The Unexpected Romantic: An Interview with Chuck Palahniuk

If there is an identity crisis among young men in America, and an ideology that goes with it, then there is no better place to start one's education than the novels of Chuck Palahniuk.

At least that's what I thought before I met Palahniuk.

The day was bright. The weather was fine. The author of Fight Club, or the "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation," as he has been called, looked impossibly mild: light green eyes beaming from a frank handsome face, soft brown hair wisping casually at the shoulders, a literary sort of sports coat draped over a healthy, medium frame, a forgiving handshake to my a 10 minutes' lateness; in other words, not a revolutionary. Not even, to my chagrin, an angry young man.

"I am the biggest romantic you're probably ever going to meet," Palahniuk said in response to my question about why the themes of his novels tend to divine from Dante's eighth circle. "I go to my signings and hand out packets of seeds. And I send more flowers than any 100 people together."

Well, that's nice. But it didn't answer my soon-to-be nagging question about why Palahniuk, since his debut novel in 1996, has specialized in male characters who are undisguised sexual deviants, schizophrenics, con artists, lost revolutionaries, misanthropes, drug addicts, anti-consumerists and cynics. The 38-year-old writer from Portland definitely has much more in common with Denis Johnson than Danielle Steel, even if he is fond of flowers.

"My novels are all romantic comedies," said Palahniuk (pronounced Paul-a-nick), attempting further explanation. "But they're just romantic comedies that are done with very dysfunctional, dark characters."

"Actually," added Palahniuk, "my characters are still playing in a very classic sort of boy-gets-girl scenario, or girl-gets-boy scenario."

With that remark, I set aside my questions about the sources of his dark subjects and literary influences (which include Kierkegaard, Camus, Foucault and Susan Faludi's book on contemporary masculinity, Stiffed) and proceeded to ask him how this was possible. But before I get ahead of myself, a few words about his books....

Palahniuk's first and best novel, "Fight Club," achieved renown because it zeroed in on the lesser noticed features of Gen X, especially those of the men -- and it is far from a romantic comedy. The novel centers on one Tyler Durden, a fast-talking anarchist out to convert a generation "raised by women" into real men. To achieve this, Tyler lectures ad nauseam on the evils of consumer capitalism (it homogenizes, feminizes, makes us dumb) and commences a series of bloody boxing nights, which allow him and his followers to beat the crap out of each other with the purpose of reasserting their culturally repressed male energy. One of my favorite Tyler Durden speeches reads:

"We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."

Fight Club was a hit because it addressed American spiritual malaise directly with a stripped-down prose that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald would have approved. It also gave voice to many of the sentiments that Faludi addressed in Stiffed: a sense among men that the post-war, post-feminist, commercial-soaked world has made them powerless and weak. The book has reached cult status, thanks to fans who Palahniuk says are "mostly skater kids and middle-aged men." And if there was a boy-gets-girl story that drove the plot, it eluded most critics.

Many of the above characteristics are true for Palahniuk's next two novels. Survivor follows the transformation by PR hacks of a death cult's last surviving member into a pretty-boy media messiah, and addresses, Nietzsche style, the death of religion by commerce. Invisible Monsters, a story about a barbiturate-popping transvestite and deformed model, tackles the increasingly rich theme of fluid sexual identity. "My audience is probably the complete opposite of the Oprah Winfrey demographic," said Palahniuk, mulling over those attracted to his work.