Book 2 - Review #3

Fight Club is certainly not limited to only a single genre. It’s a rare example of a piece of media that manages to balance several distinct genres, while ensuring that one side doesn’t tip too far. For fans of thriller novels, there are plenty of sequences where the reader is always kept on the edge of their seat in anticipation of what happens next. We’re initially introduced to the fragility of characters when Bob dies. He had been established as a relatively important character earlier in the novel, and is killed off without his death even being described; he simply “dies”, and we never feel like Marla or the protagonist are above death as a result. When the protagonist is trapped in a car with a deranged follower behind the wheel, forcing him to churn out concise and swift answers to his questions, no otherworldly force is keeping either of them safe as he deliberately places himself in danger by swerving in front of cars to make a point, and these scenes and more real and suspenseful because of this.

The drama and dark comedy of the novel go hand-in-hand. The relationship between Marla and the protagonist and how it clashes with her relationship with Tyler is something that shines particularly brightly. Drama is developed through typically hostile interaction between characters, and dark humor is developed generally through the narration of the protagonist, and only occasionally through sequences that are fundamentally humorous by nature, such as the scene involving Tyler using Marla’s mother’s fat as an ingredient in his soap, or when Tyler and the protagonist urinate in the soup of the rich. It’s admirable how capable that Palahniuk is to blend deadly seriousness with gallows humor, and to produce something entertaining out of it. Scenes where the protagonist, as he rides a downward spiral to the epitome of the word “depraved”, injects a few quips into a conversation with a woman who has recently tried to overdose on prescription pills, are what sets Fight Club apart from other modern novels that adhere to a strict genre or subgenre.