Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Finally, I got around to reading and reviewing a recent book.  Feels good to be with the times.  Though I have to admit that I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near the new releases table if I hadn’t been anxiously anticipating this book for the past year.  Ol’ Chuck is one of the few authors whose entire bibliography I’ve taken the time to read.  He has rarely disappointed me.  I was nervous about this novel, because his previous novel Snuff was one of those rare disappointments.  Fortunately, Pygmy was mostly satisfying.  I’m glad that I picked it up right away.

Pygmy is told by a boy raised in an unnamed totalitarian state, conditioned to hate capitalism and everything else American, and trained as an elite operative in a secret plot to wreak havoc upon the US.  Masquerading as a foreign exchange student, Pygmy and his fellow operatives work together to implement Operation Havoc.  What follows is an exaggerated commentary on American culture that is by turns hilarious, sickening, and sobering.

I was initially a little turned off of this book by the language.  It reads like it was written by a person who has memorized the English dictionary, but who has had no instruction in English grammar.  It took a little while to get used to.  Here’s an example:

“Only one step with foot, operative me to defile security of degenerate American snake nest.  Den of evil.  Hive of corruption.  Host family of operative me waiting, host arms elbow bent to flutter host fingers in attention of this agent.  Host family shouting, arms above with wiggling finger.”

Yes, the entire book is written like that.  There were a lot of paragraphs I had to go back and re-read, and that was a little bit frustrating.  But after the first couple chapters, the narrator’s dialect is more familiar, and it’s a little easier to get through.

It’s easy to love our misguided narrator, Pygmy.  Despite his anti-American, no-mercy training, he has a soft heart.  He also has a rather dark sense of humor.  He’s not a robot terrorist.  He’s very human.

This novel says a lot about the absurdity of American habits and customs, but it says an equal amount about the absurdity of anti-American factions who believe that we’re the devil.  Both sides are comically exaggerated, but there is a biting tang of truth contained within.  It’s not an anti-American novel (though it seems like a lot of readers have been disappointed by that).  It skirts being actual social commentary, and ends up being…well…just a novel.  And I am happy with that.  If I want blistering social commentary, I’ll pick up the opinion page of my local paper.

It took me until the very end (like, seriously, the very last page) to figure out if I liked Pygmy or not.  I couldn’t tell how Palahniuk would choose to end things, and it almost seemed like it was a snap decision on his part.  I won’t say how it ends, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an alternate final page floating around in Chuck’s personal notes.  Up until that point, it seemed like things could go either way.  I was satisfied with the ending, though, and it swung my Enjoy-O-Meter slightly into the Enjoyment zone.

I do think that Pygmy falls short of the high bar set by of some of Palahniuk’s earlier work.  I think he would have a hard time topping Lullaby or Choke.  While the broken English format was amusing, it was unnecessary and took away from the story.  That was my main complaint.  But Pygmy wasn’t bad, and I’m not sorry I picked it up.  Couldn’t say the same for Snuff.