Fight Club: A Novel
Fight Club: A Novel
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Publisher's Hardcover ©1996--
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W. W. Norton
Annotation: In a confusing world poised on the brink of mayhem, Tyler Durden, a projectionist, waiter, and anarchic genius, comes up with an idea to create clubs in which young men can escape their humdrum existence and prove themselves in barehanded fights.
Genre: [Science fiction]
 
Reviews: 2
Catalog Number: #5429119
Format: Publisher's Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Copyright Date: 1996
Edition Date: 1996 Release Date: 08/17/96
Pages: 207 pages
ISBN: 0-393-03976-5
ISBN 13: 978-0-393-03976-4
Dewey: Fic
LCCN: 95047591
Dimensions: 22 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
ALA Booklist (Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 1996)

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. (Reviewed July 1996)

Kirkus Reviews

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,'' andEverything 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. (First serial to Story)"

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ALA Booklist (Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 1996)
Kirkus Reviews
Reading Level: 9.0
Interest Level: 9+

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.


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