4. Fight Club - Chuck Pahlanuik
An anonymous narrator has a very stressful job with a car company. This leads to insomnia which won't quit and when he goes to his doctor he is given a rather unorthodox treatment. He is sent to a support group for testicular cancer sufferers although he is cancer free. Our narrator gains relief from his insomnia by sharing his problems in the group but he meets an unstable young woman called Marla, who visits the groups for her own private reasons. They agree to go to different groups because the narrator cannot cry when she is present and his insomnia returns. On a nudist beach, the narrator meets the enigmatic Tyler Durden. His building blows up and he asks Durden if he can stay with him. Durden consents on the condition that the narrator punches him really hard. A fist fight ensues which both parties enjoy and they establish the Fight Club - a bare knuckle fist fight club with strict rules that draws men who are of the same mind as the narrator and Durden. Marla makes a half arsed suicide attempt. Durden picks up the phone and hears her incoherent speech. He rescues her and the two start an affair. Marla is oblivious to the existence of the Fight Club. The narrator marvels at the fact he never sees Marla and Durden at the same time... The Fight Club becomes a nationwide phenomenon and Durden gathers the most devoted members to start Project Mayhem - a kind of paramilitary organisation to bring down society, like the Fight Club, it also has strict rules. The narrator is sick of Project Mayhem's brutality and comes to the shocking revelation about his identity, the formation of Fight Club and Project Mayhem, and just about everything in the narrator's world is turned upside down. Whenever it comes to the denouement of the book, the reader realises that the narrator is completely nuts. He was always a bit batty before that but now he is off the chart insane. Dissociative Identity Disorder - which the narrator clearly suffers from - is a very serious and hard to treat condition. For me, it was a hard pill to swallow that an adult man can suddenly develop the disorder, but I appreciate what the author was trying to achieve with this plot contrivance - to make a statement about the state of masculinity in the world today and also to make a statement on consumerism and class issues. The twist ending must make the narrator in Fight Club one of the loopiest narrators in the history of literary fiction.