Fighting Words

Enjoyed reading Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Interesting to note that in the afterword to the edition I was reading the writer explains that the novel began as a short story. In many ways that's what the novel felt like, a very intense tale expanded as far as it might reasonably go. It's remarkable that Palahniuk maintains the intensity for the length he does - it didn't flag at all for me, though I suspect another twenty pages would have been twenty too many.

American writers since the war seem to me to do this energy thing better than anyone else. There's an element of performance, possibly posturing, about this kind of novel that's engaging yet exhausting. I suppose it's related to the extraordinary sense of the US as something larger than life in itself. And I can't think of any other national literature that's quite so obsessed with violence in itself. (Is this all down to Hemingway?)

A bit odd that anyone might take this stuff seriously as a comment on the world, though. Think of how Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Dickens might skewer the Tyler Durdens of the world.