Book Review: Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

Hardcover, 316 pages

Published May 2018 by W. W. Norton & Company

I kinda accidentally read this. I am a mild CP fan, having read all his novels early on, and having met him and having a really cool conversation with him at the 2005 Stoker awards I always root for the guy. That said it had been a few years I was waiting for hold book to come in at the library and just saw this sitting on the new release shelf. What the hell. I had heard nothing about it, knew nothing going and dove in.

CP is most well known for his classic of social satire from 1996 Fight Club, or at least the movie that came a mere three years later. If he was never to write another book these would be two perfect bookends. Fight Club deconstructs a period of Gen-X assimilation and shows men desperately trying to express their inner bottled rage. 2018 when this book is released is a very different world. The internet and social media platform gives assholes a shield to hide behind as they express resentment and hatred that has building up as the world kills off old regressive thinking. The Alt-right can create a screen name and use it as an avatar to express racist ideas that in the past were being smothered out in shadows. Far right extremism expressed in things ranging from birther-ism to outrage over female Ghostbusters is the world this novel is reacting to.

Adjustment Day is about a one day revolution when all the hopes and dreams of the Alt-Right come true. Short of the disappearance of people they disagree with the country is re-organized into smaller sections of areas designed around race, culture, sexual orientation and so on. The novel has some funny moments of world building inside the new nations of Blacktopia, Gaysia, and Caucasia. This is where the satire gets biting and intense. CP has never ever worried about offending people in fact I think it is a game to him. There is lots of humor that comes from the various stereotypes that come from this cultures that the novel plays with. Some of the things that made me uncomfortable was the jive-talk in Blacktopia and forced breeding program in Gaysia.

Much is made of the gender of these revolutionaries early in the novel, the idea is that these massive changes happen when society has a too many idle young men. Capitalism and the system are planning to start a war in the middle east to decrease this population but too late. These men seeking a new world have a list they put up on line the "Least Wanted" for they want to see killed. I think this part is an interesting reaction to the internet mobs that we often see start out of online debate.

You might have noticed something. I made it this far into the review and have yet to mention a single character. Here in lies the problem with this book. There are many ideas at work, good ones. There are many statements being made, good ones. There are plenty of interesting questions and situations at play here that do a good job of highlighting the bad ideas being many of the extreme right. All that is true. But is there a story? Not much of one to be honest.

Without a story to hook me, I didn't really find myself wanting to rush to this book. There is one interesting character, a woman named Shasta and an alt-right guy who obsessed with her, but after CP introduces her in the 50 pages she is forgotten. This novel is a soapbox without a strong enough narrative, and for that reason I was pretty bored by the end.