My Library

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey is the latest offering from Chuck Palahniuk, the author of cult classic Fight Club: A Novel - now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Ed Norton, Meat Loaf and Helena Bonham Carter - own it today on DVD! - and all the major fight club themes are back with a vengeance...and a twist. Male relations with God as a proxy for relations with fathers, people finding themselves through an underground movement of controlled violence but with a hint of something more sinister beneath the surface, a day world and night world existing side by side and a mostly younger, hip underclass ready to pee in your soup or maybe give you rabies.

Fans of Palanhniuk's earlier works will enjoy the themes, the icharacters and the dark comedy. They may or may not like the way Palahniuk resolves the spiritual dilemma. In Fight Club the unspoken solution is that if God is merely our father's writ large, he's a figment of our imagination. In Rant, God is some of our father's in a different way and without the implicit rejection of spiritual side to human existence. Or maybe Rant and all his friends are just as crazy as Tyler/Cornelius/Rupert or whatever other silly name he put on his name tag each night.

Two final notes. The version I actually own is the Audible audiobook version (unabridged). (I listen to these during the 40 minute one-way commute.) The various characters giving their oral biographies are read by appropriate actors and it makes for a fun listen. This novel is explicit. Nah, it's nasty. Fight Club had one particularly nasty line (Marla's «since grade school» line.) If that line offended, stay miles from this book.