Review: Rant

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

By Chuck Palahniuk

Published May 2007

Doubleday Publishing Group

336 pp.

ISBN 0-385-51787-4

Date reviewed: April 15, 2007

Originally published in: The Daily Cardinal

Chuck Palahniuk may well be the most divisive writer in contemporary fiction – in fact, calling him a nouveau William S. Burroughs would not be inappropriate. The minimalist style and social commentary of his novels “Fight Club” and “Choke” has inspired a legion of young writers, while the gruesome language typified in his story collection “Haunted” has sent audiences at his readings scampering to the doors.

His latest novel “Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey” does little to settle this debate – it will rally his fans more than any other title, and push away detractors with its schizophrenic format. Palahniuk is pulling out all of his considerable tools, blending scientific fact and science fiction to create a startling piece of literature.

“Rant’s” title comes from its main character, the recently deceased Buster “Rant” Casey. Taking the form of an oral biography, each chapter of the book is presented as a series of interviews with those who knew Rant in life. A small-town boy with a passion for insect bites and rare coins, Rant is drawn into the world of Party Crashing – demolition derbies played out on late-night city streets where each crash feels like a split second of immortality.

Burroughs once said of Ernest Hemingway that he was a prisoner of his own style, and “Rant” makes it clear that Palahniuk, for better or worse, inhabits that same prison. Once again, his main character is a pariah who rejects society’s vision of reality, while his love interest is a woman who defies moral taboos on a daily basis. Even the oral biography format can’t change this tone – Rant’s acquaintances are each unique voices, but still sound like characters existing only in Palahniuk novels.

Half of the book could be seen as “Fight Club” with cars, but the second half is where things get interesting. Palahniuk transforms the novel into science fiction, splitting society into two castes based on night and day and implanting its members with entertainment-accessing ports in their heads. His world feels oddly realistic, most likely due to its basis on the very real themes of apathy and alienation.

More than these details, however, Palahniuk pushes the envelope with a focus on time travel to an extent not seen since Kurt Vonnegut. Going off Rant’s experimental/anarchistic views (“The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same one you had, yesterday”), the novel asks the serious question of just how subjective our place in the timeline is and just how easy it would be for us to change that.

It’s a highly complicated mix of topics, and it’s to Palahniuk’s credit that he can hold it all together. Regardless of opinions on style, Palahniuk is an immensely talented writer who supports his story with brilliant images and real-world research. Few other authors would come up with identifying STDs by taste in one chapter, offer a timeline of epidemics in the next and then debate the possibility of traveling through time simply by willing it.

No other author could have done what Palahniuk has done with “Rant,” and he deserves recognition for creating a book of this complexity. It may take multiple reads to interpret exactly what happens – and this may push away the more casual readers – but those who stick with it will be hit with something they’ve never seen before.

(Author’s note: I particularly like this one because I read the majority of the book and wrote the review in 24 hours. Might seem to make it rushed, but I still agree with my points in retrospect.)

Book Review: World War Z

World War Z

By Max Brooks

Published September 2006

Crown Publishing Group

352 pp.

ISBN 0-307-34661-7

Date reviewed: February 5, 2007

Originally published in: The Daily Cardinal

It’s the same story in most every zombie film. Walking dead appear and begin to sweep across the world, joined by their freshly gnawed victims to form an unstoppable army. Small pockets of determined survivors band together to battle the horde, a few die in appropriately horrific style and in the end humanity survives reduced but changed for the better.

These conventions form the outline of Max Brooks’ “World War Z,” but there’s a key difference between the book and films: the book feels real. Brooks, who became the most prolific zombie author since H.P. Lovecraft with his wildly entertaining “Zombie Survival Guide,” has written a contemporary holocaust novel which could become the definitive undead novel.

Brooks maps the entire course of the “Zombie War,” beginning with scattered outbreaks in the Far East and spreading through tourists and refugees hiding infected zombie bites. The hordes push humans to isolated locations – South Pacific Islands, Rocky Mountains and aircraft carriers – where they begin to fight back with new weapons and tactics, preparing to defeat an enemy that feels no fear and needs decapitation to finally drop.

The structure Brooks takes for “World War Z” is a masterstroke. Rather than write in conventional novel format, he tells the story in the guise of a postwar researcher collecting interviews for the reformed United Nations. The book consists of interviews with over 40 different subjects, written as though they were taken verbatim off a tape recorder.

This interview format allows Brooks to create stories worth listening to, as he can use an endless supply of voices to tell how the world dealt with the calamity. Soldiers speak in a veteran tone with “G” and “Zack” to describe the enemy, children who grew up in the combat emotionlessly describe dead parents and government officials desperately try to justify being caught off guard.

There’s also some particularly entertaining individual stories, which will no doubt come in handy when Brad Pitt’s film company develops its promised adaptation. Vivid entries include a Japanese hacker climbing down an apartment building armed only with knowledge gathered online and a supply pilot shot down in the swamps of Louisiana, working to overgrown freeways for pickup.

What the stories do particularly well, however, is depict a postwar world that feels entirely plausible. Cuba, thanks to its geography and shrewd dealing with refugees, is now the world’s economic superpower, while a decimated Russia has reformed into a Holy Russian Empire. Iran is decimated by nuclear weapon use, Canada is deforested for fuel and North Korea’s entire population disappears into underground tunnels – with no clues if anyone is still alive.

This keen interpretation of politics is central to “World War Z,” not only to create a new world but to implement zombie satire in the style of George Romero. In Brooks’ world, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War are only precursors to government incompetence – lying to avoid widespread panic, an impotent bureaucracy and an army devoid of volunteers all pitch in to hang bait signs on the average citizen.

By the end of the novel, Brooks will have his readers convinced that if zombies were to attack tomorrow, even with his guide no hope of survival is nil. It’s that tension, imagination and realism that keeps a reader completely gripped by “World War Z” – a book which establishes Brooks as one of the cleverest young authors out there and reanimates the zombie genre.

Review: A Strange Commonplace

A Strange Commonplace

By Gilbert Sorrentino

Published May 2006

Coffee House Press

154 pp.

ISBN 1-566-89182-5

Date reviewed: October 16, 2006

Originally published in: The Daily Cardinal

When author and essayist Gilbert Sorrentino passed away on May 18, 2006, it was a tragedy that didn’t even gather headlines outside the literary community. There were no accolades and praise of the kind that followed the deaths of Douglas Adams or Hunter S. Thompson, or that will surely salute the death of Kurt Vonnegut.

This lack of tribute is insulting, for Sorrentino has done as much with the English language as any of the more public authors. In over 30 collections of poetry and prose Sorrentino mastered the art of experimental fiction, with titles such as “Mulligan Stew” and “Odd Number” cutting a manic swathe of words in a way to make any creative writing major fall to their knees.

Thankfully, Sorrentino left a final masterpiece behind to seal his legacy: the harrowing and poignant novel “A Strange Commonplace.” Named for a William Carlos Williams poem, Sorrentino’s work replicates the poem’s image of “Long, deserted avenues with unrecognized names at the corners” with a dreamlike version of his native Brooklyn.

In the vein of his darkly entertaining “Little Casino,” “A Strange Commonplace” blends elements of poetry, short fiction and the novel to create a book that can be read all at once or in various intervals depending on mood. The book, split into two sections of 27 short chapters – each section using the same 27 titles – follows the private lives of adulterers, criminals and the disillusioned.

Human folly is Sorrentino’s medium, and he is unrelenting in how many snapshots he can take. In “Cold Supper” a woman bakes a gourmet meal and dresses in her best, then proceeds to lock her son outside and walk out the front door to never return. An old man decides to kill himself if he draws a flush in “An Apartment,” while three young men devour their meals and molest a waitress simultaneously in “In the Diner.”

Much like the cut-up surrealism of William S. Burroughs, Sorrentino has several recurring elements in each of his pieces. However, while Burroughs used sadistic doctors and rusted revolvers to show junk sickness, Sorrentino’s images are tied with heartbreak – a pearl-grey homburg hat, Worcestershire sauce, a children’s jungle story. These elements give the novel an odd sense of continuity, each possessed by a pained character.

Of course, not all readers will be entranced at the start by Sorrentino’s style, as the experimental prose requires a careful reading to obtain full understanding. Often, as in the ethereal “In Dreams,” his characters become unstuck in reality, the world changing the minute they look away. Additionally, the work’s dark tone leaves not a single character happy at the end, sucked into alcoholism and untimely death.

But happiness is not the image Sorrentino is trying to pull off in this book – these stories are 52 “magical route[s] to oblivion.” In many ways it fits the original meaning of commonplace, a book designed to compile all different forms of knowledge that capture the author’s interest – and at the very end of his life, Sorrentino was trying to compile the sense of “the man in the casket is the same … as the man at the casket.”

It is very depressing that Sorrentino is no longer around to write fiction of this caliber, but anyone who is sucked in by “A Strange Commonplace” can be comforted by the fact that he left a vast body of work behind to explore. As Sorrentino’s final work, “A Strange Commonplace” is like the last bite of an exotic dessert – not suited for every palate, but for those who acquire a taste for it indescribably delicious.

Review: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Published October 2005

Knopf Publishers

128 pp.

ISBN 1-400-04460-3

Date reviewed: February 10, 2006

Originally published in: The Daily Cardinal

The world of fiction has been a lot darker of a place over the last decade without the presence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Author of the epic “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and dozens of compelling short stories, Marquez was absent from his most famous medium in his recent career and focused instead on journalism and his autobiography.

Fortunately, Marquez was nowhere near done with the style that earned him a Nobel Prize in literature, returning to form with his new novel “Memories of My Melancholy Whores.” A compelling and concise piece of work, Marquez proves even after 15 books he still has the skill and the spirit to tell an unforgettable story.

Marquez doesn’t waste any time in his new work, summarizing all the action in the first sentence: “The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” His main character, a journalist and composer who has found little success in either profession, finds himself seeking one simple pleasure only to find himself so stunned by her beauty as she sleeps he cannot bring himself to wake her.

The book proceeds to chart the year following his birthday as he revisits his life, thinking about his writing, relationships with women (all paid for) and the reality of living his life completely alone. All through the year he continues a relationship with the nameless girl, where by never speaking or touching him she becomes the love of his life.

In all of his short stories Marquez feels like he uses fiction to cloak his poetic urges, and “Melancholy Whores” is no different, calling up multiple observations and tying them together with his fluid prose. With a main character suffering from an onset of senility Marquez is able to elaborate on any thought, as a character who feels “well compensated by the miracle of still being alive at my age” is inclined to drift on his own thoughts.

“Melancholy Whores” is not a supernatural story like Marquez’s earlier works “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” or “Sea of Lost Time,” but he still manages to fill it with the same magical sense. His relationship with the girl is one of the most touching romances in recent print, as by leaving her untouched he has elevated her to the role of a spirit. She exists more in his imagination than in real life, and his romance exists somewhere between dreams and reality.

Marquez may be 10 years younger than his nameless narrator, but there are clearly some autobiographical details worked into the story. His slight disdain for the younger staff at the newspaper he writes for likely displays some of his own attitudes, and his resigned comments about the effects of aging are too direct to not come from experience.

This connection, almost more than his other works, makes “Melancholy Whores” strike a personal chord with readers. By the time the novel winds to a close Marquez has formed a character who seems completely real, and whose regrets are ones that anyone approaching the end must feel. Marquez may have left a better legacy than his protagonist, but in his golden years he must certainly be sharing the same concerns.

“Melancholy Whores” is closer to his short stories than his novels in length – only 115 pages – but it is still a triumphant return for the master. Like a rare wine Marquez’s writing appears to get even better as the years go on, weaving a straight and detailed path towards one final satisfying breath. Hopefully, readers won’t have to wait until Marquez himself turns 90 for his next work.