by Lee Cross.                                                       

So my idea for ‘Investigates…’ this week was to write a blog borrowing (…ok, stealing) from Chuck Palahniuk’s amazing Fight Club.

The idea was simple, ‘I’ll take the rules from Fight Club and spin them in such a way as to suggest the formation of an underground book club! – Brilliant!’

But I’m not going to do that now because it’s crap. Not the idea of the underground book club (obviously! like, let’s totally do that!) but “borrowing the rules.”

In case you’ve had your head buried in a sandbox for the last 20 years, the rules are as follows:

“Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The Second rule of Fight is: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!”

Have you read Fight Club? Seriously, HAVE YOU READ FIGHT CLUB? I was hooked right there, those few sentences, “the rules,” from that moment on I knew ‘Fight Club’ was a book I was going to tell my friends about! “You DO NOT talk about Fight Club!”…Holy Pants! This was a book I was going to bore strangers about!

Beyond the words, “Marla Singer – Respect – Legend,” I’m really not confident I can say anything more about the novel and still do it justice, so instead I’ll let the man speak for himself:

• “If you could be either God’s worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?
• “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”
• “I am Jack’s smirking revenge”.

[Chuck Palahniuk – Fight Club.] I could happily quote lines from it all day and the only reason I haven’t is because I’m worried about spoiling the whole thing for the people recently liberated from their sandboxes.

Fight Club’s hook might be those first two incredible rules, as Tyler Durden reads aloud in the basement of sleazy dive bar, but there is so much more to it than just a highlight reel. It’s a book that makes you feel about the world. It’s a book that makes you think about yourself.

Oh, yes – thinking about myself – the book club… Yeah, I’ve abandoned the idea of writing about forming one based around ‘the rules’ (although Rule 3…‘we stop reading when someone yells “stop”, or goes limp, or taps out’… seems like a bloody good idea for a reading group).

Chuck Palahniuk is going to have to suffer his whole life hearing pale imitations/recreations of his greatest idea.

Quite honestly my only original thought in trying to convert the rules of Fight Club for my own purposes, is REALIZING that there is nothing original in trying to convert them for my own purposes.

Like I said, it’s crap.