Before going on to list the things that are great about Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Rant, I want to point out what looks like a major flaw in Palahniuk's writing. But in order to do this, I'll draw an unlikely parallel between Palahniuk and, of all people, Humphrey Bogart.
Humphrey Bogart, who made an art of playing the wiseguy loner who acts according to his own internal moral script in a corrupt world, is one of many Hollywood Icons who share a major flaw: they cannot, in the traditional sense, "act."
That is, they do not, from one film to the next, change personas. Instead, what one always sees in any character that Humphrey Bogart plays is the same character, dressed up with a different plot, background, and girlfriend, but essentially unchanged. The Bogart character in Sierra Madre does not significantly differ from the Bogart character in The Big Sleep. Nor, in The Big Sleep, is Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe anywhere represented.
What we get is Bogart. Or, more specifically, the singular character that Bogart chooses to play, again and again with slight variation. Perhaps it is better to assume that Bogart could indeed act, but that he chose to project a certain character because that character defined what he wanted to say about the world.
Bogart never sounds like a broken record, he always fascinates, but his presence on the screen means that we are about to engage with, once again, the "Bogart Character," and if we were hoping for something entirely new, or hoping for an actor who would allow his or her role to take over, we are sure to be disappointed.
The same is very true of Rant. Constructed as an "oral history" of one Buster "Rant" Casey, patient zero in a worldwide rabies epidemic, the book is told from many conflicting, often contradictory viewpoints, including the deceased main character's mother, a used car salesman who met his father, his friends who engage in recreational automobile crashing, a sheriff from his hometown, and a myriad of psychologists, media, coin collectors, and others.
As the book continues in every chapter to "up the ante," becoming more and more frenetic, unlikely, and surreal with each page, we see that these characters are thinly disguised mouthpieces of the same single entity. It is one we have seen before. It is the familiar, nameless narrator of Fight Club, Daisy St. Patience from Invisible Monsters, and Tender Branson of Survivor.
In fact, it is recognizably the voice of every single Chuck Palahniuk creation, and the voice of Chuck Palahniuk "himself" in Stranger than Fiction: A highly sensitive, self-destructive, jaded, detail-obsessed outsider struggling to find meaning in a culture spiraling out of control. A character on the brink of death or self-dissolution, with something urgent to say. The character appears with a different guise in every novel, but the sentence structures, the obsessions, the rhetorical questions, mark the characters as all being, essentially, one and the same narrator.
The major innovation of Rant is in shattering this narrator into many facets within the pages of one book. And the end effect is excellent: the novel itself, like the world it portrays, appears divided, sheared down many lines, including the major one of respectable "Daytimers" and the more sinister, "Nighttimers" who can play Swiftian stand-in for many of society's cast-offs.
In the end, we know who is talking. It is the consistent voice we have been hearing since the 1996 publication of Fight Club, and it is a voice that is unlikely to vary over the (hopefully very lengthy) period of Palahniuk's creative endeavor. If it a voice that fascinates you, the way that Bogart does on screen, you wait for the next novel to come out so you can hear it speak again. If it a voice that repulses, you are unlikely to get, it seems, anything "different" fromPalahniuk . His plots and structures may be innovative and richly filled with new ideas but the song, as "they" say, remains the same. Luckily, it's a good one.
