MikePadgett.com

Rant

— Palahniuk's changing - or maybe it's me - but I predict a parting of the ways sometime soon.”

• Chuck Palahniuk
• Vintage (first published 2007)
• 

With Rant, the endlessly inventive Palahniuk may have finally run out of ideas. The author’s formidable back-catalogue, which includes Fight Club, Survivor and Lullaby, illustrates his original, if extreme, prognosis for American society. What makes reading Palahniuk such a thrilling experience, that his characters’ realities are so close to ours, is missing in Rant, in which the author resorts to a rather half-baked examination of time travel.

The device used to tell this piece of hokey urban folklore is an oral history. In short soundbites, characters reminisce about the protagonist as if being interviewed. Without his usual mouthpiece in the form of a first person narrator, Palahniuk’s idiosyncrantic, often polemical style is muted.

Yet whenever called upon to offer criticism of the powers that be, the author’s sardonic wit and novel language burst through. Palahniuk shows himself always equal to the task of challenging the torpor of American society, mining a rich source of angst in the process. So if Rant was intended as a stylistic departure, many of his loyal readers will probably expect a glorious return.