DAVID HARSANYI: Why “Fight Club” Still Matters: Chuck Palahniuk’s story of hopelessness and masculinity is more powerful than ever.

If I were the kind of person who recklessly intellectualized pop culture, I’d contend that Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club” was the coda to GenXers’ disaffection with the 1970s and ’80s, a distillation of angst and confusion created by assaults on masculinity. “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” the nameless narrator famously explains. That echoes a familiar complaint these days.

When I first read the book in my mid-20s, it wasn’t a profound literary experience, but rather something visceral — maybe culturally akin to watching “Pulp Fiction” for the first time, if “Pulp Fiction” had a moral (amoral?) center. While “Fight Club” is violent and funny, it’s also a book about despair, isolation, pessimism, and slackerism. Palahniuk’s lean sentences toy with unpleasant notions; his characters speak about men in a ways they understand but rarely express. I’m not sure there is any other book quite like it.

Rereading “Fight Club” might have made me feel older, but its satire and prose still stand out in a culture teeming with phony edginess. Perhaps it’s just sentimentality about the ’90s, but so much of today’s output seems an exercise in back patting. “Mr. Robot” or “Girls” — or, well, any other supposedly socially conscientious film, show, or novel that pops into my head while writing this — are preachy exercises that bolster notions already fully embraced by its audience. No one is challenged, because being challenged means being offended.

Not long ago, I ran across an article in which Palahniuk took credit for the use of the term “snowflake,” a moniker some people on Right use to insult the easily outraged on the Left. The line in the book is: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”

Read the whole thing.