![]() ![]() Here there’s a sense of visceral romanticism to his writing, that he has some skin in the game. Palahniuk’s critique of masculinity works best when it manages to be homoerotic at the same time. ![]() There’s some arch comedy in the play between tumescent expectation and castration anxiety as the US is described as struggling with “arguably the biggest boy bulge in world history”. The German academic Gunnar Heinsohn warned that all great upheavals in history are due to an excess of young men, and so the draft is reintroduced and an unspecified Middle Eastern war is planned to cull this dangerous glut. America is suffering from a “youth bulge”, a surplus that risks causing civil conflict or worse. In Adjustment Day the problem with the next crop is its very abundance, particularly the males. Two decades on and some 14 novels later, a new generation has come of age and found itself in Palahniuk’s telescopic sights: the millennials. A wry satire on self-help groups and slacker culture, it was a gloriously acerbic swansong for that fin de siècle spawn we called Generation X. ![]() C huck Palahniuk’s passionately provocative 1996 debut Fight Club hit a zeitgeist moment in the dying years of the 20th century, channelling the spirit of exhausted consumerism and disaffected masculinity. ![]()
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