Elle (ellexamines)'s Reviews > Fight Club

I did not dislike this book because I did not understand this book. I disliked this book because I have fundamental ideological disagreements with this book.

I'm sure we all know this quote:

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying, organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.

...I think this is just a really dumb way of looking at the world. The complaints about consumerism are one thing, even though they all sound like this SNL skit. But here’s the thing: this book is woefully and irredeemably nihilistic and I am emphatically not a nihilist.

I’m aware this sounds like an obvious statement, but the narrator of this book needs to get a fucking hobby. No, really. Fight Club is that one weird nihilistic asshole who thinks the apocalypse is coming because consumerism, or political correctness, or something, he’s not quite sure what, and also he makes fun of everyone for having joy in their life.

Here's why this bothers me: I’m sure you’re all aware that’s a terrible way of looking at life, but I think we do, genuinely, as a society, romanticize an idea of giving up and no longer caring. I don’t hold with that. Yes, we all have dumb corporate jobs and no meaning in our lives. If you don’t have meaning in your life, go out and fucking find some. Love, or family, or a damn puppy, as the narrator so sarcastically intones:

My tiny life. My little shit job. My Swedish furniture. I never, no, never told anyone this, but before I met Tyler, I was planning to buy a dog and name it “Entourage.”
This is how bad your life can get.

Like… he’s getting a dog and naming it a dumb name, like you do with a dog because it’s a goddamn dog and it makes you happy. Why is that so stupid?

I think the reason this bothers me is I know why buying a dog to be happy is stupid, and I choose to ignore it. Looking at the world through a nihilistic eye will never make the world better.

There’s another dynamic at play here - the new commonality of this language. nihilist language is the only rhetoric we hear about millenials right now? I mean, I’m sure this was a revolutionary idea twenty years ago, that none of us are special and consumerism is killing America so therefore, posessions are bad, and our current generation is awful for blah blah blah reasons. That is currently the belief of about 80% of older Americans about our generation. This book made widespread the use of term “special snowflakes” as a derogatory term (look it up - it’s true.) The idea that it is weak to care about things, weak to care about other people, or even weak to love your dog - it’s widespread. It’s not a weird deviation from social norms. Constant nihilism is a social norm; this book is thus not particularly transgressive.

I liked what user Ruzmari said here:

The 1990s finds us again at a crossroads where literature is concerned, with the rise of Oprah's book club and the whole genre of "chick lit" on the one hand (in many cases just "silly novels by lady novelists" revivified), and a sort of phallic-anxiety heavy-on-the-masculine literature on the other. This second group, I like to call "guy crap."

The thesis being “life is meaningless” does not make this any deeper or any less cliche and done-before.

(Oh, and since I’ve brought up the whole snowflake thing - weirdly enough, this book has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness, but it does talk about how the generation before my own was raised to believe they’d be everything. It’s so funny to me that this led to the entire criticism of “millenial snowflake” culture. People who were adults in ‘96? Isn’t that ten years off?)

And listen, to the inevitable person who is going to say I just didn't get it: I really love unreliable and biased narrators. I am also not convinced this narrator, though certainly unreliable, is meant to be disagreed with. I mean, seriously, after all of that people-are-trash, our-generation-is-terrible bs for 200 pages, this is the payoff we get:

“We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.”

...this is still nihilistic? Actually, on that topic, here is a compilation of fake-deep, not-that-funny, ideologically-shitty quotes from this book:

“Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.”
“Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.”

Yeah, whatever.

I mean, I think the best things I got out of this book was a greater appreciation for the possibility of movie superiority over books and for how fucking annoying 2000s nihilism was. And from the movie, I got 1) new pop culture references that I actually understand now, 2) an interesting critique of toxic masculinity, rather than whatever this was, and 3) good acting performances. I'll just end with this quote:

I have been told that I do not "get" you. That I do not understand the basics of a male love story, a male writer who understands the male psyche and who can convey what it really feels like to be, a male. Perhaps this is the core of my issue, being a hapless female who fails at trends. Either way, I have friends that adore you and for that reason only I will not completely denounce you on the internets. Keep appealing to your trendy fan base and keep raking in the dough. Maybe someday I will swallow my pride and appeal to the masses just like you. And James Patterson.-Source

Bye, Chuck.

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