An Army Of One
Fight Club; Choke; Lullaby
By Chuck Palahnuik
by Madeleine Perry

A lot of people in college spend most of their time trying to find out why what they’re reading really means something else. It’s true: just think about it. Plato's world is not the real world; it is the world of shadows on the wall. His world is the world of pure forms: where horses and eggplants are perfect models of what horses and eggplants should be -- but are not. All the horses and eggplants in our world (our sick, phony, pseudo-world, our world where nothing is real) are just copies of the real thing. I’m not kidding, that’s what he says.

And Shakespeare? Don't even tell me about Shakespeare. I am sure that he knew what he meant, but do we know? Romeo and Juliet (we are told) is not a love story at all; it is a story about lovers in love with death, not with each other, (sorry, you were wrong about that -- but complain to your high school teachers, not me). And it’s true -- Juliet even says so. You can look it up. As for the sciences, let me see. Light is a line in space. Or is it. I thought it was a wave. Which is it?

Both!!

It was to flee this world of interpretation that I did what every student does but cannot and will not admit: I retreated from the field. I fled in hasty fear. I crashed with a carton of orange juice, a silenced television, a half-cracked window, a carton of cigarettes, and a locked door. Oh yes, and two of the best books I have read in a long time, both by Chuck Palahnuik. Palahnuik (not exactly a household name) is the author of Fight Club, the bestselling book that became a movie by the same name. The movie sent gurgling girls to the theatre to check out the six pack chests of Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.

I’ll be succinct: Fight Club (book and movie) did not lend itself to deep interpretation (which is what I, in my escape pod, prayed for) but was sound entertainment. Palahnuik is a good writer. No -- a very, very good writer -- and he has a way of deflecting emotion, so that it is only by the tail end of his project that you find yourself out of breath, or weeping, or prepared finally to head back to class. The real world is, I think, much less edgy than his books, less violent, certainly less entertaining.

Yeah, yeah, okay -- so (as Shakespeare says) less art and more matter. What Palahnuik writes about are stories that we know could never really happen: two men -- one who is addicted to therapy groups and another who makes and sells soap -- taking over the world one city at a time through a violent group they so aptly name Fight Club; a man who gets checks in the mail from those who saved his life while he faked choking on food (Choke). In his Lullaby, a poem that, when read or thought, kills others. Fantasies all, except that when read purely for escape, as entertainment, as something like a movie (to be looked at more than read), they are frighteningly real.

"I don’t need such escapism," a friend of mine said when I told him about Fight Club. "To escape you need entertainment; you need to lose yourself. Fight Club? It’s too violent." He turned away then (we were at a bar, he was talking to me and watching the news) and changed the subject -- his girlfriend no longer loved him, his parents didn’t understand him, the world was a mess. An advertisement on CNN caught his eye: "Hey I could do that," he said. "I could be an army of one."

You, too, could be an army of one. But, as Palahnuik puts it in Choke, "you’re not getting any younger." So be the typical college student and put down your studies for a moment. Then, turn into the college student that no one wants to admit they have ever been: lock yourself in your room, turn off your telephone, crack open a box of doughnuts, and read some Palahnuik. It may not be the cigarettes hanging artistically between Brad Pitt’s lips, or Edward Norton’s hairless and oh-so attractive body (sigh...), but I can guarantee you will read something you could have never predicted.