So for some reason this week I’ve been in the mood to reread the novel Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. You might have seen the film starring Brad Pitt and Ed Norton a few years ago. It wasn’t a bad adaptation, but the book was better (and when isn’t it?); I remember reading it last about ten years ago, kind of getting it on a weird-edgy level, and putting it up on my bookshelf to collect dust for a decade.

My rereading interest bubbled up this week, only to be met by a disturbing realization: I apparently left my copy in Florida. I couldn’t believe it. Let me get this straight.. I packed Taking Lives and I left FIGHT CLUB? That hardly makes sense. But so it was. So we did an overdue trip to our local Barnes and Noble and picked up, among other things, a new copy.

It’s funny how I never fully appreciated this book for what it was until I got to almost forty. Maybe a few of you have read it. I’m guessing more have seen the film from a few years ago, with Brad Pitt and Ed Norton; the film was good, the book much better.

Fight Club tells the story of an unnamed protagonist with chronic insomnia. Months have passed and he’s hardly slept. It’s the mid-nineties, he’s in his mid-twenties, working for a big company in his shirt and tie and busily stocking his yuppie condo with all the socially acceptable accessories and he’s thoroughly unable to sleep. One night he decides to go crash a cancer support group, pretending that he’s dying, and so discovers why he can’t sleep: he feels no emotional connection to his life. No real relationships, nothing he can really trust or take comfort in. So every night he makes up a new name, picks a new disease, and finds a new reason to cry on the shoulder of the dying. He cries, and then he sleeps.

Along the way he meets a girl named Marla Singer who is doing the same thing, for much the same reasons. Then he meets Tyler Durden, a night shift movie projectionist who leads them down an anarchistic road of intentional self-destruction – or towards freedom, depending on your point of view – through the creation of an underground boxing club (the “Fight Club” of the title). The ambiguous distinction between existential freedom and the immolation of self is an important theme of the story; depending on your perspective, the story is (as an old friend of mine once said) either a tragedy or a fairy tale.

When I first read Fight Club, I appreciated it only as a well-written and very dark, edgy story about existential urban angst and anticommercialism. Now, ten years and a lot of recent conversations later, I’m seeing it as a satirical generational novel. From the perspective of a married man now approaching forty – the age and time portrayed in the novel now living mainly in memory – I appreciate that satire more. And I find myself thinking that this is a novel that more people should read.

Us Gen-X’ers are a strange, cynical bunch. Our parents watched a man walk on the moon; we watched a space shuttle explode on live TV, in our classrooms, with a teacher on board. Our parents once knew an honest government; we were born in Watergate and raised on a steady diet of Iran-Contra and Monica Lewinsky. Our parents had the local community church; we had the abuses of megachurches and televangelist assholes like Benny Hinn and Jimmy Swaggart. We were the first real generation of latchkey kids and divorce. Fiercely independent, untrusting, repeatedly burned, we’re now a bunch of adults trying to find our way as spouses and parents.

We’re not slackers anymore. Now we’re a target market, and a key economic demographic.. the very fate that history and generational dynamics have created us to resent most. The bitterness and anger have faded and dulled, replaced with a pragmatic “believe it when we see it” approach to life. We’re getting older, but we are still slaves to our nature. And for many of us, we’re still searching for what we sought fifteen years ago: an authentic, genuine emotional connection to life that isn’t intended to be conveniently abandoned, carelessly exploited, or cynically repackaged and sold as a well-marketed consumer product. We don’t expect to find it, and when we do, we don’t spend much time trusting it. That’s simply who many of us are, and Palahniuk captured it so well in his novel (particularly with subtly jabbing moments like the narrator’s early lament that he had a house full of condiments but no food).

I’m also reading Palahniuk’s 2004 collection of essays, Stranger Than Fiction. In one essay he writes about making this same discovery himself, that he had unintentionally written a generational novel; at the time, he thought he was just writing a book about him and his friends and things that they did in the mid-nineties. I’m enjoying reading these two books side by side, finding myself relating to the contrasting perspective differences.

Also been working my way through Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”, his memoir of living in Paris in the 1920’s as part of the cynical and distant “lost generation” that fought in the First World War. Another book more people should read. There are a lot of similarities between these two generations.

I wonder how things will unfold as our age group continues to walk the path from young upstarts to target markets, to the financial and political bases that organizations depend on, and finally to guiding elders. How a generation trained to not expect a future deals with the future. I’m sure that it will be an interesting trip.