Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk

(pb; 2018)

From the inside flap

“People pass the word only to those they trust most: Adjustment Day is coming. They’ve been reading a mysterious book and memorizing its directives. They are ready for the reckoning.

“Adjustment Day, the author’s first novel in four years. . . does what [Palahniuk] does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Smug, geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war in an effort to control the burgeoning population of young males; working-class men dream of burying the elites; and professors propound theories that offer students only the bleakest future.

“Into this dyspeptic time a blue-black book is launched carrying such wisdom as:

“’. . .The weak want you to forgo your destiny

just as they’ve shirked theirs.

“'A smile is your best bulletproof vest!’

“When the Adjustment Day arrives, it fearlessly makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche.”

Review

Adjustment, as other reviewers have noted, is a timely satire. (It brings to mind many of Kurt Vonnegut's more savagely funny novels.) It is a variation on themes he has written about before, especially in Fight Club─which gets a meta-mention, as does Palahniuk himself─and Rant; Adjustment's storyline shows poisonous hyper-masculinity taken to its logical, national level, as viewed through an especially American lens.

Like many of his novels, its puzzle-piece structure sports a journalistic-distant tone, with sly, absurd (and often blackly hilarious) one-liners, even as upheaval initially splinters his fictional America into three countries. There is the occasional ickiness and brutal violence, but to focus on that is to miss larger points: this is not far from where we are headed, tonally speaking, and Palahniuk is not one to shy away from veracities born of this world, which so often infuse his fiction.

Because of its puzzle-piece set-up, it took me a few chapters to fully “get into” Adjustment, but even then I was intrigued by it. Even on the rare occasions when I do not fully connect with Palahniuk’s work, I find his writing worthwhile, as─when it comes together─it is distinctively Palahniukian and thrilling.

This is worth reading, especially if you have a dark, wicked and unflinching sense of humor and are disgusted with our current political situation.