Fight Club: A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

We understand that the first rule of Fight Club is to not talk about Fight Club, but it’s too good not to talk about. If ever there was a book that defined Chuck Palahniuk in all of his unhinged brilliance, this is it. A gritty, grimy, oft-disturbing story that still manages to effectively explore mental health and masculinity.

Chuck Palahniuk's startling and outrageous debut novel, basis of the hit movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.

THE FIRST RULE about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.

Every weekend, in the basements and parking lots of bars across the country, young men with whitecollar jobs and failed lives take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded just as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter, and dark, anarchic genius, and it's only the beginning of his plans for violent revenge on an empty consumer-culture world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393039764
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/17/1996
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	73,520
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Chuck Palahniuk is the best-selling author of more than eighteen fictional works, including Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant, Pygmy, Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You and The Invention of Sound. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Hometown:

Portland, Oregon

Date of Birth:

February 21, 1962

Place of Birth:

Pasco, Washington

Education:

B.A. in journalism, University of Oregon, 1986

Website:

http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net

What People are Saying About This

Thom Jones

Even I can't write this well.

Robert Stone

A powerful, dark, original novel . . . a memorable debut by an important new writer.

Editorial Reviews

"Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing."

Washington Post Book World

"A powerful, dark, original novel . . . a memorable debut by an important new writer."

Robert Stone

"An astonishing debut . . . Fight Club is a dark, unsettling, and nerve-chafing satire."

Seattle Times

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Designer soap made of human fat, an anarchist's cookbook of volatile recipes, and the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it — Chuck Palahniuk's outrageous, darkly comic first novel is a brutal reminder that we each have a part to play in the apocalypse.

Plagued with insomnia due to the cynical nature of his job (he investigates accidents for a carmaker in order to assess the cost-effectiveness of a recall), Fight Club's nameless narrator spends his evenings attending support groups for the terminally ill. Masquerading as a sufferer of various cancers, or as a victim of brain parasites, he discovers that losing all hope bestows a sense of freedom; Facing death, he feels more alive than ever before, and sleeps like a baby. Until Marla Singer — also a shamming support group groupie — ruins everything.

Marla not only invades his therapy sessions, but gradually insinuates herself into his private life as well, taking up with his housemate, the mysterious Tyler Durden. Tyler, a self-styled "minimum wage despoiler," works a succession of night jobs, taking perverse glee in sabotaging and blackmailing his employers. When, on a whim, the narrator and Tyler take turns punching out their frustrations on each other at a local bar, Fight Club is born.

"The first rule about fight club is that you don't talk about fight club."

Soon the disaffected drones of industry are spending their off hours beating each other to bloody pulp. After a night in Fight Club, they go back to their jobs bruised and battered, but with the liberating sense that they can handle anything. But FightClubis only the first stage of Tyler's anarchic master plan; Soon random acts of unkindness proliferate as mayhem and organized chaos spread across the country, culminating in a schizophrenic showdown on top of the world's tallest building.

Featuring soap made from human fat, waiters at high-class restaurants who do unmentionable things to soup and an underground organization dedicated to inflicting a violent anarchy upon the land, Palahniuk's apocalyptic first novel is clearly not for the faint of heart. The unnamed (and extremely unreliable) narrator, who makes his living investigating accidents for a car company in order to assess their liability, is combating insomnia and a general sense of anomie by attending a steady series of support-group meetings for the grievously ill, at one of which (testicular cancer) he meets a young woman named Marla. She and the narrator get into a love triangle of sorts with Tyler Durden, a mysterious and gleefully destructive young man with whom the narrator starts a fight club, a secret society that offers young professionals the chance to beat one another to a bloody pulp. Mayhem ensues, beginning with the narrator's condo exploding and culminating with a terrorist attack on the world's tallest building. Writing in an ironic deadpan and including something to offend everyone, Palahniuk is a risky writer who takes chances galore, especially with a particularly bizarre plot twist he throws in late in the book. Caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling, Palahniuk's utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The 2008 audio edition of Palahniuk's ground-breaking 1996 novel provides a timely opportunity to contemplate the direction of Generation X and the wider, popular culture over the past dozen years. The white, male, 20-something angst of the story's unnamed protagonist and his mysterious partner in crime, Tyler Durden, may now sometimes seem like slightly dated grunge rock. Also, the themes of domestic terrorism and insurrection certainly play differently in a post-September 11 world. Yet Palahniuk's power to provoke our collective sacred cows remains undeniable. The narrative-with its delusional twists and turns-presents serious challenges on audio. James Colby cleverly plays deadpan cool through much of the early plot exposition so that the chaos that eventually takes hold becomes all the more eerie and surreal. He pulls off the convoluted climactic revelations with emotional authenticity. The listening experience may be too jarring for general audiences merely hoping for a commute diversion. However, the release offers today's crop of young urban hipsters an opportunity to connect with the voices of a previous decade. A W.W. Norton paperback (Reviews, June 3, 1996). (July)

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Publishers Weekly

In the world of Fight Club, healthy young people go to meetings of cancer support groups because only there can they find human warmth and compassion. It's a world where young men gather in the basements of bars to fight strangers "just as long as they have to." And it's a world where "nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual." Messianic nihilist Tyler Durden is the inventor of Fight Club. Soon thousands of young men across the country are reporting to their work cubes with flattened noses, blackened eyes, and shattered teeth, looking forward to their next bare-knuckle maiming. The oracular, increasingly mysterious Durden then begins to harness the despair, alienation, and violence he sees so clearly into complete anarchy. Every generation frightens and unnerves its parents, and Palahniuk's first novel is gen X's most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities. This is a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings. It's also a powerful, and possibly brilliant, first novel.

Thomas Gaughan

Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level—in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written.

Palahniuk's insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world—he's a "guerilla terrorist of the service industry." "Project Mayhem" seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers' soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club—a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden's bigger scheme: a supersecret strike group to carry out his wilder ideas. Durden finances his scheme with a soap-making business that secretly steals its main ingredient—the fat sucked from liposuction. Durden's cultlike groups spread like wildfire, his followers recognizable by their open wounds and scars. Seeking oblivion and self-destruction, the leader preaches anarchist fundamentalism: "Losing all hope was freedom," and "Everything is falling apart"—all of which is just his desperate attempt to get God's attention. As the narrator begins to reject Durden's revolution, he starts to realize that the legendary lunatic is just himself, or the part of himself that takes over when he falls asleep. Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs.

This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self- described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because it's so compelling.

Kirkus Reviews

"Irresistible…As with chocolate or pornography, you struggle to savor it slowly, yet feel compelled to zip through its smart, atomic, nightmarish world. A visionary novel of beautiful violence and creepy intensity."

Scott Heim

"Amazing and artful disturbance. Fight Club is for everybody who thinks and loves the fine American language."

Barry Hannah

"A ferocious, taut, mesmerizing novel whose economical stylishness and rigorous, perverse philosophical underpinnings put one in mind of Camus’ The Stranger and J. G. Ballard’s Crash."

Dennis Cooper

"A noir fable with a punch…A genuine, two-fisted talent."

Katherine Dunn

"Fight Club is hot. It’s great. Even I can’t write this well."

Thom Jones

"A volatile, brilliantly creepy satire."

Washington Post