PYGMY
Chuck Palahniuk
Doubleday
Fiction
ISBN: 9780385526340
PYGMY continues noir-thriller/satirist Chuck Palahniuk’s tradition of protagonists designed to make us feel worse about ourselves while not entirely fitting the bill of the contrarian ideals they supposedly uphold. Agent 67 is a diminutive though highly trained secret agent from an unnamed country with designs on destroying America (cough, China). He only speaks in the present tense with a curious grammar, but he’s well versed --- like all supergenius terrorist children --- in the art of killing people and the science of how. He has infiltrated the country as a foreign exchange student in an unassuming American family with a cadre of fellow agents engaged in Operation Havoc, an unspecified plan involving impregnating as many teenagers as possible to sow the seeds of rebellion.
But like Tender Branson in SURVIVOR and Tyler Durden in FIGHT CLUB, Pygmy is not the perfect America-hater we expect. He falters at impregnating an American of his own. Despite an education most helicopter parents could only dream about, his impoverished sense of American culture yields amusing and awkward moments of culture clashing. In any family but “cow father, chicken mother, and pig dog brother,” his cover would easily be blown --- but there’s the rub of this family and town of impressively oblivious people. (This may be somewhat explained by the cocktails of drugs to which the family is addicted: the father to Viagra, the mother to Zoloft, the son to Ritalin.)
The result of these character flaws is similar to Palahniuk’s other novels --- the otherwise alien protagonist is made human, allowing the plot to move from a fantastical premise to a jarring and evocative narrative culminating in something both cruel and humane. And PYGMY does deliver on a satire that, unlike previous novels, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Instead of the humor stemming from gravelly-voiced one-liners, it comes from the awkward failed attempts of an overly serious terrorist to destroy a country he understands so little. PYGMY pokes at its genre as much as at its target.
You can read the novel like another straight-up Palahniuk book, but doing so yields unsatisfying results. Palahniuk selects the most obvious targets --- Wal-Mart, family dysfunction, the cult of the individual, America’s collective drug addiction, etc. Pygmy is the perfect dictator-worshipping communist, and his critiques are blisteringly vocal. But this also makes them dull. We’ve heard all these diatribes before, and they don’t carry much weight. Read on this level, PYGMY is a tired play on the same theme. However, when viewed as a lampoon of caricatured ideologies --- both American and other --- there’s some genuine humor in it.
Still, some aspects of the novel never coalesce even with a more charitable reading. As mentioned before, Pygmy only speaks in the present tense with a syntax that makes Yoda sound comprehensible. His grammar isn’t consistent but is overused; it becomes tired quickly. His blistery rapid-fire speech launches barbs with ease but is unnecessarily difficult to understand. The plot gets lost in Palahniuk’s at-times desperate attempts at stylized speech. The line between carnivalesque and comprehensible gets blurred too far, and reading becomes more of a chore than a pleasure as you strain to figure out what just happened.
PYGMY is an intriguing mixed bag that centers on culture clash with a Palahniuk twist. It’s one of his least dark books, which works to its benefit and detriment --- we gain whimsically awkward humor, though we must drudge through stylistic elements that distract more than enrich the reading experience.
--- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz
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