Rant (not the kind you're thinking of)

I recently finished reading Rant, one of the newer novels by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club. To say that it was a strange book would be redundant, as I'm sure anyone who has read even one of his novels could tell you. But it was, as most of his books are, enjoyable.

This story is a fictitious biography of one Rant Casey, as told through snippets of interviews with several dozen people in his life. There are three fairly distinct pieces to the tale.

Much of Rant concerns the title character's childhood. We read about how his early fascination with rabid and poisonous animals, both in letting himself be bitten or stung, and in using the diseases and poisons to inflict harm on others.

The "second third" of the book deals with his adulthood in a big city, where he falls in with a group of "Party Crashers," people who tool around town in a sort of underground auto club for the sole purpose of getting into car accidents.

The "final third" of the book I'd best not spoil for anyone interested in reading it themselves. Suffice it to say, things take a very bizarre left turn into an area that doesn't really feel related to anything I've just described.

But somehow it is related, because much of the course of the novel is foreshadowed in the very first chapter. I wouldn't recommend scrutinizing that chapter so you can prove yourself clever by figuring out some sort of "twist ending"; that's not really what's at play, and I think it would diminish one's enjoyment of the book to dig into the intro too thoroughly. But it is all there from the outset.

Yet despite the fact the author "plays fair" and lays all his cards out on the table, I still walked away from the book feeling like it was three separate ideas that didn't effectively intertwine. The writing style is as good as always -- punchy, sometimes humorous, often unsettling, brute but somehow polished. Each of the three pieces I've described works well on its own. And yet I feel like each was its own book, and the whole of Rant was simply the strange anthology that contained them all.

I'd rate the book a B, and definitely recommend it to anyone who has liked other Chuck Palahniuk books. But it's not in danger of becoming my favorite of his novels. If you haven't read him before and are curious, I'd point you to Lullaby or Choke instead. (I'd suggest Fight Club, but really the movie is in my opinion a quite effective and faithful adaptation. If you've seen it, you may well find the book to be redundant.)