Book Review: Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk

I hadn't intended to read this book. When the chance to review it was offered to me, I had just finished reading and writing about Choke. As I said at the time, I think Chuck Palahniuk is a damn good writer, but his style, his attitude, his subject matter are all things that I can only handle in small doses.

But there I was, opening up my package, and tucked away beneath American Youth was Palahniuk's latest, Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey (published by Random House Canada). Oh well, I thought, I guess I'll read it. After all, I do have a train ride coming up. Plus, I thought, it'll be a good exercise to try and come up with something new to say, something different than just rehashing my conflicted feelings about the angry young man's poster author.

Turned out to be an easy exercise, finding something different to say, because Rant is something different from other Palahniuk works that I've read. There are similarities — descriptions of bodily effluvia, sociopathic behaviour explained as raging against the machine, repulsive characters, casual sex, boys and their mothers and compulsively readable writing are nothing new for Palahniuk. There's enough here to quickly identify Rant as a Palhaniukian work.

While the themes and the tics might be the same, though, the form is something different. The first thing you encounter in Rant is an author's note:

This book is written in the style of an oral history, a form which requires interviewing a wide variety of witnesses and compiling their testimony. Anytime multiple sources are questioned about a shared experience, it's inevitable for them occasionally to contradict each other.

Instead of Palahniuk's traditional, unreliable first person narrator, in Rant we encounter a series of voices, of whose accounts we are forewarned to be skeptical. This is a forehead-smackingly obvious choice in its perfection for Palahniuk, who has always seemed fascinated by the lies of self-agrandizement and self-flagellation. Are these narrators victims of the foibles of memory? Or are the consciously creating mythologies to support the lives that they have chosen?

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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