Fight Club ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Here is another author that presents a Queer view of the world. I have added comments to the synopsis in bold.


From Publishers Weekly
Featuring soap made from human fat, waiters at high-class restaurants who do unmentionable things to soup and an underground organization dedicated to inflicting a violent anarchy upon the land, Palahniuk's apocalyptic (The men in this novel are embittered by a world they see as "run by men raised by women") first novel is clearly not for the faint of heart. The unnamed (and extremely unreliable) narrator, who makes his living investigating accidents for a car company in order to assess their liability, is combating insomnia and a general sense of anomie by attending a steady series of support-group meetings for the grievously ill, at one of which (testicular cancer) he meets a young woman named Marla. She and the narrator get into a love triangle of sorts with Tyler Durden, a mysterious and gleefully destructive young man with whom the narrator starts a fight club, a secret society that offers young professionals the chance to beat one another to a bloody pulp. Mayhem ensues, beginning with the narrator's condo exploding and culminating with a terrorist attack on the world's tallest building. Writing in an ironic deadpan and including something to offend everyone, Palahniuk is a risky writer who takes chances galore, especially with a particularly bizarre plot twist he throws in late in the book. Caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling, Palahniuk's utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice.

This is the perfect Chuck Palanuik novel. Most of his novels deal with distruction of an element of popular culture; magazines, models, porn. But this is queer because of it's look at the depression of the modern man. I don't think that in this age men are seen as depressed at all, just because of all of the resources that are out there for their success. But we don't realize that so many men can find themselves in similar situations to Tyler Durden.