“Bad things happen in heat like this.” The May Mothers is a group of Brooklyn women whose children share May birthdates and who enjoy bonding over the trials and tribulations of new motherhood. Sound familiar?Ī mommy group attempts to get to the bottom of a baby’s disappearance in Aimee Molloy’s debut, “The Perfect Mother.” Palahniuk’s latest is a caustic fantasy about emasculated men, power reversals, proletariat revolution, and extreme violence. 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. 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. They are elevated to the rank of barbaric “chieftains,” their serfs marked by a severed ear. Only those who killed are granted rights. 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. The more votes a person gets, the more danger they are in. The first is the List, an internet site where anyone can post the names of people they deem a threat to society. 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. Clearly, Palahniuk has embraced the madness, crafting a dystopian nightmare that takes all the fractures of our modern society and escalates them to a perverted climax. Many writers have complained recently that current events are distracting them from doing the work. An uprising in Portland, Ore., leads to social revolution and terror in Chuck Palahniuk’s “Adjustment Day,” a relentless satire of our splintered times.
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