Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk’s first novel, shot him to fame; it, and the movie adaptation it spawned, became a cultural touchstone in the mid-‘90s for male aggression, self-delusion, and the dangers of consumerist culture. It also pegged Palahniuk as a social satirist, a label he’s been struggling with ever since. In the books he wrote after Club, the plots became more esoteric, and the disconnect between Palahniuk’s worldview and the people he was supposedly mocking became more obvious. Satire has to have empathy as well as contempt for its target, and, as in his new novel, Pygmy, Palahniuk is better at celebrating the freaks than cutting down the squares. It’s the kind of story the author has made a career out of; intermittently funny, absurdly scatological, and more than a little hollow.
An unnamed agent from a country that worships Hitler and Malcolm X has been charged with the completion of a most important mission. Along with several fellow operatives, male and female, he will infiltrate a typical American town as a foreign exchange student, in preparation for steps towards destroying the filthy capitalist sinkhole. The agent, dubbed “Pygmy” by his new family, describes his disgust for the people he’s charged with destroying in a series of dispatches to the home office. His training has prepared him for physical combat and seed implantation, but he’s not prepared for how his actions affect those around him, like the bully he rapes in a mega-store bathroom. Will he complete his mission, or succumb to the temptations of individualism?
The first hurdle to get past in Pygmy is the narrator’s unique writing style: lots of inverted grammar and lists of adjectives and nouns, it’s at once impressively thorough and irritatingly tedious. Palahniuk never eases up, but the patter eventually becomes familiar enough to be coherent. That leaves character and story, and unsurprisingly, it’s pretty mixed. The lazy slaps at high school and religion aren’t nearly as funny as they should be, and the supporting cast is underdeveloped and indistinct. But Pygmy himself is a piece of work, and the book is strongest when he talks about his training or tries to work out his growing affection for the idiots around him. Somewhere between all the narrative tics and bad jokes, there’s a pretty good story; if only Palahniuk would calm down long enough to tell it.