I Read Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Rant’.
Chuck has a voice that gave me the feeling of riding a bike without training wheels for the first time. I never knew something could feel like this. In my early twenties, I was reading fantasy novels and science fiction to get a fix on fiction that wasn’t being shown in theaters or television. I didn’t believe that fiction could simultaneously be grounded in reality and also tell stories that spilled the surface tension that kept the rules in place. I didn’t realize that people were telling stories in a way that sounded like they had you sat down in a local diner with coffee coming at you in endless flights, each sip older and more rotten than the last. I didn’t realize that noir didn’t mean wearing a fedora.
It has been several years since I checked out a book by Palahniuk and in my RNG way of selecting the next book I would take on, Rant came up. I was excited. But along with the excitement came the ‘flood’ of emotion that was tied to this novel. Wasn’t this the book that started to detach fans of his? Wasn’t this the book that started rumors that he was starting to lose his touch? Wasn’t this the book that I avoided eye contact with for over a decade? — It was. But it seems that time healed all wounds and I wasn’t ready to finally give up on owning this copy after all. I am so glad that I stuck with this one.
This book opens up in the darkness of human conversational small talk, connecting the lives of strangers in a hideous web all connecting back to Rant Casey, a local boy to all local places, the genesis of a superspreader, and the way that, in some way, his infamy has outgrown his pocket of the earth, infamous as Jesse James. The way these early conversations establish Rant Casey, our main [pro/ant]agonist, and the way the story is told from the perspective of his neighbors, family members, schoolmates and passersby, it builds such an interesting and scraped over world. It feels, in some way, like cities are either gone or blind to the plight of these underworld problems. Everything feels fringe. Everything feels undergrowth. I love it.
This book shifts around a decent bit, from the origin story of Rant and the way that he/we long to feel something by any means necessary. This opens up a window to one of the main fronts of the book which is Party Crashing, a live action destruction derby style nightlife that takes place in the neighborhood streets and on the interstate. They tag each other, build impromptu teams, wreck, ruin and collide. This portion of the book somewhat lost me, mostly because I was so intrigued by the People of this book, by the ‘townsfolk’ and the mythos of Rant himself. The way these people got in cars and hunted each other down was just another analog for the lengths we’ll go to in order to feel something, in order to brush with authenticity. To live.
And from here, truly, the book takes another step into another direction that totally surprised me. So much comes together, so much comes to light, so much is explained and dissected that you really have to read the final quarter to believe the folklore of Rant himself.
I really did love this book, end of the day. While it did lose me in certain actions, the style and speed of the novel kept me in the entire time. I knew that every 5–10 pages, I’d get a line so excellent that I’d be reaching for a pen. I love that this book can be about any drifter, any townie, any man at the end of the bar, any guy you see standing at the corner for months. This is a story about all the things you’ve ever heard about someone you’ve never met. And it is all done in a magnificent Chuck style.
