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Tanya Simmons
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 October 2009
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Related articles Foreign Bodies and Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
This article contains sexual content
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Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk 241pp, Jonathan Cape, $32.95
Written in a stilted pidgin English, Pygmy is the narrative of agent number 67 who is sent to the United States as a 13-year-old exchange student to complete “Operation Havoc”. Nicknamed “Pygmy” because of his small stature, agent number 67 has been indoctrinated against all things American, and is highly trained in chemistry and martial arts—“Flying Giant Stork Death Kick”, “Lashing Lynx” and “Cobra One-Strike No-Blood” are amongst his repertoire. He comes from a nameless totalitarian country—a mixture of Communist China, Cuba, North Korea and Nazi Germany—and is accompanied by a team of teenage assassins, similarly hosted by white, middle-class American families. Although the details of Operation Havoc are unclear, the mission is definitely a terrorist attack and involves an exploding science project.
This satire on American indulgence is written as an epistolary of 36 dispatches sent from Pygmy to his homeland. Decoding the bizarre syntax is challenging but often amusing: “American holiday food of Thanksgiving. Present: vast cow father, pig dog brother, chicken mother, cat sister host family all hands linked so create fence surrounding bounty food table.” Other sentences try the reader’s patience: “Revered soon dying mother, distribute you ammunitions correct for Croatia-made forty-five-calibre, long-piston-stroke APS assault rifle?”
Once accustomed to Pygmy’s fractured dialect—it takes dedication—the usual Palahniuk subject matter and style unravels: extreme violence, explicit sex scenes, unrelenting profanity and content beyond taboo. By the second dispatch Pygmy has brutally raped a boy in a Wal-Mart bathroom and later violates his host mother to retrieve the batteries of her sex toy. Palahniuk even manages to include a high-school massacre, Columbine style.
Palahniuk is known for his novels’ disturbing content, marginalised characters and acerbic humour, but in Pygmy the outrageous and the shocking are pegged on a loose plot line—the novel reads as a gratuitous vehicle for the author’s subversive bombshells.
Pygmy does have flickers of brilliance and dark wit though. The spelling bee that never ends because Pygmy and his comrades can spell anything smacks of irony, and the inflation and distortion of Pygmy’s xenophobia is very entertaining. Palahniuk also cleverly pits totalitarian propaganda against western culture’s laissez-faire attitude which makes a thought-provoking backdrop to the novel’s absurdity.
However, the plot is flimsy and obscured by a string of repetitive jokes that are borderline puerile (the reader is treated to numerous alternative names for breasts). The suspense of belief needed to follow one scene to the next may also be too fantastical for some readers. And the sudden happy-ever-after ending—Pygmy falls in love with “cat sister”, rejects the homeland in favour of America and prevents Operation Havoc from happening—jars with the hatred that precedes it.
Diehard Palahniuk fans will be enthralled but the novel is probably too transgressive for a wider audience. Perhaps this is inconsequential for an author whose book readings are more like rock concerts, and whose fan-based website “The Cult” boasts a membership of 47,000, with over 700,000 page views a month.
Palahniuk’s other novels set a high standard—perhaps this is why Pygmy is ultimately dissatisfying.
Palahniuk’s nine previous novels are Fight Club (made into a film by director David Fincher); Survivor; Invisible Monsters; Choke (made into a film by director Clark Gregg); Lullaby; Diary; Haunted; Rant; and Snuff. He has also published non-fiction works.
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