Everything but Fight Club is Illuminated

I just sat down at a coffee shop with a couple of new books, and I made a conscious effort to place one book on top of the other.

Everything is Illuminated (2002), by Jonathan Safran Foer, is on top because it looks more like a serious book than the book I covered up, Fight Club (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk. I guess I don't want to be seen on a late Friday afternoon in a coffee shop, alone with a new copy of Fight Club. Not only is that novel less "literary" than Foer's, it's also more likely to suggest to strangers that I am strange, or at least that I'm more receptive to apocalyptic fantasies than I actually am.

The reason I'm carrying these novels around is because I have honors students who are writing about them. One student is writing about Palahniuk and social criticism in the contemporary American novel. This project really interests me. I'm a big novel-as-social-criticism guy. And I missed the boat on Palahniuk. In 1996, I was wading through the Western canon. I actually had little patience for "popular" fiction back then. I even hated Jack Kerouac (a writer who's since become very important to me); he was too unserious about the craft of writing for me to bother with. In short, I spent the late 90s as a literary snob. I've since reformed, middled my high-brow quite a bit. I now have a vast collection of Kerouac and have spent many hours thinking and writing about the Beats. (look for a future post on this topic.)

In fact, I'm curious about Palahniuk in precisely the same way as I first grew interested in the Beats--I'm curious about the conditions in which people discover and read him. I know that his books are not for the faint of heart; I know that students assume that professors don't like him. I can conclude, then, that his readers read him in an unofficial (even clandestine) capacity. Maybe they even sneak his books around to one another like Jerry snuck George that copy of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1961).

Maybe readers of Palahniuk represent what Michael Davidson, my favorite Beat scholar, calls the "alternative communities and constituencies" that form around books that are circulated outside of, or in opposition to, the imprimatur of the institutions in whose context they get read. Such communities are cool because they're like reading under the covers with a flashlight, only the covers expand into a blanket fort the size of your whole adolescent world, a fort into which you might escape the dull safety of daily life.