|
Rant, an Oral Bio by Palahniuk |
|
|
|
|
Sunday, 05 October 2008 |
|
Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for presenting characters one hates to love (think Tyler Durden in Fight Club, charismatic and boisterous but with fascist tendencies). In Rant: An Oral Biography, Buster “Rant” Casey is the kid you remember from elementary school who was always dirty and smelled of urine and old tampons, but he fascinated you because he flustered the teacher.
The reader learns—through the ranting (pun intended) of family, friends, acquaintances, doctors, and psychologists—Rant’s story; the story involves rabies, the tooth fairy, a trained, heightened sense of smell and taste, a game involving people crashing their cars into one another, virtual reality implanted in your brain a la Matrix, time travel, and a possible case of incest.
In one of the lighter scenes of the novel, the reader learns how Rant received his name from a Halloween prank he pulled off where he made all the school children in his town vomit. Remember those Halloween parties where you were blindfolded, and then told to put your hand into a bowl of “brains” and “eyes”? Take out the quotation marks and you have kids ranting after touching cow eyeballs and pig intestines.
Tension develops in the novel through the use of a myriad of contradictory anecdotes detailing not only Rant’s life but also the setting of the story: a pseudo-apocalyptic future where over-population has led to laws that relegate people to “Day-timers” and “Night-timers,” and in which the government has an Orwellian eye on its citizens.
The anecdotes are entertaining, leaving the reader wondering what is real and what is artifice, until the final fourth of the book when Palahniuk tries to explain all the obscure time travel and rabies he has deftly introduced; rather than leave the reader in the dark with the freedom to use his own imagination. It is like food poisoning. You enjoy the meal while you eat it, but then you are left (excuse the pun) ranting afterwards. Palahniuk should stay away from the pseudo-sci-fi and stick to the pseudo-Gothic he is much more talented at.
\J. Aparicio\FIU Student\
|
News 
