A car-crashing rabies-spreading black-toothed inbred redneck puts America on hold by spreading the next human super virus. That’s about all I can explain to you about the plot of Chuck Palahniuk’s newest book, Rant: the Oral Biography of Buster Casey before your head melts and your stomach decides to consume your liver. That, or you would probably shoot me for ruining the most satisfying surprise ending since Fight Club. So be forewarned, there may be spoilers but I’ll try not to make them very obvious. Promise.
We enter after Buster “Rant” Casey has been reported dead, but not before spreading a reign of terror across a near-future America in the form of auto-wrecks and communicable diseases. This is an America divided into night and day, poor and rich, privileged and in need; an America swept up in fear over an incurable new form of rabies created inside Rant’s body that has spread across the country turning normal people into something out of 28 Days Later. Imagine seeing a stripper getting her toes bitten off right out of her platform shoes. Real cold shower for everybody.
Originally from down South, Buster has been bitten, stung, maimed and mauled by so many animals he’s basically become a human Petri dish who gets black widow bites for fun. He spent his childhood years bamboozling the townsfolk as often as he could in the sick prankster way that Palahniuk (and myself) seem to enjoy. Strangely, though, he was always surrounded by the eeriness of death and, after he migrated out of the city, began joining in with groups of automobile-tilting youngsters called “party crashers.”
To explain, party crashing involves people getting into specially decorated cars (”Just Married” cars, ones with Christmas ornaments and trees, some as a full dinner tables, etc.) and touring around the highway crashing into each other for points and general amusement. This eventually culminates into Rant’s last sighting and public disappearance, steering a car with a decorations up top all aflame, chased by dozens of police, party crashers and media as he drives off to his certain death. But for some reason, people seem to think that he’s still around. Is he Jesus? Elvis? The real Michael Jackson? Everything boils down to an insane, mind-bending conclusion in the tradition of Shyamalon and Stephen King only better, and not as stupid though just as outlandishly weird.
Make sense? Not at all? Good. I haven’t given anything away then.
From a car salesman to a traffic expert to a radio personality to a cop named Bacon, pretty much everybody has something to say about Buster Casey. The structure of the book is based entirely on direct quotation from those who know about or have met Buster. This is an extremely interesting literary technique that Palahniuk uses, and it offers unique perspectives on the situation, putting you into a room of Kennedy assassination theorists, squabbling over crossfire and rumor. Lovers, enemies, friends, strangers and just about everybody except Rant himself has a chance to speak, giving light to many dark corners but only in narrow rays, obscuring the whole picture until the novel is finally complete. This makes a second reading just as fun as the first when you can spend hours picking out clues from the details, the symbols and the lies.
Though Palahniuk uses it skillfully in his slow and specific revelation of details, he fails to realize how pervasive his voice really is, and almost every character sounds like Palahniuk putting on a different accent or costume. Though disguised fairly cleverly, each character begins to use the factoids and wry humor you’d expect from Tyler Durden, except from a person who speaks only in questions, or a redneck sheriff with quite a negative disposition.
His skill with absurd detail is also a plus. From Rant’s tar-black teeth to his booger collection pockmarked on his wall from childhood, the real story of Rant is revealed through his artifacts and eccentricities, a recurring theme of the novel being a study in the means through which history is recorded.
Palahniuk uses his new America as a parody of our own, weighted under the thumb of terrorist attacks and fear. His poisoned U.S.A. is too near a facsimile to ours to ignore and offers a shuddering “what if…” to our destiny as well as dishing out radical ways to change it. Though not particularly refined in his political views, he does offer a general pessimism towards authority in general and lays it on the individual to produce any real change.
A devastatingly brilliant though essentially flawed work, Palahniuk has made another novel that is insightful, entertaining, intelligent and inventive but was unable to silence his voice in service of his characters. As a result, their narration becomes secondary to his overwhelming style, and the book falls just short of its goal.
By T.O. Lawrence
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