Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy: Almost a Return to Form

05Apr09

So, I got my hands on an advance reader’s copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel, Pygmy (available May 5th), and I’ll say this about it: It’s almost a return to what made Palahniuk one of my favorite authors to start with.

Recently, Palahniuk seems to have been pushing the boundaries and experimenting with form. I followed him through Haunted (a book of short stories with a narrative thread putting their narrators in a bizarre haunted-house-like writer’s retreat), and Rant (a fictional oral biography of an angst-filled patient zero, taking place in a dystopian future, and being told almost paragraph by paragraph, from a different character’s point of view). I did not, however, make it through Snuff, most likely because I viewed it as exploitation for exploitation’s sake. I’ll probably come back to it, though, as it comes out in trade paperback this week (April 7th).

Back to Pygmy, though. I say it’s almost a return to form because its narrative structure, and its anarchist (well, totalitarian, anyway) tendencies rival Palahniuk’s breakthrough Fight Club. However, at the sentence level, reading Pygmy is a tough cross between slogging through the first section of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and listening to Borat (who I find largely unamusing… sorry). This is because the story is told from the first-person point of view of Pygmy, a member of a team of terrorists who have infiltrated America disguised as foreign exchange students. I won’t say much about the plot, but the group, enacting the ultra-secret “Operation Havoc” are bent on bringing this country to its knees, while Pygmy spends a lot of his time dealing with the typical American middle school issues (school dances, science fair projects, dodge ball) from a uniquely outsider’s point of view.

In this way, Palahniuk does manage to get away with things that may have seemed trite and overwrought from an American protagonist. For example (and I’m expressly prohibited from actually quoting the book here, as it’s an uncorrected galley proof), Pygmy goes to quite a few church services, but he refers to the church as a (I’m paraphrasing here) religious propaganda distribution center. Also, as the United States representative in his school’s Model United Nations, Pygmy (dressed in sequined Uncle Sam hat, oversized “Property of Jesus” t-shirt, and ostrich-skin boots), is able to make a few cracks about the American way of life that may have seemed… well, just dumb from a homegrown protagonist.

I won’t go into detail, here, but Pygmy’s shortcoming is in its last chapter (what would have been the epilogue, had the novel followed a standard pop-fiction formula). In those last three pages, I felt like the whole thing just wrapped itself up too nicely. And after such great endings as Fight Club, and Invisible Monsters, I’ve come to expect a certain amount of twisted, irreverent uncertainty at the tail end of a Palahniuk novel. If I hadn’t read the last three pages or so, though, I would have been very satisfied with the outcome of the novel.

What does all this mean? Pygmy is certainly not for everyone. If Palahniuk lost you with Snuff (as he did me), he may not win you back with this one. If you can get far enough into the story to get past Pygmy’s way of speaking, to let reading his broken English (with its almost total lack of articles and prepositions) seem almost normal, to get at the emotional center of his plight as a displaced kid, struggling between duty and love, patriotism and fitting in, you’ll probably like it (that is, if you’re open-minded, which, I’m sure you’d have to be, to be reading my blog anyway). And, as far as that goes, Pygmy probably won’t win Palahniuk any new fans either [with the exception of the few left-wingers who may read it out of curiosity after hearing it railed on during a sermon, or a broadcast by Nancy Grace (these things haven't happened yet, but they almost certainly will... )].

Bottom line: This novel is incendiary, it’s funny, and it kind of makes you think. You both root for Pygmy, and you’re a little scared of him. Mostly, though, you feel his pain, and you cringe along with him. If I were rating this on a five-star system, I’d probably give it four.

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