🥒 reviewed Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
No One Should Talk About Fight Club. Ever.
4 stars
Yes the big plot twist is a groundbreaking example of its kind and yes to a degree it was thought-provoking, if not bizarre enough to hold one's attention. It's not Palahniuk's best but it's not his worst either. Having watched the movie before reading the book (I know, I know), details of both get mixed with the other. I think they're fairly similar in quality though, sharing much of the same strengths and flaws.
At its worst, Fight Club is a lot of run-on sentences about self-centred (mostly white, mostly upper-middle-class) douchebags externalising their frustration with America's late 1990s-era cubicle economy by getting into elaborate and ritualised street rights. Any substantial, counter-cultural, or satirical message it had about queerness, capitalism, and patriarchy is drowned out by the shock value of its violence. Unsurprisingly, this satirical reading of Fight Club is too subtle for the men in the audience who see …
Yes the big plot twist is a groundbreaking example of its kind and yes to a degree it was thought-provoking, if not bizarre enough to hold one's attention. It's not Palahniuk's best but it's not his worst either. Having watched the movie before reading the book (I know, I know), details of both get mixed with the other. I think they're fairly similar in quality though, sharing much of the same strengths and flaws.
At its worst, Fight Club is a lot of run-on sentences about self-centred (mostly white, mostly upper-middle-class) douchebags externalising their frustration with America's late 1990s-era cubicle economy by getting into elaborate and ritualised street rights. Any substantial, counter-cultural, or satirical message it had about queerness, capitalism, and patriarchy is drowned out by the shock value of its violence. Unsurprisingly, this satirical reading of Fight Club is too subtle for the men in the audience who see themselves in the men in the ring. It is, most certainly, a product of its irony-pilled time.