Way back when this website was called Space Junk, we posted reviews of just about everything, from music to movies to books. So when I was given the chance to review the latest book from Chuck Palahniuk, I figured it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch… especially considering the fact that he also wrote Fight Club. The following is my take on his newest effort, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey:

Chuck Palahniuk is one of those rare authors that is able to speak for a generation, whether he means to or not. At a time when reading as a hobby is dying out and books are pitted against the stiffest competition they have ever faced, Palahniuk manages to hook 18 to 24 year old readers in with his terse, funny, conversational writing style and dark subject matter. The fact that he rose to fame after his first book, Fight Club, was adapted to a movie seems all the more fitting, considering the modern media-savvy audience he appeals to.

In recent years, however, Palahniuk has been branching out a bit, and in some ways even risked alienating his fans by releasing an eclectic variety of books, from a travelogue of Portland, Oregon, to a collection of non-fiction essays, to a compilation of short form horror stories, his latest output has been all over the map. And then there’s his last true novel, Diary, a book that many fans criticized for being agonizingly slow and dry. With Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, we have Palahniuk returning to something much closer to the feel of his first few books, which should have many of his readers breathing a sigh of relief. That said, he still felt the need to inject a unique twist: the book is written in the form of an “oral history”, a style used for non-fiction books where chunks of interviews are organized in order to recount events from multiple perspectives. Unfortunately, while I admire the attempt, I’m not quite convinced that it works so well for a fictional story.

The synopsis for Rant describes it as being about a “serial killer”, which is somewhat misleading in retrospect. Buster “Rant” Casey is a disturbed kid who, growing up, becomes addicted to poison from insect and rodent bites. Eventually he contracts rabies, and his body inadvertently creates a new strain of the virus allowing him to pass it on to many others through his saliva. He is far from a malevolent creature, and is never referred to as a serial killer in the book at all. Eventually, the whole rabies thing kind of takes a backseat to other aspects of his life, which includes becoming a part of a strange subculture known as “party crashers”: young disillusioned kids who take part in a secret underground demolition derby on city streets. Gee, remind you of another secret underground club Palahniuk has written about before?

The first half of the book details Rant’s childhood in the small town of Middleton, and while dark in tone, for the most part it’s just kind of dull. The second half takes an unexpected turn as it feels like Palahniuk suddenly watched a handful of David Cronenberg movies (Crash and Existenz in particular), and introduces some weird sci-fi elements including something he refers to as “boosting peaks” (a way to record someone’s sensory experiences and then play them back like a movie that feeds directly into your brain). By the end, there is also a time travel element that comes out of left field and really throws you for a loop. Normally I’m a fan of science fiction, but this book gets progressively more and more fantastical as it goes, until it starts to feel a little too schizophrenic.

The problem with the oral history format that he uses in this book is that the true joy of reading Palahniuk has always been getting into his character’s heads, and hearing their voice (or Palahniuk’s voice, as the case may be) come through in the quick pacing, snappy rhythm and the sarcastic wording he uses. This time around, you have a whole bunch of random people talking about the main character in their own voices, and ultimately leaving you very distanced from him. Maybe the mystery was intended to keep you reading, but the upshot is that you just don’t care about him or anyone else involved in the story. Because these are supposed to be real interviews, it also draws attention to the dialogue when it suddenly becomes a little too wordy for country bumpkin-types. It’s hard to maintain the illusion, and there are so many people talking that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

Many of the characters expound their knowledge of odd topics throughout the book, as Palahniuk characters often tend to do. This time around the offbeat trivia includes things like the biological effect of rabies, psychological tactics of car salesmen, conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, and the concepts of liminal and liminoid space. While many of these subjects were intriguing in their own right, sometimes they felt shoehorned in and didn’t connect with anything else in the story. At other times it seems like Palahniuk is being crass just for the sake of being abrasive, or because it’s expected of him. As original as the book might seem, it still ends up feeling like it’s been done before, especially with the religious undertones that crop up.

Overall, Rant was still an interesting read, but there wasn’t much of a plot and it never came together as a satisfying or cohesive whole for me. I know some people feel that Palahniuk is overrated as a writer, and that Fight Club in particular was really a lot of B.S. masquerading as something deep and meaningful. For me Fight Club did have substance to it; it was poignant and relevant and written with such sharp, sly prose that you simply couldn’t put it down. With Rant, however, I can’t help feeling that he missed the mark, although to be fair, there are enough familiar elements here that most Palahniuk fans will still enjoy it. Who knows, maybe I just won’t fully “get it” until I see the feature film. All I know is that Palahniuk isn’t likely to attract many new fans with this one, but it’s still somehow comforting to have him back writing his patented brand of transgressional fiction again. — Sean

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