My readers contact me regularly. Bear in mind, these aren’t the Oprah Book Club sort. Both The List and the media men list are outgrowths of existing trends across social media, which speaks to things I feel you’ve been interested in for some time: inner lives and the ability to express them safely, perhaps…? There are many parts of the book that feel, for want of a better way to put it, ripped from the headlines - not least of which is The List, which feels like an extreme version (with, admittedly and importantly, entirely different ambitions) of the “media men” list that was in the news at the start of the year. White appeal to me. The chaos they depict achieves a profundity that orderly, rational fiction lacks.

Look really close and you’ll see Nathanael West in there, too. And more than a little Gogol. Years ago, doing volunteer work escorting terminally ill people to their therapy/support groups, something always struck me: As a dying person would report the progress of his condition, someone with only weeks or even days left, he’d often stop short. He’d start to laugh. Then everyone present would laugh. Humans can only bear the burden of so much misery before it tips into feeling absurd. That’s why surreal and absurd stories by Gogol and Kafka and E.B. Dick and Vonnegut in your writing, but maybe that’s my own tastes coming into play) at a time when reality feels more and more like bad versions of the same? Does it spur you to want to go further, or feel as if the world is at war with your work? Related to that, in a sense: How does it feel to write what is, in many ways, absurdist speculative fiction (I always see threads of both Philip K.

Is it my fault that history always repeats itself, “First as tragedy, then as farce,” as Napoleon would say? Complete with a dialect-spouting, black-faced old white lady as Mammy. Love sets the plot in motion, and love is the central quest. Sigh. A civil war. A bright young woman torn between the man she wants and the man who wants her. Her ascent to nobility. It’s a rewrite of Gone With the Wind. As Palahniuk sets out on a promotional tour - see dates below - Heat Vision talked to the writer about the book, and its connections to the world around us, and also his previous work.Īdjustment Day feels, in many ways, like a novel made out of the times we’re living in - one in which cult of personality (and a desire to belong to specific tribes) fractures the world people are familiar with, and creates something different - and worse - in its wake. Is this a cautionary tale, a satire, or something else altogether?

Adjustment day palahniuk