Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the government rots.
Chuck Palahniuk was one of the guests at this year’s NC Comicon: Bull City, so I was able to buy a copy of his latest novel Adjustment Day for him to sign. Which he did so, with his unique combination of the ridiculous and the unsettling: “Tell yourself this is only a book!”
I gotta say, I thought about that advice more than once while reading this.
The story starts with a book, one with a remarkably seductive message, and with a list of names. The list appears online, and anyone can add a name or vote for names that are already there. Some people are obsessed with the list; most people think it’s a joke. It’s the exact opposite of a popularity contest, and when Adjustment Day comes it’s going to determine who will lead America into a bright, perfect future and who…won’t.
Content warning for coarse language. It’s Palahniuk, the novel has graphic descriptions of sex, death, birth, and all the stages of bodily disease and decay, of course I’m going to fucking swear.
The catalyst for Adjustment Day is the reinstatement of the draft. The upcoming war will be in North Africa, but it might as well be Iraq or Afghanistan or Korea. No matter where the conflict takes place, an entire generation of young men are facing certain death. A chapter told from the point of view of a US Senator makes it very clear that after years of keeping things calm with Ritalin, online gaming, and pornography, the government-controlled social media has turned the public against draft-age men so no one will resist too much when the surplus population of young and/or poor males is culled, freeing up resources – including eligible women – for all the wealthy older men sitting comfortably at home.
And if that particular bit of fiction sounds uncomfortably close to reality, well get ready, because there’s going to be a lot more of that sort of thing in this book.
A big element of all of Palahniuk’s books is how absolutely anything we value in society is, at best, a good idea that’s been implemented really badly. At its worst it’s a tool used by powerful people to control the masses. Nothing is sacred; religion, higher education, identity politics, blind patriotism, parenting, all of it is picked apart and mixed with all the conspiracy theories that you know can’t be true, but oh, wouldn’t it make so much sense if they were.
For example: The government knew ahead of time about Pearl Harbor. And 9-11. The moon-landing was faked. Money is just a shell game. With the government’s blessing, revolution is prevented when various groups are taught to focus their rage and destructiveness inward, killing themselves off with disease, gang violence, opioids, or just pointing the finger at any other group and declaring “THEY’RE the reason everything’s gone to shit.”
In an ultra-paranoid setting like this, the idea that a single book written by a mysterious man named Talbott Reynolds can convince thousands of disaffected, angry, powerless men to slaughter every politician, celebrity, and tenured know-it-all professor in one day sounds shockingly plausible, almost like an act of self-defense.
A new world order promises to fix all of society’s problems as long as everyone follows the rules in Talbott’s book. Palahniuk lays out all of the pop psychology and revisionist history and quick-fixes so reasonably that you’re constantly forced to ask yourself why an idea is bad. “Money will have a built-in expiration date so everyone has to spend it fast on essentials and no one can hoard more than their fair share.” Well… “Every repressed group will get their own country, so each country’s citizens will be free to become the best version of themselves without anyone being oppressed for being different.” Hang on, that can’t be… “No more old white men sending young men to die in a war that they themselves will never have to endure; from now on the only people in charge are the ones willing to do real battle.” Now wait a minute…
(Note: Palahniuk knows people will think he’s seriously suggesting some of this. He’s fucking daring people to get this wrong. For crying out loud, he lampshades some of the “young men who are angry that they’re not getting what the world promised” themes from previous books by having characters reference Fight Club. By name. One character even claims that Fight Club was about empowering each man through a series of exercises, which to me sounds like the author’s literary facepalm at all the people who’s takeway from the book or the movie was, “Yeah, we should start our own underground fight club meetings!”)
As all the grand uniting narratives floundered…when all the tenuous, external circumstances failed us, we’d be forced to form our ranks base on our most basic elements: skin color and sexual desire.
The story has many, many different interlocking plots, from the fever-dream origin of the Talbott book, to the main participants of Adjustment day, to the few hapless targets who survive the process, and all the random people watching it go down from the sidelines, getting sorted off to their respective countries of Caucasia, Blacktopia, or Gaysia, and then trying to figure out how the hell they’re supposed to make their lives work now. It’s exactly as crazy as it sounds, and I found myself trying to not read too much at one sitting so I could make it last longer.
Things change very fast, the details about life in each country are lunatic and endlessly fascinating, and a lot of it makes for a series of thought-puzzles. What kind of economy would you have when money is perishable and can’t be saved, meaning your security depends on the good will of the powerful? How would you manage the population imbalance when children who are born gay in designated straight countries are constantly emigrating to Gaysia as soon as they reach eighteen? Would an all-black society be able to evolve into something amazing when its citizens are no longer required to “act white” in order to survive proximity to scared, oversensitive whites? And what would a society look like, really look like, when it’s run by people who’s only qualification to lead is their willingness to kill in order to take over?
The great metropolises of Caucasia had swiftly declined into deadly no-go zones where displaced liberal-arts majors stalked each other as food.
White culture gets a good kicking here, Blacktopia is an almost hallucinogenic version of Wakanda, and oddly enough the country of Gaysia felt like the most “real” outcome, keeping in mind that voluntary slavery to the well-being of your country is still slavery.
Don’t expect an ending that will neatly wrap up all the loose ends. If there’s an overarching theme to all this glorious lunacy, it’s that humanity will never get it right. People want what they shouldn’t have, sometimes because they can’t have it. Some people need more than they’re given, and others take more than they deserve. In one system some men can’t get sex, but any attempt to change that means some women lose the choice of when to have sex or not. We could subdivide ourselves into smaller and smaller categories, trying to keep people from finding an “other” to blame for everything that goes wrong. But the perfect little world where everyone is safely tucked away in their proper place ends the very second one person realizes that Hell is the same thing as society’s definition of “their proper place.” Whatever system we come up with is never going to solve every problem.
And that’s the point. That’s the entire point. We’re never going to find a solution to every question because humanity takes place in the spaces between the answers. No problem is ever going to be fixed once and for all, we just have to keep asking questions, and making adjustments (see what I did there) and getting it wrong, and trying again. And whether you think this constant evolution is a good thing or a bad thing is going to depend entirely on whether you think we’re all going to be able to survive the process.