Books
Bite club
by Sam Finnemore
Some 10 years on, Chuck Palahniuk is still searching for that particular nerve in the popular imagination that his Fight Club tweaked so successfully. Something about that premise of anonymous violence as a fix for consumerist unreality nailed the anxieties of the late 90s, and Rant brings back the key elements for another outing, albeit with a fresh format and a nod to the realities of the post-Patriot Act United States. It’s quintessential Palahniuk: the futility of searching for meaning is as much of a meaning as you get.
The life story of Buster “Rant” Casey is pieced together after the fact, in the form of an oral history with various narrators, some of whose significance only becomes apparent later in the book. All of them are trying to make some kind of sense of Rant and his life as a daredevil, iconoclast, disease vector and pop-culture icon.
Rant inevitably invites comparison with Tyler of Fight Club, although his actions are much less organised: he shares the same quest for something authentically human – usually in the form of pain – and the same ability to disrupt systems of belief, from classroom manners to an entire small-town economy.
Rant’s increasingly notorious life fills out the majority of a plot replete with a rabies epidemic, faked deaths, a secretive car-crashing game with some strong analogies to the fight club, and a mind-bending allusion to time-travel: did Rant somehow travel back to kill his father, prevent his own birth and thus step outside the bounds of mortality?
All of this is set within a dystopian, overcrowded future US, where pressure on infrastructure has necessitated humanity’s split into daytime and night-time shifts, “Graphic Traffic” radio reports car-crash injuries in loving detail in an attempt to deter rubberneckers, and human experiences are downloaded and commodified into filtered and tweaked chemical “peaks” – all of which add colour to Rant’s search for real experiences, be it animal bites or passing on his personal rabies strain to adoring followers.
The whole book is suffused with Palahniuk’s trademark black humour and absurdism. Although the format seems gimmicky at first, it rapidly becomes an engaging way to convey frenetic action and a variety of frantic theories: history, epidemiology, conspiracy. There’s social criticism here if you want it, but for all its exterior radicalism Rant isn’t a mould-breaker, just a solid, entertaining example of what Palahniuk does best.
RANT, by Chuck Palahniuk (Jonathan Cape, $36.99).
