The Observer, April 27, 2007
Volume XXXIX, Issue 26
Palahniuk scores big with new writing style and new novel
Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club, Survivor, and numerous other darkly comic modern masterpieces) was reported to have made people pass out while publicly reading a short story from his last novel, Haunted.
Palahniuk's new book, Rant, is a return to form for the 'Kurt Vonnegut' of our times, tackling such topics as immortality, government oppression, rape, car crashes, history, and the wild spread of plagues. After a somewhat disappointing venture into more fantastical, mythological stories (Diary and Haunted), Palahniuk's Rant is a complex story firmly grounded in modern times.
The new book is prefaced with a warning: "This book is written in the style of an oral history, a form that requires interviewing a wide variety of witnesses and compiling their testimony." Palahniuk's innovative narrative combines eight different books in only 200-300 pages. Each group of common-topic paragraphs is recorded as being said by a particular character who had previously known the main character, Rant "Buster" Casey. The oral biography details Casey's complicated life from alternating points of view, after his supposed death. In summary, the book is some thing of a literary documentary.
This is a new way of writing works, especially for Palahniuk. After reading all of his other books, I had grown tired of his choppy, often repetitive writing. The split narrative in Rant works: there is no repetition (characters speak in their own dialect and never repeat the same story more than once), and the alternating of characters perfectly breaks up Palahniuk's normal stream-of-consciousness writing.
I can't begin to describe what this book is about without giving too much away. The official synopsis summarizes the novel (about an "evil character who may or may not have been the most efficient serial killer of our time") as a story about Buster Casey, "a small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies." Buster Casey is the typical "high school rebel who always wins...a leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashers...[and a producer of] saliva [that] infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies."
Rant is a truly introspective look at today's society, commenting and documenting our lives better than any Encyclopedia Britannica. Although I finished the book fast, I'd recommend a double, triple, maybe even a fourth re-reading of the novel. There is just too much lurking beneath the surface to wrap your head around the first time through.
Fight Club, this is not. It's better. While first paging through the book, I seriously doubted spending my time reading this novel. I'm glad I did. Put down your organic chemistry books, and read Rant! Seriously. You'll have another week to study for finals. If Rant Casey comes along anytime soon, you just may not be so lucky.
