“50 pages into this book, I was thinking, “Ah, Christ. So Mr. Palahniuk is weighing in on American politics too? Is fucking EVERYONE an expert now?”
But then I read some more, and what he’s doing is way more interesting.
What I see happening on both sides of the real-world political fence is journalists, interviewers, reviewers and so on amping up the political side of every story. An artist releases a new album, and we’re WAY more likely to hear about the artist’s politics or projected viewpoint than we are to hear anything about the musical qualities of the album. A movie comes out, and we’re pretty likely to hear where it falls on the pass/fail spectrum of the Bechdel Test, but less likely to hear about its qualities as a movie. A book comes out, and there’s a lot of application of “so important in this fraught political moment.”
This isn’t a bad thing. Someone should always be looking at things that way, and someone always has been, but it’s tipped towards that being the primary, if not only, method by which so many of us are evaluating art.
It feels like we’re using everything as a segue to politics. All roads lead to politics. And while art can serve that purpose, it’s being railroaded into serving only that purpose. Hence the common phrase: All art is political.
Adjustment Day calls bullshit. Instead of using art to talk about politics, Mr. Palahniuk uses politics to talk about art. Politics dominate the book up top, and the path they take leads away, back into art.
I love this book for doing that. I love that this book poses the idea that art is bigger than politics, that art doesn’t serve politics.
I love the idea that art doesn’t have to be yoked into service pulling the wagon of politics. Politics can take a turn pulling its own fucking wagon. I never thought I would consider that a radical statement, but here we are.
Mr. Palahniuk has done something really interesting here. Something really different. Of all his books, I’m most curious how this will age. I wonder if it will make sense to a generation who comes of age 25 years from now and doesn’t really understand the current climate. It might not make sense. It might, like a lot of satire, do well. Jonathan Swift, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, Miguel de Cervantes, Shakespeare, John Kennedy Toole, all writers who did very “of-the-time” satire that still works years and years later. Probably because satire sticks it to assholes, and it doesn’t matter what time or country it is, we all love to see an asshole get what he deserves.
Either way. It’s a book for fans of Chuck’s work. Now, don’t get me wrong. The writing style is different. It’s calmer, less white-knuckle than his early books, and that’s in the service of the story. The writing style presents things less as immediately engaging than it does really, really interesting. It’s not a difficult, dense book. It’s lulls you into going along with a very crazy story by presenting it in a very plain way.
What I mean is, if you like Chuck’s work because he’s always doing his own thing, writing books that nobody else is writing, then you’ll appreciate this one as part of that career.
Wait, shit. Not “career.”
You’ll appreciate it as a limb on his body of art. “