By Franny French

Things multiply in "Fight Club," Chuck Palahniuk's dystopian tale of disaffected young men who meet in dark bars for bouts of consensual bare-fisted brutality. First there are only two men fighting, then 20, then 50, then thousands spread out across the country. Eventually, everywhere the main character turns, battered and bruised men are all around, winking furtively at him with blackened eyes. The making of soap, too, starts off small, but soon an army of fight club members manufacture and distribute the designer soap, which sells like hotcakes at stores such as Nordstrom, and which is made primarily from liposuctioned human fat.

"Fight Club" is the story of an insomniac product-recall analyst who befriends a waiter/movie theater projectionist named Tyler Durden. Handsome, cunning and ambitious, Tyler deftly wages a form of covert work-place warfare that can best be described as unsavory. In writing "Fight Club," Palahniuk set out to retell "The Great Gatsby." Though the setting for this end-of-millennium tale is vastly darker and more disturbing than Fitzgerald's West Egg, the narrator of "Fight Club" is a lethal Nick Carraway infatuated with a modern-day Jay Gatsby.

Tyler's Daisy Buchanan is Marla, a wayward woman who has a taste for the bizarre, and who gets between the narrator and one of his many secret passions: crashing cancer-support groups. Marla's participation in the groups prohibits him from getting emotional at the meetings, therefore preventing him from feeling alive. Marla also develops a sexual relationship with Tyler, a move that further frustrates the narrator.

The strength of Palahniuk's novel comes from the astonishing power of his imagination, not to mention his sense of humor. At many points in the course of its scant 200 pages, "Fight Club" reads like an imaginative and witty diatribe on consumerism, greed, self-importance, beauty, the working world and, of course, the pathology of support groups. At the same time, it is an incredibly violent work of literature, filled with graphic scenes of jaw cracking and head bashing. While the violence is sometimes, thankfully, incomplete, it's no less worrisome to the reader. It will be interesting to see if the movie version, which comes out on Oct. 15, will top the frightening violence that Palahniuk jabs at his readers.

"Fight Club" is written in a spare and inelegant style. It is not a beautifully crafted piece, but the prose is quick and intoxicating, cleverly mirroring the book's mood of hyperawareness. Though the structure is derived from a classic, the story is an original, and certain elements are sure to stay with the reader and raise sticky questions about everyday life--mostly with regard to the workplace.

The public's response to "Fight Club" has been enormous and varied. It has sparked adoration, fear and controversy. Everyone, from critics at Esquire and Publisher's Weekly to TV personalities like Kathy Lee Gifford, has had an opinion on the real message of "Fight Club." But when the hype dies down, it won't be the controversy people remember. The book's humor, its nihilistic violence and its originality will leave the most enduring impression.