"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. 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.
It is Fight Club franchised. Gone national. Sick with all of our current ills and darkest, weirdest desires ... Chuck Palahniuk just wants to see how far he can push you before you get offended, throw the book down, walk away from it for good. He wants to see how thin of a tightrope he can walk between satire and slur, provocation and revulsion ... And I gotta tell you, watching him try it? It's fun. It's fun like watching NASCAR but only for the crashes ... He's masterful at making readers feel and understand the desperate, grasping needs of his underdogs, and maybe too good sometimes at making us cheer for them when they achieve their violent catharsis. And in Adjustment Day, he's at the top of his game. At least for most of the book.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, has added a unique but rather distasteful novel to the dystopian canon ... The narrative of the novel jumps from person to person and detailing how each person contributes, copes, or fights against the events of Adjustment Day and its aftermath. The result is a novel which is not told in chronological order and difficult to follow ... Palahniuk’s commentary is stifled by the lack of chronology, random scenes which appear to have no other purpose than to disgust the reader, and an abrupt ending that leaves many questions unanswered.
Palahniuk’s critique of masculinity works best when it manages to be homoerotic at the same time. Here there’s a sense of visceral romanticism to his writing, that he has some skin in the game ... But about 100 pages in there’s a plot twist ... Suddenly we’re caught up in a very long-winded satire on race and sexual identity. You can’t fault Palahniuk’s ambition in wanting to create a grand dystopia for his nation, but he spends too much time and effort on the detail of how these subdivisions come into being and how they function, all confusingly depicted by multiple narrative strands ... he clearly wants to shock. There are copious amount of sex and violence in Adjustment Day, presented in such a detached manner that the effect is more numbing than disturbing ... Part of the problem could be that he already feels he’s passed judgment on millennials ... What’s lacking in Adjustment Day is his heart.
