Chuck Palahniuk: Pygmy

So, how about Pygmy? I was delighted when I found Chuck Palahniuk's new novel on the stands, and the backcover read something like "the most daring, best, most inventive since he wrote Fight Club". I would have been sold if the blurb had promised "the best book since his last book".

So, this is the part where I talk about the book, huh? Well then: It was amusing enough, not quite easy to read as Pygmy, the protagonist and narrator, uses a very special kind of English throughout the book. You see, Pygmy is an infiltrator from a communist dictatorship, inserted into a typical Midwestern American family, and while he is able to punch through walls and build a bomb from a toaster and orange peels, his language is a mixture of totalitarian propaganda slogans and automated translations from Chinese to English. Strangely, while I normally have no problems to follow other works with "inventive" language (Like Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting), I was not able to get into Pygmy's strange propaganda speak. Decadent reader understanding for glorious literary device of kind novelist and immortal artist Chuck Palahniuk lacks!

Pygmy and his fellow sleepers are in America to pull off something big and terrible, but until then, Pygmy has to deal with American consumerism, evangelical religion, oversexed teenagers and other outgrowths of Western decadence.

The book is very funny and features most of Palahniuk's trademark devices: elements of everyday life reduced to their original (and often disgusting) meaning, frank and burlesque sexuality, shameless hyperbole, the "I am Jack's diseased liver" coping mechanisms of the protagonist. In the details, Palahniuk is as inventive as ever, but apart from that, he moves on paths well-trodden in his earlier novels - a male protagonist bewildered by the decadent society surrounding him, lusting for an enigmatic female figure, the destruction of said decadent society and all the other good Jack-and-Tyler-Durden stuff. The plot seems to be full of holes, but I didn't mind too much - one of strengths of the book lies in its episodic structure, helped along by Pygmy's flashbacks to his education as a top spy.

It is not his strongest book since Fight Club, but it is a typical Palahniuk, which was good enough for me. I only worry that novels like Pygmy will become his staple, and I like works like Rant or Haunted better. If you dig Palahniuk, you will like this book, but it is not his best since Fight Club.