“I see myself as God,” Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, jokingly confesses over the phone from Portland, Oregon. And though Palahniuk, whose latest, Choke (Doubleday), will bring him to Harvard Square this Wednesday, might be softening the boldness of his God complex with an innocent chuckle, it’s entirely possible that he isn’t kidding. His heavily trafficked fan Web site (www.chuckpalahniuk.net) proudly calls itself “The Cult.” Choke’s antihero, a glib sex addict called Victor, thinks his highbrow nut-job mom was implanted with an embryo containing the foreskin of Jesus Christ. Which would make Victor the grandson of God.

And like any deity worth His salt, the proselytizing Palahniuk has a message — actually, he has a lot of them. But the one he’s telling me about now is a call to crucify cynicism. “Choke is like the sequel to Fight Club. If [Fight Club’s] Tyler Durden hadn’t been killed and had lived into old age after doing nothing but attacking, criticizing, and being snide and rebellious, then he would’ve been [Victor’s mom] Ida Mancini at the end of her life, going, ‘Fuck, I never added anything. I just attacked what other people were trying to do.’ And so we have to break beyond the cynicism and irony. Because what is cynicism? An excuse not to create.”

But doesn’t Palahniuk’s work — especially Choke’s closing line (“Where we’re standing now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything”) and Fight Club’s anti-commercialist rants — smack of existentialism? “I am an existentialist, but I’m also deeply romantic. To be a dark cynic, I think you have to be a huge romantic. I just came back from the post office this morning, where I dropped off a bunch of packages for people who’d written to me. I love doing that, giving these people brown-paper Christmases in the middle of July. It’s the opposite of a letter bomb, it’s — oh, I dunno — a love bomb.”

Excuse me, sir, but who are you and what have you done with the dude who wrote Fight Club? Aren’t you the cat Janet Maslin summed up as “a working definition of the adolescent male state of mind”? The guy whose readings have, on more than one occasion, collapsed into frenzied chaos?

“Yeah, the Sunset Boulevard [reading] in Los Angeles last week was really wild. Traffic in front of the bookstore was stopped for a little bit and they were afraid people were going to push in the front windows of the store. I went over to apologize that the store couldn’t fit everybody inside and a few fans offered me flasks of whiskey. I thought that was pretty cool, because people don’t usually smuggle booze into readings. It was weird, though, I don’t know if it was just because we were in Hollywood, but there were a lot of women screaming and falling over when I talked to them.”

Screaming and falling over?

“Yeah, I know. Nobody gets like that over writing.”

Ah, but Chuck’s fans do. Not only does the author attract a gaggle of Marla wanna-bes (after Fight Club’s female lead), but newspaper reports have a veritable Kiss army of spiky-haired boys, clad in brown leather jackets and orange sunglasses, strutting into his public appearances trying to mimic Tyler Durden. And though having one’s own costumed congregation must be nice, does he think such dressing-up will continue with Choke, a book where the feckless protagonist’s employment at a historical theme park often has him gussied up in a powered wig, breeches, and buckle shoes?

“I hope so. Of all places, it should happen in Boston. Don’t they have trunks of cravats lying around there?”

Chuck Palahniuk reads from Choke this Wednesday, June 27, at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Square Coop, 1400 Massachusetts Avenue. It’s free; call (617) 499-2000.

Issue Date: June 21-28, 2001