Jim Uhls

Fight Club, like Catcher in the Rye, may be one of those books that is best appreciated by younger readers. I bought the novel nearly twenty years ago, after seeing the movie, eager to further explore themes of anger, alienation, violence, and nihilism. Today, as a middle aged man, I appreciated the book's clever language, sick humor, and intellectual critiques, but abhorred the characters and their actions (as indeed a reader is meant to). Fight Club doesn't so much extol violence as it devastatingly critiques society's shallow consumerism, dead end jobs, dysfunctional broken families, and self-help cultures. Among other things its a dsytopian vision of how religions and cults bubble up from the ugly underbelly of the disenfranchised (I believe it's no coincidence that the spelling of Tyler Durden and Jesus Christ mirror one another). And while this short two hundred page novel left me as physically exhausted as its "nameless" insomniac narrator, its pre-apocalyptic vision of an America on the decline eerily foreshadows the destructive impulses of a post-911 and angry Trumpian world.… (mere)