Nina read and liked ruzmarì's review of Fight Club:

"Mary Ann Evans, in the 1850s, spoke out against the notion that "lady novelists" were capable of producing only "silly novels" - precious, sentimental, illogical and improbable claptrap - while men produced high literature. She c...more Mary Ann Evans, in the 1850s, spoke out against the notion that "lady novelists" were capable of producing only "silly novels" - precious, sentimental, illogical and improbable claptrap - while men produced high literature. She changed her name to George Eliot and wrote as a "gender neutral" narrator, highly educated and worldly, and mostly transparent (i.e., not silly).

The 1990s finds us again at a crossroads where literature is concerned, with the rise of Oprah's book club and the whole genre of "chick lit" on the one hand (in many cases just "silly novels by lady novelists" revivified), and a sort of phallic-anxiety heavy-on-the-masculine literature on the other. This second group, I like to call "guy crap." It's not a bad label ; there's some good stuff in guy crap, just like there is on Oprah's book list. Guy crap includes genre fiction (Dennis Lehane, Jonathan Lethem), as well as insistent intellectualism (David Foster Wallace, Martin Amis, Paul Auster) ... and, of course, the violent, psych-you-out, latter-day-Robbe-Grillet disturbances of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Some of these are done well, and some of them are just as silly as the lady novelists' claptrap.

Fight Club is one of those novels where the unrelenting GUY-ness of narrator and storyline begins as an intriguing challenge and ends up fatiguing and gimmicky. In case there's anyone out here who hasn't either read the book or seen the movie, I won't spoil anything, I promise. It's a book about a bunch of young men, frustrated in their low-on-the-ladder white-collar day jobs and the emptiness of modern society, who meet routinely to pound each other close to death and plot destruction on a less personal scale. The novel is Palahniuk's testament to the counter-culture of yuppiedom, a world in which squalor and presentability, upward mobility and civil disobedience, live side by side and take each other's measure daily. Palahniuk asks pointed questions about the world we live in, and his prose is the strength of this novel - he keeps you interested, even when you realize how much you hate what he's saying.

And you should hate what Palahniuk is saying. Because at the heart of the novel sits a troubled foundation. It's not the acts of (juvenile, for the most part) sociopathy, or even the ultimate real pathology the characters fall into. What you should hate as (or after) you read is the book's central three-part idea, that (a) the disaffected youth of the video-game generation really do hold the truth about society ; (b) society in turn is nothing but a reflection of the video-game generation's disaffected world-view ; and (c) once a disaffected youth of the video-game generation, always a disaffected youth of the video-game generation - there is no improvement, there is no connection, there is no healing, there is no "out," because boys never grow up. Even the support-group conceit that could represent the narrator's redemptive attempt at relation turns out to be just a device, as egotistical for the character as it is ultimately for the storyline. Relation between people doesn't exist, not really : you don't talk about fight club. We're all just wandering bruised through the wasted LCD landscape, staking out our independence like rebel teenagers, promising to blow up whatever we disagree with.

Palahniuk has said he wrote this book as a kind of provocation, to get back at a publisher for turning down his earlier manuscript. I wonder if he peed in the publisher's soup, too : it wouldn't altogether surprise me.(less) "