If you’re Chuck Palahniuk, the first rule of “Fight Club” is that you never escape “Fight Club.” And maybe, almost 20 years later, you don’t want to.
“It’s the thing you dream of, being co-opted by the culture,” says the Portland novelist, who’s famous for raucous, wildly interactive readings of stories so grotesque they have been known to make audience members keel over.
“In the long term, it becomes your calling card, proof you can produce something that has a lasting effect,” he says. “The disadvantage is that things that have a lasting effect on culture tend to be things that were dismissed or rejected at the beginning. The book and the movie were failures for years. … ‘Fight Club’ the movie lost a lot of people their jobs. The book sold fewer than 10,000 copies in hardcover. It was a big disaster.”
Published in 1996, Palahniuk’s first novel is no longer considered a disaster. It’s a cultural touchstone that rages against complacency and consumerism via its iconic, anarchic master of mayhem Tyler Durden (played with unhinged grace by Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s 1999 film).