Pygmy

March 2, 2009
Palahniuk’s 10th novel (after Snuff
) is a potent if cartoonish cultural satire that succeeds despite its stridently confounding prose. A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. Their mission: to bring the nation to its knees through Operation Havoc, an act of mass destruction disguised as a science project. Narrated by skinny 13-year-old Pgymy, the propulsive plot deconstructs American fixtures, among them church (“religion propaganda distribution outlet”), spelling bees (“forced battle to list English alphabet letters”) and TV news reporters (“Horde scavenger feast at overflowing anus of world history”), before moving on to a Columbine-like shooting spree by a closeted kid who has fallen in love with the teenage terrorist who raped him in a shopping mall bathroom. Decoding Palahniuk’s characteristically scathing observations is a challenge, as Pygmy’s narrative voice is unbound by rules of grammar or structure (a typical sentence: “Host father mount altar so stance beside bin empty of water”), but perseverance is its own perverse reward in this singular, comic accomplishment.

November 30, 2009
Palahniuk's eponymous protagonist, a highly skilled terrorist, infiltrates an American family by posing as an African pygmy on a student exchange. He relates his sinister albeit humorous escapades in a stunted and ungrammatical prose. While the style is essential to the plot and effective in the novel, it is overwhelmingly problematic in an audio version: read aloud, Pygmy's peculiar speech patterns sound like bad beatnik poetry. While Paul Michael Garcia handles pacing and rhythm admirably, his professionalism cannot alone make this a worthwhile listen for anyone but the die-hard Palahniuk fan. A Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 2).