Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant

After having read Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Rant – An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, I feel dirty. I feel used. I feel manipulated. And then I feel silly for being surprised at how I feel.  After all, it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, right?  Should anybody be surprised at being surprised by one of his books?  Especially after seven previous novels, beginning with 1996's Fight Club, that do anything but walk the straight and narrow.

What's most interesting about Rant is the format Palahniuk uses to convey the fictional story of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, who may or may not be the most prolific murderer (albeit through highly original means) in the history of the world. Rant is written as an oral history, basically using quotes from other characters relating anecdotes and observations about Rant Casey after his supposed death in a car crash.  In the case of Rant Casey, the fact that no one single witness can be believed to be telling the absolute, objective truth serves to mythologize, almost deify, the character.  This is good, though, because it sets the reader up for the inevitable plot twist that we know is coming (although we never really know what that twist is until it is staring us in the face).

After a brief introduction where a car salesman explains how he met Rant's father on a plane as he was escorting his son's body home we're given a history of Rant's early years, where he was quite the oddball in his small hometown.  He is blessed with a superhuman sense of smell and could guess who certain discarded items belonged to just by sniffing them.  He sticks his arms into holes in the desert in the hopes of getting bitten by whatever strange animal or insect lives therein, in an effort to experience the pain and priapic effects of the various venoms and poisons the bites usually include. In time, Rant leaves his hometown for the big city, which is demographically divided into Daytimers and Nighttimers, neither of whom is allowed in public between certain hours of the day.  Naturally, Rant is a Nighttimer and hooks up with a group of people who are into Party Crashing, a kind of mutually consensual demolition derby that takes place on the city's public roads. The Crashers dress up their cars with “Just Married” streamers and tin cans or with Student Driver signs or other agreed-upon getups and hunt each other down, all in the hopes of inflicting damage to the opponents' cars.  Along the way we are introduced to all the people who knew Rant and they tell us their seemingly unimportant and unrelated anecdotes about him.  What's impressive about all this is that Palahniuk effortlessly drifts from character to character, easily adapting his dialogue style into many different voices.  We really do get the feeling that these people are relating their stories through the author, and that they're not just made up characters.

Palahniuk has said that he decided to write a novel in this oral history format after reading Edie Sedgwick's biography, finding it to be a digestible form.  He's right on that count:  Rant is definitely an easy-going read, although it takes almost half the book's 300-plus pages before we finally start to see something taking shape.  Stick with it, though, because the payoff is brilliant.  This is trademark Palahniuk, a slow buildup to the halfway point of the novel, then an almost-as-slow denouement, with everything coming together to the point where the reader is knocking himself in the head saying, “Of course!  I should have seen that coming a mile away.” It's a credit to Palahniuk's talent as a storyteller that we never do see it coming.  The fact that he can dream up a not-too-distant future including Party Crashing and neural-transcript boosting (wherein people download other people's experiences through ports in the back of their necks), throw in some informational tidbits about infectious diseases and so-called “superspreaders”, some theological and time-travel discussions, and even go so far as to make us question our very concept of reality, all while keeping us interested in the outcome of Rant Casey's life story, just goes to show that Chuck Palahniuk deserves much more than the cult status he currently enjoys.  He is truly one of the greats of modern literary fiction.

So yeah, I feel dirty, used, and manipulated.  But you know what?  With a Chuck Palahniuk novel, I wouldn't have it any other way.