Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk
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Book Summary Information
Author: Chuck PalahniukEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-05-06
ISBN: 0307275833
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Book Review: A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Summary: 1 Stars
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.
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?
RANT is littered with pop-nihilistic syllogisms, 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?
The subhuman prose is even more galling than the book's content. 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
Summary of Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Buster ?Rant? Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.Humor Books
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