Pygmy is advertised as “The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park.” If I had to put definitive numbers to that statement, I would say the book is 95 percent South Park. This satire is chocked full of good ‘ole 13-year-old-American-male humor, which is what will either make the reader love it or hate it. But before you can do either, you’ll have to figure out how to read the damn thing.
The book is narrated in the first person dispatches of a teenage terrorist from a unnamed Asian country who is in the U.S. as part of a student exchange program. He’s here with several other undercover agents to unleash a massive attack on civilians. He speaks in a stereotypical broken English with lots of cliche, communist-totalitarian-like phrases. If you can get used to Pygmy’s phrasing, it almost becomes poetic later in the book. Until then it’s just annoying.
Pygmy, like all of Palahniuk’s novels, makes some very general insights into how American society is degenerate, hypocritical, and weak-minded. Nothing new. It also includes tons of cartoonish violence and sex, including a teenage boy brutally raping another teenage boy in the bathroom at Walmart and a school shooting. Cartoonish is the key word. Otherwise it would be unreadable. Think Borat (which I cut off halfway through the movie).
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club set him up to be a promising literary star for the new century. In my opinion, he hasn’t lived up to that literary potential at all, but Palahniuk has a devoted following that would certainly disagree with me. It seems that every book since Fight Club has tried to top the last in shock value and inventiveness, which suggests he’s writing for pure entertainment value. Pulp is not bad for pulp’s sake, but it’s not art. I still have hope, the audacity. I have one more Palahniuk book on the shelf to read. It’s like tonguing a sore tooth. It hurts, but I keep doing it.
