Fight Club

Sween gave Fight Club a post two and a half years back, and his main takeaway was that the book was virtually identical to the movie, to the point where reading the novel gave him absolutely nothing that the movie didn't. He's absolutely right - the film was an incredibly faithful adaptation to the point where the book itself read like a mostly-finished version of the screenplay, and there really isn't much to take from here that wasn't provided by the movie. In fact, the biggest difference between the book and the movie was the ending, and honestly, the movie wins on that front hands down.

But I still want to talk about Fight Club. (Seriously, no pun intended.)

The movie is fifteen years old now and the book is closing in on twenty. And while both are noticeably dated in a few ways - Project Mayhem's domestic terrorism seems a lot less exotic and freeing on this side of 9/11 - some of the book's points about working class dissatisfaction jibe nicely with the recent backlash against Wall Street and the one percent. Then again, the struggle of the bourgeoisie and class warfare are fairly timeless themes, so maybe that's a nonstarter. And come to think of it, the rejection of consumerism present in the novel (and film) isn't an entirely original premise, either. And what's the deal with the narrator's schizophrenia-via-insomnia? That doesn't even seem like a plausible medical condition. Ultimately, there are a lot of cool ideas in Fight Club, but I've got to agree with Sween's hot take: the story isn't as great as the sum of its parts. A lot of motifs are suggested and implied during a lot of different scenes. There's a nihilistic longing for death; there's the idea of solace in masochism; there's human bonding through shared suffering at all those support groups. But it doesn't all tie together into one cohesive point at any point in the 200 pages or 2:20 runtime. This is still one of my all time favorite movies, and it was quite an enjoyable book to read, but reading it also opened my eyes to how much of a smoke and mirror show this hodgepodge of mostly-thought-out ideas and witty, quotable lines really was. Ultimately, this is some strong and apt criticism of society, like so many other great books, but it wasn't much else. It may have made for one of the decade's best and most popular films, but as a literary work, the book was merely "good." And that's fine with me! I'd read Palahniuk again any time.