Rant
Quite a bit back in me high school years I saw this movie with Brad Pitt, perhaps you've heard of it, Fight Club? Seemed to have quite a following at the time, and I for one enjoy it. Fincher's hilarious take on male aggression run rampant in the underground of American synthetic culture was quite the hoot, and hell, I'll admit I didn't see THAT ending coming! But and so also anyway, I figured I should check out the book written by that one guy with the unspellable last name, because after all, the book is always better, right? Except in the cases of The Shining, Apocalypse Now!, and The Passion of the Christ, of course. Well, that's a discussion for another day. Anyway.
Fight Club the book was tepid, but I could still see how it inspired the movie, and for what it's worth it did inspire one of my friends, so it wasn't completely without value. And the ending was better than the movie (yes! Even better I said!). However, it wasn't until this new book by Palahniuk came out called Rant that I bothered to follow up and see what else this guy could do. Besides, I like the word "rant". It makes me warm inside.
Luckily a friend had it while I was over at her house, and I literally read the whole thing while waiting for people to arrive for a party we were having. Hint to future readers of potential bookfail rants by me: a story should not take less than an hour to read unless it's a short story or meant for someone less than 13 years of age. It shows, to me, that it is either a "short story with a goiter problem" (to quote Pynchon) or an underdeveloped novel. Let's explore the latter idea, shall we?
First of all, Rant is Fight Club with cars. And since Palahniuk is no JG Ballard, that means Rant is Fight Club without the good ending. More specifically what I mean is that Rant is about yet another unbelievably idiosyncratic and counter-cultural man who, despite absolutely no charisma that is actually proven (only stated by the annoying "oral histories" that fabricate the book), manages to get people to... care? It's all a statement on how stupid America is, let's just leave it at that and move on.
The point is, reading this and doing a minimal (I'll be fair and say insufficient) amount of research reveals that that is Palahniuk's story, and each book for the most part is a variant thereof. Okay. So why'd we read that story featuring a guy sticking his boogers to a wall and taping menstruation pads to fences? Oh yeah, I forgot. It's "shocking". I call it aimless, but different strokes, right?
--PolarisDiB