Sundance has occasionally bestowed its honors on unquestionably worthy films that went on to modest, indie-scale success; in 2003, the dramatic grand-jury prize went to “American Splendor,” the audience award to “The Station Agent” and the documentary prize to “Capturing the Friedmans.” Quite frankly, a year like that is so rare in Sundance history that it feels like the operation of random chance. Here are the major jury-prize winners of the last four years, listing narrative features first and documentaries second: “Primer” and “DiG!” (2004), “Forty Shades of Blue” and “Why We Fight” (2005), “Quinceañera” and “God Grew Tired of Us” (2006), “Padre Nuestro” and “Manda Bala” (2007).

I think a couple of those are outstanding films — which is, and should be, the principal criterion. Others are mysterious, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey selections: “Quinceañera”? As the best film in a list that included “Half Nelson,” “Flannel Pajamas,” “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” “In Between Days,” “Sherrybaby,” “Steel City,” “Stephanie Daley” and “Wristcutters: A Love Story”? Give me a break! As for last year, Jason Kohn’s high-style, Brazil-as-hell documentary “Manda Bala” sank without a trace, while Christopher Zalla’s immigrant drama “Padre Nuestro” hasn’t even been released (although it will be, eventually, by IFC).

That’s quite a set-up for the 2008 Sundance prizes, ain’t it? Well, here’s the good news: Although I haven’t seen all of this year’s prize-winners, I don’t think there’s a turkey in the group. It was undeniably a bear market for name-brand movies in Park City this winter, but the range of appealing, low-budget, sub-Indiewood pictures was impressive. None of these films will make $100 million; many will be fortunate to make $1 million, given the dire marketplace conditions of the moment. Maybe there wasn’t anything in competition this year that suggested the second coming of Orson Welles, but I believe we caught the early stages of several intriguing and high-integrity careers. This was a bad Sundance — if you work for a major media conglomerate. If you like movies, it was a pretty good one.

The Grand Jury Prize for narrative film went to writer-director Courtney Hunt’s “Frozen River,” an appealing and atmospheric tale of poverty and illegal immigration, featuring a fine lead performance by Melissa Leo and shot in and around a Mohawk reservation that straddles the New York-Ontario border. “Frozen River” was almost universally admired, although most critics would have chosen “Ballast,” Lance Hammer’s mesmerizing work of Mississippi minimalism; Marianna Palka’s acerbic romantic comedy “Good Dick”; or Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Dominican-baseball drama “Sugar.” (That last would have been my choice, I think.) The audience award went to Jonathan Levine’s “The Wackness,” a 1994-set New York coming-of-age tale that I didn’t catch.

On the documentary front, the grand jury prize was awarded to Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s “Trouble the Water,” an extraordinary post-Katrina tale of heroism and survival. There was some mumbling among documentary purists about this title (was its subject, Kim Roberts, hoping to use the exposure to launch her rap career? Maybe so; who cares?), but its effect on viewers was electric. Surprisingly, “Trouble the Water” did not double up with the audience award, won by Josh Tickell’s biofuel-activism saga “Fields of Fuel.” (I didn’t see the movie, but the buttons, ski hats and other gear were ubiquitous in Park City.) Other competition docs you’ll be hearing more about include Nanette Burstein’s “American Teen” (which won a directing award), Christopher Bell’s steroids study “Bigger, Stronger, Faster,” Irena Salina’s enviro-doc “Flow: For Love of Water,” Alex Gibney’s Hunter S. Thompson biopic “Gonzo,” Margaret Brown’s “The Order of Myths” and Marina Zenovich’s “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.”

The world cinema jury prize for dramatic films went to Swedish director Jens Jonsson’s family drama “King of Ping Pong,” and the audience prize to Amin Matalqa’s “Captain Abu Raed,” a reputed heartwarmer that’s apparently the first feature made in Jordan in 50 years. (Filmmaking in the Arab world is dominated by Egypt and Tunisia.) Both the jury prize and the audience prize in world documentary were won by British filmmaker James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” one of the Sundance films I’m truly sorry I missed. It’s an exploration and reconstruction of Philippe Petit’s “artistic crime of the century,” an illegal high-wire walk staged in August 1974 between the World Trade Center’s towers, 1,350 feet above the street.

In other awards, Hammer won a special directing prize for “Ballast,” and Lol Crawley won one for the film’s cinematography (it was shot in wide-screen 35mm, using only natural light). The annual Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award went to director Alex Rivera and his co-writer David Riker, who authored the paranoid, “Matrix”-esque sci-fi thriller “Sleep Dealer.” A special jury prize was awarded to Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald and Brad William Henke, the hilarious ensemble cast of Clark Gregg’s Chuck Palahniuk adaptation “Choke,” which is forthcoming from Fox Searchlight.

“Hamlet 2,” a high-school showbiz comedy starring Steve Coogan as a drama teacher who stages a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, became the focus of the first and perhaps only bidding frenzy at Sundance this year and went to NBC Universal’s Focus Features for $10 million, a near-record price for this festival. (“Little Miss Sunshine” cost $10.5 million two years ago.) I haven’t seen the film (although word of mouth has been outstanding), but that’s a shitload of front-end money for what sounds like a mash-up of various indie-comedy themes.

Overture Films, a new player in the market, picked up director Mark Pellington’s “Henry Poole Is Here,” a heart-warmer with a religious theme and Luke Wilson in the lead, at a far more reasonable $3.5 million. Fox Searchlight acquired Clark Gregg’s “Choke,” an amusing adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel with a delightfully sardonic star turn by Sam Rockwell, at a ballpark figure of $5 million. (More on that one below.)

Needless to say, the underwhelming acquisition news was not Topic A at Sundance on Tuesday night. I was never more than an interested spectator of Heath Ledger’s career, and never met him, but the news that someone so young with such evident promise had died so needlessly cast a pall over our snowbound paradise. It took “Brokeback Mountain” and, even more so, the little-seen Australian indie “Candy” to convince me that Ledger was more than a charmer or a pretty boy, but in those roles the energy and intensity of his performances seemed electric. There was always something of Marlon Brando or Steve McQueen about him — the charismatic screen presence, walking the tightrope between actor and movie star — and now he’s suspended forever in the middle of that continuum.

On the topic of life and death, surely one of the most important documentaries at this festival is “Made in America,” an operatic history and prehistory of the Crips-Bloods gang war of South Los Angeles, made by “Dogtown and Z-Boys” director Stacy Peralta. It’s a film that will challenge audiences on many levels, from its horrifying newsreel footage of the bloodshed that has claimed an estimated 15,000 lives over three decades to its numerous interviews with current and former gang members and its complicated lessons on the racial history and geography of L.A.

Peralta builds a case that the long-running gang war and all its associated pathologies resulted from a perfect storm of toxic ingredients: restrictive real-estate covenants, the notorious paramilitary racism of the LAPD, the rapid deindustrialization of Los Angeles in the decades after World War II and the implosion of the African-American family. Some of that may sound like old-school, blame-society white liberalism, but the film is far more complicated than that. Virtually all of Peralta’s interviewees agree that poor black communities suffer from prodigious self-hatred — why else would so many young men embark on careers of pointless, suicidal violence? — and that the problem must be healed from within, more than without (although spending so many billions of taxpayer dollars on the world’s most punitive program of incarceration rather than, say, education really isn’t helping).

As Peralta told me during a fascinating interview on Tuesday (see the video here), his central intention is to humanize these young men, so often regarded as members of some predatory, not-quite-human species. “These are American teenagers, and we need to treat them that way,” he said. “If 28 percent of the white male population were in prison, I kind of think we’d be doing something about it.”

As a group of men who appear in the film told me during a remarkable interview, coming to Sundance was a startling experience. (Again, video is on the way.) They’d been put up for free in lovely quarters, fed luxurious meals and loaded up with some of the sponsors’ famous gift bags, and good for them. But more than that, they said, they suddenly found themselves in a context where they were accepted as individuals, not as members of an alien and frightening population. “It wasn’t like this two days ago in L.A.,” one guy said in wonderment, “and it won’t be like this when we get home.”

A source close to Peralta’s film says a distribution deal is imminent, with Time Warner’s Picturehouse, Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax and the Weinstein Co. all in the running. “Made in America” may need some trimming and tidying before it’s ready to face the public, but it’s a shocking, absorbing and absolutely necessary film. To ask the brutally obvious question: What in Jesus Christ’s name are we doing fighting a war halfway around the world, and allowing one to rage virtually unchecked in our second-biggest city?

As mentioned earlier, Clark Gregg’s Chuck Palahniuk adaptation “Choke” is now in Fox Searchlight’s stable. It’s a solidly crafted and often very funny entertainment, starring Sam Rockwell as a sex addict who works as an 18th century “historical interpreter,” Anjelica Huston as his senile and/or psychotic mother and Kelly Macdonald as the lovely young doctor, or whatever she is, who tells our hero he may be the result of a secret cloning experiment involving Jesus Christ’s foreskin. (Therefore, she needs the two of them to create some embryonic tissue, if you catch my drift.)

Palahniuk’s blend of slapstick and social satire can play pretty heavy-handed on the page, but Gregg has transformed “Choke” into a light-hearted, filthy-minded farce loaded with delightful performances. Rockwell slithers through the film with the self-mockery and self-loathing of a certified cad and lounge lizard, and Brad William Henke is especially good as his compulsive-masturbator best friend. (Don’t miss Joel Grey, in a brief but marvelous cameo as the battered senior member of Rockwell’s 12-step group.)

One film that will not be acquired by anybody at Sundance — I’ll just crawl out on a limb with this one — is “Downloading Nancy,” from Swedish TV-commercial director Johan Renck. It stars Maria Bello as a woman who flees her twitchy, golf-zombie husband (Rufus Sewell) for a guy she’s met on the Internet (Jason Patric). They share similar tastes: Specifically, she wants him to kill her, and he says he wants to oblige. The film was shot by legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai’s frequent collaborator) in various shades of cadaver-dishwater gray and blue. Bello’s skin-peeling, ultra-depresso performance is wrenching and brave, calling for both emotional and physical nakedness. Can a film with those attributes also be insulting garbage? It’s a difficult aesthetic-philosophical conundrum, but having sat through this damn thing I now have an answer.

“If someone comes along and says, ‘Hey, you and your friends — you’re in an urban tribe,’ the response is pretty much, ‘Fuck you, I’m not in a tribe,’” he admits. “I appreciate that. I just want to begin a conversation about this. And I hope the book is the beginning of that conversation.”

The conversation Watters refers to actually began in 2001 with an article in the New York Times Magazine, in which he suggested that people were staying single longer in part because they drew so much sustenance from their friends. Using his personal experience as a jumping-off point, Watters said that members of urban tribes (his coinage) spend their 20s and 30s roaming the cities, fixing each other’s leaky faucets, planning dinners and weekly “Survivor”-watching parties at each other’s houses, and — in San Francisco, at least — helping build hovercrafts for Burning Man. The period between college and marriage, he argued, was becoming longer not only because of declining economic and social pressure on women to marry, or boomer kids’ notorious fear of divorce, but because tribes themselves were so fulfilling. The book expands on the article, and paints a much less bleak picture of single urban life than, say, “Sex and the City,” or “Fight Club.”

I’m 33, single, and moved to San Francisco eight years ago from a small town. Like Watters, I have a group of friends to whom I’ve said, many times, and not only under the influence of pharmaceuticals, “Man, you guys are like my family …” But my initial response to his book was, “Fuck you, I’m not in a tribe.”

The 39-year-old Watters is affable, easy to talk to, and well prepared for my objections. Tall, handsome, now married and expecting a child of his own, he describes the book as his attempt to make sense of the past 20 years of his life, a memoir of sorts, but one that he thinks taps into a larger cultural phenomenon. So far, not all reviewers have agreed. In a piece in the Atlantic Monthly, Caitlin Flanagan writes that Watters and his tribesmen “might be representative less of a striking new social trend than of arrested development.” (Rule No. 1 for aspiring West Coast trend-writers: If you want to be taken seriously, don’t open the book with your epiphanies from Burning Man.) After we order, I ask Watters what’s so novel about his brand of tribes as opposed to say Michel de Montaigne’s famous 16th century musings on friendship, or the Bowling League, or the Algonquin circle, or the man-boys in Barry Levinson’s “Diner.” What’s he saying that the slogan from “The Big Chill” didn’t tell us in 1983,that “in a cold world, you need your friends to keep you warm”?

“What’s different now,” he says, “is that a bigger chunk of our generation is spending time outside of the family unit — both the family that raised them, and the one they might one day make after marriage — but even more importantly, they are doing it for longer than any group in American history.” Glaringly absent from Watters book are hard numbers to back up claims like these. However, the latest Census figures, even though he doesn’t cite them, do show that people are marrying later — the median ages of first marriage was 25.1 for women and 26.8 for men in 2001, up from 20.8 and 23.2 respectively in 1970 — but there is no evidence to suggest that later marriages are proliferating because people are spending more time hanging out with their close friends.

After his New York Times piece was published, Watters set up a Web site, Urbantribes.net, and asked people to write in with their own stories — in part to gather research material for his book. Thousands of people responded, and not surprisingly, they, like Watters, were overwhelmingly white, college-educated and relatively well-off. “We lack a lot of socioeconomic diversity,” wrote Jamie, about his Washington, D.C., tribe. “But are internally varied in most other ways.”

Throughout the book, and in conversation, Watters refers to “our generation,” though as far as I can tell, he’s not describing a generation at all, but a specific demographic: yuppie liberals with lots of disposable income who live in destination cities, people who hate to be thought of as a demographic.

When asked whether he thinks his tribal theory fits poorer urban neighborhoods, where groups that substitute for family are referred to as, uh, gangs, he reminds me that his book only describes one man’s experience. “This may sound like a bit of a cop-out,” he says, “but it was, like, lemme figure out what’s happened in my life for the last 20 years, and let me try to draw in everyone else who seems to sort of, you know, identify with me.”

Well, it does sound like a cop-out. Especially since the book does not bill itself as a memoir, but rather makes the hefty promise of explaining how a generation is “redefining friendship, family, and commitment.” But when I try to pin Watters down on any of these questions, he reminds me, again, that it’s “just his own experience.”

Part of what Watters is trying to debunk in his book, and rightly so, is the still popular conception that American men and women suffer from a Peter Pan complex, an extended adolescence in which we hold onto juvenile ideas of “freedom” because we are so afraid of the responsibility of adulthood. Maybe that’s because adulthood is still rigidly defined by the holy triumvirate of Marriage, Mortgage and Kids. What Watters offers up is clearly something different. But still, a social identity based on belonging to a specific group of people doesn’t sound like a huge step forward — in fact, it sounds like high school for adults, with no graduation in sight.

“What’s the difference between a tribe and a clique?” I ask, just as Watters’ friend Noah arrives at our table to take us to the softball game. Watters tries to dodge the question: “Uh, Noah, you want to field this?”

A fellow tribesman to the rescue: “A clique is exclusionary,” says Noah, curly-haired and serious. “A tribe is inclusionary.”

This difference is key for Watters, who nods his head vigorously. Ethan Watters is a nice guy, and nice people don’t do cliques; they are not snobs. “People can come participate [in tribes], and no one will look askance at you when you show up.” This seems true — at least as far as Watters’ San Francisco tribe is concerned. Throughout the ’90s, fresh out of school and sure I was bound for nowhere but a park bench, I attended several parties that I now know were thrown by Watters and company. While I do remember feeling intimidated by their important-sounding jobs (Editors! Freelancers!), I don’t remember ever having been snubbed or made to feel like an outsider. Of course, had I moved in and tried to reap the full-fledged benefits of tribal membership — in the book Watters details favors ranging from providing shelter to distilling home brew to driving friends to therapy — surely I would have had to jump through some hoops before indoctrination, right?

With my friends, it would take a lot more than hoops. In fact, none of them — disloyal, unsupportive and emotionally stunted slackers all — would do this kind of stuff for me, and they’d never chauffeur me to softball games on the other side of town. By now, my take on the tribe is not “Fuck you, I’m not in one,” but “Damn, I need to find me one!”

We head out to Noah’s car, and on the drive over to the Marina, I take the back seat and listen to them grumble like two old ladies about another tribal member who just won’t grow up. “I’m worried about him,” Ethan says. “I mean it’s one thing to want to go off and have your own TV show when you’re 25, but when you’re 35?” Watters had mentioned earlier that in tribes, people like to gossip, but since he and Noah are both journalists, I can’t help wondering if the conversation is for my benefit, especially since Ethan assures me that he’s not using the ne’er-do-well’s real name.

By the time we’ve found parking, the team is out on the field warming up. “The Elucidators” are mostly journalists, mostly in their 30s, and many of them turn out to be friends of friends of mine (or if you want to be fancy, people with whom I have “weak ties,” a term Watters borrows from sociologist Mark Granovetter). I meet Brad, a journalist, and his wife, Jennifer, a lawyer; there’s Christine, a consultant; Adam, also an editor; and finally a novelist named Alex and his gorgeous new wife, whose name I don’t catch. There are several others there, and they all greet me with genuine warmth and friendliness. It’s freezing and several people offer me sweatshirts. “Inclusionary” might not be a word, but is certainly a lovely idea. I take my position in the bleachers to watch the game, light a cigarette and start a heated conversation with yet another editor, Adam, about Spider-Man comics.

I meet with awkward silences, however, when I ask each person, in turn, “Are you a member of the tribe?”

“Uh, I just moved here,” says Adam.

“I married this guy over here just to get in!” jokes the gorgeous newlywed, pointing to her husband.

Sometime during the fourth inning, Watters joins me on the bleachers and offers a discreet behavioral corrective — it’s the first time I’ve heard any edge to his voice all evening. It turns out, not everyone on the team is necessarily a part of his tribe, some of them are just “on the team,” and it was a faux pas of the new social order for me to have made that point so clear.

“That question,” he says, “is antithetical to what this book is about, antithetical to what I’m trying to say. I found those questions unnerving. No one would ever, ever ask that.” I apologize, profusely, although for what, I’m not quite sure. Tribes aren’t cliques, right? They are organic, and naturally inclusive, no? But lines do have to be drawn, people get left out. The concept of a “group” of friends, no matter how loose, must leave some people out — even if that uncomfortable fact is anathema to Watters and the rosy picture he wants to paint of open and borderless single communities.

Watters heads back to home plate — and scores a double, but too late to save his losing team.

After the game, and some good-natured browbeating from Brad, Jennifer and Christine over my gauche queries, and on the verge of vertigo from all the slippery definitions and vagaries of the evening, I ask the women whether they feel that a “tribe” ever kept them single.

“Oh yeah,” says Christine, one of Ethan’s friends from the softball team — I know enough now not to pose indiscreet questions about her tribal status. “I have my friends so I don’t get lonely. And if a guy can’t get along with my friends, then there’s something wrong with him. My friends are smart and cool — if he can’t deal, he’s out.”

But what about marriage? Settling down? Growing up?

“I think it takes more maturity and courage to define your own priorities, and wait for the right person,” Christine continues. “You don’t need to be defined by whether or not you’re married anymore.”

Jennifer, the lawyer, drives the point home: “How do you define maturity anyway?” she asks. “By how you live? By how you treat people? By your values, what?”

The tribe to the rescue, again. Jennifer has inadvertently saved Watters’ memoir-pitching, generalizing, bet-hedging ass by touching on what makes the book worth reading. Part — not all — of our generation is redefining something, but that something is not “friendship, family, and commitment.’ Instead it is single life itself, which Watters doesn’t treat as a pathology, a neurosis or a condition from which America must heal, lest we all become bitter, Botox-addled old maids or freaky Chuck Palahniuk protigis. And for this he should be applauded.

Watters himself finally makes that point clear at the book’s end, when he throws down the gauntlet: “I have spent exactly 20 years — almost to an hour — living outside a family unit. It is impossible to see such a large chunk of time as a transitional phase between youth and adulthood. Twenty years is an era — a goddamned epoch in one’s existence.”

Whether one agrees with him or not, Watters has said something original, and to this 33-year-old single adult, it is a long-overdue addition to the national conversation about what being a “grown-up” really means: The old definitions don’t apply, the new ones haven’t been invented, and 20 years suddenly seems like a reasonable amount of time to take to figure them out. If it requires some sociology-lite and a catchy phrase to make this point about the new adulthood, then so be it.

I am pondering all of this when Watters interrupts my thoughts. “I’d love to keep talking about all this some more,” he says wryly. “But I’ve got to go home to my pregnant wife.”

Christian McKinney, the 22-year-old Edinboro University senior who is the main organizer of the conference, was similarly anxious in the days leading up to the event. At some of Palahniuk’s recent speaking engagements, McKinney explains, the author has been asked disconcerting questions: “People were asking him, basically, to tell them how they should live their lives. And when he refused to tell them, they started shouting at him.”

Palahniuk’s three novels, “Fight Club,” “Invisible Monsters” and “Survivor” (the fourth, “Choke,” comes out next month), all hinge on issues of postmodern sexual identity, consumerism and fame, and they’ve struck a chord with fans of contemporary literature as well as the young, suburban outcasts who popularized Palahniuk faves like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. With the cult success of David Fincher’s 1999 film adaptation of “Fight Club” — starring Brad Pitt, Ed Norton and Helena Bonham Carter as nihilistic characters who create an ominous underworld culture revolving around floating bare-knuckle fistfights — the author’s fame spiraled in both the ivory tower and on the streets. While teachers such as Edinboro University literature professor Janet Kinch were teaching Palahniuk in their courses, less scholarly fans were allegedly punching each other’s lights out in real-life “fight clubs” across the country.

It’s hard to know for sure, though, because, according to Palahniuk’s novel, the first rule of fight club is: You don’t talk about fight club. With the beginning of the Palahniuk conference on April 6, however, any anxiety about potential violence has faded. Edinboro’s University Center multipurpose room is filled with well over 100 of the 165 Palahniuk enthusiasts who signed up for the event, and it’s apparent that the “fight-clubbers” failed to make the journey. Most of the men in attendance, like the yuppie narrator at the beginning of “Fight Club,” look like they haven’t been in a fight since the schoolyard bully called their mother a bitch in the hall after science class. Apparently, such topics as “The Quest for Fulfillment: An Analysis of Recurring Themes and Character Motivation in the Works of Chuck Palahniuk” and “Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be: Postmodernism and ‘Fight Club’” appealed more to the bookworms than the basement brawlers.

Still, the audience watching the screening of Fincher’s film, which was interrupted by a Q&A session with Palahniuk himself, is a mixed bag of 21st century types. Among the attendees, mostly in their 20s, are obvious devotees of the self-destructive heroine of “Fight Club,” Marla Singer — goth girls in faded prom dresses, black boots or pink hair. One Marla, clad in leather, eyes blackened by mascara rather than barroom blows, is taping every word the auto mechanic-turned-author says. “You have to see my microphones,” she says to another fan with a digital recorder. “They cost a thousand dollars.”

Obsessive documentation seems to be the order of the day — there are at least four video cameras, numerous digital audio recorders and all manner of photo amateurs, uploaders and cellphone junkies. The crew from Chuck Palahniuk.net is even filming a documentary. Beside the Marlas sit the emulators of Tyler Durden, the gleefully violent antihero of “Fight Club”: college boys with pompadours or goatees, uniformly clad in brown leather jackets.

Sitting in front of me are two Tylers whom I recognize from the check-in line at the appropriately run-down and ant-infested Edinboro Ramada Inn. During the screening, I can hear them whispering along with Tyler as he states his masculinist philosophy. “We’re a generation of men raised by women,” they both mouth, and I get the impression they might break out in high-fives at any moment. “I’m not sure another woman is what we need.”

But mixed in with the Tylers and Marlas are people who look more like graduate students, as well as writers and literature buffs who’ve driven and flown from as far away as Arizona, Oklahoma, Michigan and Long Island, N.Y., to take part in a 48-hour celebration and discussion of an author whose work, many of them feel, will one day take its place on the classics shelf.

“I see ['Fight Club'] as a cultural marker for the 1990s and this decade,” says Kinch, whose appreciation of Palahniuk’s fiction was an impetus for the conference. “The conflicts it brings up — we’re not talking about outcasts of society, trying to see how they can fit into society. We’re seeing mainstream ‘normal’ folks, who look normal, and have normal jobs, being so desperately unhappy. They’re living lives not only of quiet desperation — they’re not even living! And I think that’s how ‘Fight Club’ really resonates with all of us.”

“This work is … very entertaining — a lot of people from our age group really relate to this material, and to this kind of humor,” says McKinney. “Plus, it’s very fresh — this isn’t an author who’s been dead for 100 years, this is an opportunity to discuss this work for the first time and not rely on criticism that’s been handed down like dogma.”

Some of the weekend’s presentations seem only tangentially connected to Palahniuk and his work. “The big lesson of stage combat,” says a theater student demonstrating some techniques, “is that groin kicks are very, very popular.” Then there’s the roundtable discussion on coping mechanisms (“Because I Can’t Hit Bottom, I Can’t Be Saved”), the interpretive dance series performed by a group of Mercyhurst College students and several other “creative works.” The performances aren’t as off-base though, as they might at first seem. Many conference-goers like Palahniuk’s fiction because he excels at depicting characters who are drawn from the auditorium of consumer culture and into real life.

“The major device [in each novel] is the secondary character who catalyzes growth and enlightens the narrator,” states Scott Heckmann of UCLA in his paper “Chuck Palahniuk’s Fiction.” “Palahniuk’s [work] influences the reader the same way his secondary characters influence the main character. Palahniuk is Tyler Durden, Brandy Alexander [from "Invisible Monsters"] and Fertility Hollis [from "Survivor"]; he is the character that finds a hero in a spectator. By causing the reader to become the central character, in the end, the reader is also heroic.”

In his presentation on “Fight Club: Beating Men Out of Submission,” Bowling Green State University graduate student Rafael Colon Gonzalez agrees: “Tyler Durden’s role in creating fight club is to save these men who are controlled by capitalism. The violence that Tyler wants men to take hold of is normally only fed to them as spectators.”

One presenter, Edinboro student Mike Oelke, went so far as to say that the reining in of their violent instincts and the relegation of men to the spectator stands is the root of many men’s inability to cope with society. In “Human Services and Their Failure as a Therapeutic Tool for Men,” Oelke says that “what makes men feel good about themselves is being able to look in the mirror and see a man they can respect — not a coward, not a slave, not a charlatan. This can only be achieved by the building of character. From a young age, little boys are taught that when they have a problem … they settle it ‘like men.’ So they fight. This rite of passage has been taken away from today’s man, and we’re all suffering for it.”

At the Boro Bar, Edinboro’s most tolerable watering hole, a motley crew of Chuck-heads gathers. Across the table from me, James Dolph talks about his own conference presentation, “Chuck Palahniuk’s Virulent Burroughsian Visions.” A student of the beat school, Dolph savors Palahniuk’s paranoia. But I also recall that during one of the Q&A sessions with Palahniuk he proposed that “Invisible Monsters” was, perhaps, an homage of sorts to C.S. Lewis’ “‘Til We Have Faces.” (Palahniuk said he hadn’t read Lewis’ reworking of the Cupid and Psyche myth.)

Dolph studies full time as a graduate student in literature at the University of Central Oklahoma, and then works 40-hour/three-day weekends as a nurse at the Oklahoma City Jail. His eyes are chronically shadowed from lack of sleep. He thinks a lot about literature and how it relates to the harsh environment that surrounds him.

“You know Terry Nichols, McVeigh’s accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing?” asks Dolph with an Okie drawl, explaining why he hates his job. “I see him every day at work. The worst part of it is that he’s so nice. These murderers are always so nice! It makes you long for the Mansons, guys you could instantly recognize as what they are.

“Sometimes,” Dolph continues, raging against the hardcore criminals he’s grown to despise, “I put a sign up behind my desk that says [quoting "Fight Club"] — ‘You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.’ But they don’t even get it.”

What does the author himself think of this kaleidoscope of responses to his work? “It’s incredibly exciting,” says Palahniuk. “Not so much that they’re dealing with the books themselves, but that they’re dealing with the issues raised in the books. It’s an exploration of these issues, not just a big Chuck love- or hate-fest. Now people are looking at these issues, and it’s like a continuation of what the books were supposed to create.”

Wherever Palahniuk goes during the conference, a long line of attendees seeking his attention forms. They want the longhaired, casually dressed anti-guru to weigh in on their theories about his novels, or to autograph a paperback, or simply to shake their hands.

The conference may have escaped the fight clubbing that some feared, but there is a certain degree of geekishness that can’t be ignored: An obsessive fan corrects Palahniuk on the finer points of which screenwriter added which lines to the Fincher film, and during his wrap-up Q&A on Saturday afternoon, the author deftly parries the question “Given the choice, would you rather be a robot or a vampire?” And, like all good cult phenomena, Palahniuk’s writing inspires his readers to construct their own version of the story by imagining what happens to his characters off the page.

There is, however, a more immediate reason that Palahniuk’s work resonates with the grad students and barflies who have made the migration to Edinboro.

“It’s the way we all want to write,” explains Dennis Widmyer of Chuck Palahniuk.net. “He has a style that’s so simple and to the point, and yet no one writes in that way — it’s written from the gut. He writes about things that we’re all thinking, but we don’t say. His stuff has all been done before, but his books are kind of antiestablishment.”

When I meet up again with Christian McKinney, he looks like he hasn’t slept in days — to him, at this point, everything seems like “a copy of a copy of a copy,” as the narrator in “Fight Club” assesses insomnia. For the past week, McKinney has devoted his every moment to working out conference details. The project began over a year ago, when Kinch asked McKinney to come up with a name, someone he’d like to bring in as a guest speaker for the university honors program. When McKinney brought her the name Chuck Palahniuk, he thought she wouldn’t have heard of him or his books.

“I got the biggest grin on my face,” says Kinch. “I just wanted to say, well, maybe I’m not quite as out of touch as you think! When he said that he’d really like to have [Palahniuk] as a guest speaker, I said no, we’re going to hold a conference.”

Palahniuk took a bit of persuading.

“I had three books out at that point,” says Palahniuk. “I was questioning whether or not I really had anything to offer. It just doesn’t seem much of a body of work to hold a conference on. But Janet and Christian were so insistent — how could I say no to that kind of request?

For a small college like Edinboro, celebrating an unconventional young writer with a cult following turned out to be an inspired choice. “Edinboro is not really known as a terribly academic center,” says Kinch, “and for us to be able to do something that’s cutting edge — it gives us some notoriety. But more importantly, the fact that our students will get something out of this, it’s not just a media event, it’s not just a blip on the TV.”

Speaking to the entire conference, the irreverent young author at the center of it all gets decidedly caught up in the enthusiasm.

“If I read a book, and it’s incredibly well-written,” Palahniuk says in his keynote address, “I read it quickly as much out of enjoyment as out of the fact that it makes me want to write. Creation that generates creation is the highest tribute. I would say that there is going to be work coming out of this room that vastly dwarfs my work, and that is the greatest tribute … that could ever be given to me.” After his speech, Palahniuk adds privately, “If I can be part of a catalyst to creating a generation that revolutionizes its culture, my God — I can’t think of anything I’d rather do! I seriously want my books to be forgotten [due to] the mass of extraordinary work that these people create.”