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A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia [written in 2007]
“Even Chuck Palahniuk's most devoted followers will have a hard time getting through RANT (2007), a book about thrill-seeking that is devoid of a single thrill. As insipid as they are, at least Palahniuk's other books are EZ-2-Read. RANT, however, is not merely stupid---it is also deadeningly, mind-numbingly tedious. While trudging through its pages, the essence of boredom was revealed to me.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-11-09.
RANT is composed of endlessly babbling voices. Each voice narrates a piece of Buster Casey's life, a Typhoid Mary who has spread rabies across the United States. But there is nothing new to be learned about Casey after the sixth page (pages one through six are titled, imaginatively, "An Introduction") and what we do know is never vividly or convincingly described. To be absolutely explicit: The plot doesn't move. It stagnates. There is no progression. No motor drives the narrative. Nothing is narrated between pages 7 through 319 that hasn't been narrated in the first six pages.
Anything that seems to be remotely original comes from somewhere else. The book's epigraph was pilfered from Atom Egoyan's EXOTICA (1994), the oral-biographical structure was pillaged from Stephen King (CARRIE), the "Party Crashers" narrative was fobbed wholesale from J.G. Ballard's CRASH, a narrative that dominates the book to such an extent that it would have been better titled BALLARD FOR KINDERGARTENERS or BALLARD MADE EZ. (Casey IS Vaughan from CRASH. Yes, there is repetition in CRASH, but it is repetition with purpose, repetition with nuance, repetition with difference. Here, there is only the infinite repetition of the Same.) The Tarzanesque pseudo-sentence, "How the future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday" (pages 4 and 253) was plagiarized from French poet and thinker Paul Valery ("The problem with the present is that the future is no longer what it used to be"). The illiterately worded statement, "History is, it's just a nightmare" (p. 60) was lifted directly from Karl Marx, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE. (Not that Palahniuk has READ Valery or Marx, mind you. These aphorisms can be found in BARTLETT'S BOOK OF FAMOUS QUOTATIONS.) Even the rabies motif was thieved. David Cronenberg's RABID (1976), anyone?
Reeking with unearned profundity, RANT is littered with the kind of syllogisms one finds in fortune cookies, statements of the obvious that are presented as "deep truths": "Rant meant that no one is happy, anywhere" (p. 12). Who DOESN'T know that car-salesmen mimic the body language of potential clients?
Even more galling than the book's content is its illiterate language. Nearly every other sentence has a double subject. For instance: "The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what's it he wants to drink" (p. 2). A slightly less awkward, slightly less annoying way of writing the sentence would be: "The flight attendant asks a hillbilly what he would like to drink." Palahniuk, however, insists on multiplying the subjects in his sentences _ad nauseam_, with unbearably irritating results. Palahniuk's defendants claim that he isn't really as dimwitted as he seems to be, that his narrators are merely functionally illiterate. If that is the case, they must explain why Palahniuk interviews in a functionally illiterate manner, why he writes essays in a functionally illiterate manner, and why every character in his universe is functionally illiterate, including those who hold doctorates. If Palahniuk is merely impersonating a lobotomized orangutan on heroin, why would he write essays and speak in exactly the same simian language?
And so we have the grating misusage of the word, "liminal"---over and over and over and over again... We have Phoebe Truffeau, Ph.D., who uses phrases such as "prohibitions to [sic] bestiality" (p. 82). We have teachers who say things such as, "That Elliot girl, she told me the Tooth Fairy left [the coin] in exchange for a tooth she'd lost" (p. 52) and "Money you don't work to earn, you spend very quickly" (p. 54). We have Lowell Richards, teacher, who uses the phrase "indirectly and obliquely" (p. 99). Whenever Palahniuk tries to write "like the smart people do," he reveals himself as a half-wit.
And we have unspeakably hideous sentence fragments such as: "The ice melt and disappear" (p. 2), "somebody's died tomorrow," etc., etc., etc. Whenever Palahniuk tries to revise a cliche, such as Andy Warhol's overly-cited declaration, "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes," he comes up with a monstrosity: "In the future, everyone will sit next to someone famous for at least fifteen minutes" (p. 5). Palahniuk's revision makes no sense: I'm assuming that "everyone" includes "the famous," which implies, of course, that in the future, the famous will also sit next to the famous.
Perhaps most offensively, RANT states, in a particularly infantile passage, that AIDS is a "disease" that has been "spread" by a single carrier---that it is a "disease" like any other disease---when, in fact, AIDS is a syndrome of diseases, a pandemic, for which no single individual is accountable.
Allegedly, "RANT" refers to the sound that babies make when they vomit. Now, I've never actually heard a baby make such a noise, but perhaps one should take the "author" at his word. The title seems perfectly appropriate. Simplistic, stupid, superficial, tedious, and derivative, RANT is the verbal equivalent of chunks of regurgitate.
The same could be said of all of Palahniuk's "works," which are not based on the imagination (the "author" seemingly has no imagination whatsoever), but rather on whatever he is leafing through at the present moment. Palahniuk has admitted that his books are collages of interviews he has had with random people in bars and at parties, as well as the four or five non-fiction books he leases from his local public library every time he sits down to write a "novel." The rest of the information is "Googled" or directly experienced. [I have already discussed Palahniuk's "indebtedness" above.]
Regrettably, Palahniuk is an incompetent "borrower." There is often the question, in his "books," of relevancy. In SURVIVOR, there is a longish passage on lobster-eating that was lifted word for word from a book on dining etiquette. What, precisely, does this passage have to do with SURVIVOR's narrative? Answer: Absolutely nothing.
Palahniuk wrote LULLABY in three weeks. I'm not entirely certain how much time it took him to disgorge RANT. My guess would be two weekends. I don't say this to praise Palahniuk, as if he were capable of fashioning a well-crafted novel in two weekends with the dexterity of a Picasso, who could toss off a painting in an afternoon. RANT is writing-workshop trash. It reads as if it were a live-journal or Web log written by a subnormal high-school stoner, retched out and fraught with galling errors.
Palahniuk's followers worship their leader as if he were a god. But God is not an artist.
Neither is Chuck Palahniuk.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
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Meandering at times, unfulfilling in the end; Palahniuk needs to regroup...
“I devoured `Rant' like it was a nice fat piece of chocolate cake (complete with thumbtacks) but when all was said and done I can't say that it was as satisfying as that cake would have been. I have been a longstanding fan of Chuck Palahniuk ever since I read `Fight Club'. He has had a string of marvelous page turners (`Invisible Monsters', `Survivor', `Lullaby') and then some not so wonderful contributions (`Choke', `Diary'). Some have noted that Palahniuk rests too heavily on gimmick, and while that is true with `Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey', I don't think that is always the case. On works like `Survivor' or `Fight Club' he completely backed up the gimmick with a complete and focused (in Chuck's schizophrenic kind of way) story.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-14.
`Rant' lacks that focus.
The story is quite complicated, and even when all is said and done I'm still scratching my head a little, trying to figure out if what I think is true is really true. Rant (or Buster) is a disturbing person who infected the world with rabies and committed suicide, but before that he told a bunch of girls what they ate for breakfast, crashed a few cars, stole some money, provoked poisonous animals and married his mother. To understand `Rant' is to crawl inside the head of Palahniuk, which may be a tad difficult on this run. I've always appreciated Chuck's strange imagination, for it possesses a fearless quality that few writers have today (not everyone is going to discuss a booger covered treasure map) but on `Rant' he lets the strange take over his imagination.
Another issue with `Rant' is the regurgitated ideas that roll in from his previous works. There is a likeness to everything from `Choke' to `Lullaby' to the most obvious, `Fight Club'. I never felt that this was so strong as to make the novel feel cheep but it is noteworthy that it appears as if Palahniuk couldn't find a fresh idea. He tries in the end to make something new out of something old, but it comes off rushed and incomplete (Time travel? Really?).
One of the biggest issues I have with `Rant' is the narrative. The structure is hard to follow and hard to keep straight. With so many people thrown in to give their take (often contradictory, which is the one aspect that I actually LIKED) on Buster, it's hard to keep them all straight. In fact, at the end of the novel when they run through all the contributors and where they are now, I was left scratching my head since I couldn't remember half of them.
Not good.
The first half of `Rant' has more merit than the second, for the telling of Buster's home life and adolescence actually holds your interest. He's one crazy little kid, and the happenings in his small town are quite strange, but it's perfectly Palahniuk. The second half suffers from a lack of clear vision, and the whole `Party Crashers' section is overlong and overcooked and rather boring. I struggled to get through the second half, waiting for it to pick up and actually go somewhere, and then when it finally did it was so out there that I kind of found myself wishing he had hung up this idea before attempting to preserve it.
I agree with those who said that maybe Chuck needs to take a break. This is my least favorite of his novels so far. The one thing going for him is that he is unique, and when he uses that to his advantage he delivers us something truly extraordinary (`Invisible Monsters' is one of the greatest novels I've ever read). He just needs some time to find a new inspiration, and then he can "WOW" us again!” -
Fabulous.
“A lot of people say that this book sucks. It is one of my favorites by Chuck. Fight club, obviously good....yes, survivor, yes, invisible monsters, and so on.
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-10-06.
I didn't enjoy Snuff as much, I mean, it is good...but not stunning.
Rant will leave you thinking. It will make you laugh in the only way Chuck can. It's graphic and I cannot wait for his sequels on this book. I recommend!” -
Works better on CD
“This is the first Palahniuk book that I bought on CD and I'm gladd I did. Some of the more negative reviews I've criticized the book for having indistinct characters which I imagine is true when one reads the book, but with a cast of voice talent giving the characters personality, the nuances of their personalities are more easily recognized. I've read everything Palahniuk has written and this is not the best but it is interesting and, as usual, full of insight and Chuck's unique nihilistic take on life.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-09-17. -
0 of 1 members found this review helpful.
Palahniuk, he hits bottom
“This book, it's Palahniuk's poorest effort. The characters, they all use the same style of speaking. The plot, it never truly develops. The protagonists, they're really just canvases for the author to splatter shocking characteristics onto. Palahniuk's books, I've read every one and after Fight Club they all started marching toward mediocrity. Trying to constantly shock the reader, it gets very tiresome. Time travel, it's a lazy method of resolving the main conflict. This book, it's not worth the time.”
An amazon user wrote this on 2009-07-05.
