't fuck with us.”