Lots of writers put out a great novel early in their career and go downhill from there. The reasons are hard to pinpoint, admitting of only the most general explanations: Maybe it’s because humans are only allotted one book’s worth of truly good ideas for fiction, and after that it’s repeat yourself or dip into your supply of bad ideas. Maybe it’s because great novels aren’t the work of great writers, but of decent writers who manage to get everything right just once, which gets them published, which then gets every subsequent merely decent book published. Maybe it’s because success stories don’t work their assess off the way starving artists do. Who knows, all I know is I see this way too often. So when I finished reading Fight Club, “that was great” led immediately to “I’m never reading anything by him ever again.”

Then I found myself in Madison, where my girlfriend still lives but where my library cards no longer work, without enough reading material to last me the ride home. We wandered in to an Urban Outfitters for some reason, and I went straight for their book section, that dependable reminder that my taste in books overlaps more than I’d like with that of people whose taste in clothes I abhor. I notice a copy of Choke, which I was vaguely aware of as a Chuck Palaniuk book that recently got turned into a movie that didn’t get as good of reviews as the movie version of Fight Club. I think to myself: “If it’s the second Palaniuk novel to be made into a movie, and the cover says it was a bestseller, it’s probably a strong candidate for his second-best book, and who knows, maybe Palaniuk is the exception to the downhill-after-first-novel rule.”

Choke, didn’t turn out to be the exception to the rule, but I’m still glad I read it, Choke’s weaknesses make it easier to see what was great about Fight Club. Quick summaries: Fight Club is about a group of men who hate their office jobs, hate their lives, hate the support groups that are supposed to stop them from hating their lives, and deal with it by meeting in basements to beat each other up and, as the novel progresses, commit acts of terrorism. Choke is about a guy raised by insane mother who spends his time getting laid with the help of 12-step sex addiction groups and supplementing his income by pretending to choke in restaurants so that people will save him, feel sorry for him, and send him money.

It’s easy to say the books are about the same thing: losers who cope with life in fucked-up ways. But the key difference is this: in Fight Club, the characters’ problems is that they’re normal, and they respond by doing their best to fuck with the system. Their activities may not be admirable, but they’re at least trying to claim some dignity for themselves. In Choke, the narrator’s problem is that his entire life has been dominated by crazy people, and he responds by finding little cracks in the system that he can ooze his way into. He’s not only despicable, he cares nothing for his own dignity. And most people haven’t had a life ruled by crazies, most people are normal, but they also want their dignity. This means that while Choke is just vaguely disturbing, Fight Club managed to express the attitudes of a generation that finds society’s ideals of normalcy soul-killing.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying: There’s a theology student here at Notre Dame who tried to tell me that Fight Club is a philosophy book because it outlines an alternative way of life. That misses the point. The point of Fight Club is not that joining a group of men who beat each other up and swear unquestioning loyalty to a terrorist plotter is a laudable way of life. It isn’t about expressing a “philosophy,” at all; literature is often best without without any philosophy at all. All literature needs to do is express an attitude that resonates with people, in this case, that anything is better than being normal in the moder world–even getting beaten up in a basement.