"A powerful, dark, original novel . . . a memorable debut by an important new writer."
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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.
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.
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.
"An astonishing debut…Fight Club is a dark, unsettling, and nerve-chafing satire."— Seattle Times
"A volatile, brilliantly creepy satire."— Washington Post
"A powerful, dark, original novel. This is a memorable debut by an important writer."— Robert Stone
"Fight Club is hot. It’s great. Even I can’t write this well."— Thom Jones
"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
"A noir fable with a punch…A genuine, two-fisted talent."— Katherine Dunn
"Amazing and artful disturbance. Fight Club is for everybody who thinks and loves the fine American language."— Barry Hannah
"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
"Palahniuk’s utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice."— Publishers Weekly
"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
1997 Oregon Book Award, Winner
