Adjustment Day: A Novel

by Chuck Palahniuk

Overview

The author of Fight Club takes America beyond our darkest dreams in this timely satire.

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, is an ingeniously comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he 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:

Imagine there’s no God. There is no Heaven or Hell. There is only your son and his son and his son and the world you leave for them.

The weak want you to forgo your destiny just as they’ve shirked theirs.

A smile is your best bulletproof vest.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393652598
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	939,356
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Chuck Palahniuk is the best-selling author of more than eighteen fictional works, including Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant, Pygmy, Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You and The Invention of Sound. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Hometown:

Portland, Oregon

Date of Birth:

February 21, 1962

Place of Birth:

Pasco, Washington

Education:

B.A. in journalism, University of Oregon, 1986

Website:

http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net

Editorial Reviews

03/19/2018
The defiance of social order well-known from Palahniuk’s Fight Club finds new—if stunted—life. As American society continues to fail the common man, the mysterious actor Talbott Reynolds appears on radio and TV promising a new system built truly by the people. Soon, copies of a blue and black book proliferate quickly underground through the U.S., speaking of an Adjustment Day that will bring power to the powerless. With the American government on the verge of reinstating the military draft, Talbott’s followers rebel, killing and enslaving all journalists, politicians, and academics. New leaders arise from the rebels, creating three separatist states: Caucasia, which reverts to a medieval society; Blacktopia, which springboards into a magical and technologically advanced world; and Gaysia, a state consumed with outing heterosexuals and inseminating lesbians to keep the economy in balance. As misplaced citizens flee, others must hide in plain sight. One elder white woman blackfaces to awkwardly fit in, while a heterosexual couple passes as gay so they aren’t permanently separated. The over-the-top premise is classic Palahniuk, but he stumbles in its delivery, focusing more on the farcical aspects of these societies rather than on the characters living in them, resulting in a thin story. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Adjustment Day feels, in many ways, like a novel made out of the times we’re living in—one in which cult of personality (and a desire to belong to specific tribes) fractures the world people are familiar with, and creates something different—and worse—in its wake."

The Hollywood Reporter - Graeme McMillan

"[Adjustment Day] is what you'd expect from the author best known for writing Fight Club: violent, kinetic, and deeply disturbing."

Goodreads - Kerry Shaw

"A quick, horrifying descent into madness and murder, gorgeous in its psychotic build-up and over-the-top execution."

National Public Radio Book Reviews - Jason Sheehan

"Palahniuk toys with our cultural dividing lines—race, class, sexuality—and all the fears, myths, and conspiracies that come along with them. The result is a novel that straddles both the horrific and the absurd, kind of like present-day America."

Vice - Peter Rugh

"[Palahniuk] takes the United States’ divided politics to their extreme conclusion and proves along the way that his gift for social satire has only sharpened with time."

Shelf Awareness

"Visionary and fearless . . . perhaps [Palahniuk’s] darkest, most biting satire to date. . . . Razor-sharp insights and boundless imagination are matched only by his ability to make even the most stomach-churning scenes somehow vividly entertaining. . . . Equal parts Jonathan Swift and Tyler Durden."

Booklist

"A send-up of the many absurdities in our society."

New York Post, “This week’s must-read books” - Mackenzie Dawson

2018-03-05
An uprising in Portland, Oregon, leads to social revolution and terror in this relentless satire of our splintered times.Many writers have complained recently that current events are distracting them from doing the work. Clearly, Palahniuk (Make Something Up, 2015, etc.) has embraced the madness, crafting a dystopian nightmare that takes all the fractures of our modern society and escalates them to a perverted climax. The United States is on the brink of war, and millennials are expected to be mowed down by the thousands, a deliberate plan by a crooked senator to avoid an American Arab Spring. But two new developments emerge. The first is The List, an internet site where anyone can post the names of people they deem a threat to society. The more votes a person gets, the more danger they are in. The second is a revolutionary manifesto by a man named Talbott Reynolds that contains wisdom like "We must kill those who would have us kill one another" and is advertised with the slogan "A Smile Is Your Best Bulletproof Vest!" And then...Adjustment Day, during which The List's targets are exterminated, journalists murdered, and a "Declaration of Interdependence" setting new rules is written. Only those who killed are granted rights. They are elevated to the rank of barbaric "chieftains," their serfs marked by a severed ear. The country is split into divided states: "Blacktopia," "Gaysia," and "Caucasia." "Democracy was a short-lived aberration," Palahniuk writes, taking the anarchist conviction of Fight Club (1996) Project Mayhem and letting it run unchecked. Once Palahniuk turns society on its ear, it's a rich milieu in which the author can experiment with characters, form, style, and an acidic wit that savages social constructs, conspiracies, and norms with abandon. Or, perhaps not. "Palahniuk," Reynolds mutters. "All of his work is about castration. Castration or abortion."A caustic fantasy about emasculated men, power reversals, proletariat revolution, and extreme violence. Sound familiar?

Kirkus Reviews

"A send-up of the many absurdities in our society."

New York Post - Mackenzie Dawson

"A must-read."

Bleeding Cool - Gavin Sheehan