![]() ![]() ![]() “The world wants a unified theory,” this book-within-a-book reads. The novel traces the roots and ramifications of a populist revolt in America, set in motion by a mysterious piece of agitprop written by a man named Talbott Reynolds, itself entitled Adjustment Day. It also feels patently untrue, and is perhaps even a shirking of responsibility for his work to say Adjustment Day isn’t about American politics, even on a superficial level, is like saying Animal Farm isn’t about Stalinism. ![]() This is, understandably, the kind of evasive response a Very Serious Author gives. “Nothing I write is about politics,” Palahniuk wrote, in an email exchange. Spoken like a character in one of his own novels, the author says “satire” is just a marketing term employed to sell books so is “transgressive.” And politics? Of course, Palahniuk himself is resistant to any critical descriptors one might use to explain his work. Depending on how you look at it, Chuck Palahniuk’s first novel in four years, Adjustment Day, is a biting satire of Trump-era grievances, a meta-fictional treatise on the danger of, and our hunger for, explanatory narratives, or a semi-sincere call for revolution. ![]()
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