Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk
It has been a while since I last read a Palahniuk book. When I first discovered Palahniuk through 'Fight Club,' I instantly fell in love with his writing. I quickly, and rather ravenously, gobbled every word that he wrote down. 'Diary,' 'Survivor,' 'Lullaby,' etc. And then, I read 'Haunted' came out. And then 'Rant'. And then 'Snuff'. And after reading those three books, I decided to be done with Chuck's books. It had just seemed that, in order to sell more books, Chuck had decided to sacrifice plot, substance, and good writing for shock, filling those novels with whatever he could to get his readers to squirm and whence in disgust. Considering this, it would have behooved me to have listened to my previous decision and ignored this book, but I was hoping that I was wrong and that his writing would have improved. Sadly, it did not, and it pains me because I do still consider Chuck to be a great writer.
It was all that I could do to just finish 'Pygmy.' It is written in a broken English style, presumably to poke fun at our misconceptions about foreign cultures, specifically Asian culture. This style does make it somewhat difficult to read. Scenes and dialogue do not flow well as a result. While I do applaud Chuck in his desire to want to do something new, this particular style of writing is not conducive to good storytelling and even the employment of such a style is a complete mismatch for the particular story Chuck is trying to tell. For one reason, the narrator, and without giving too much away, is supposedly a child prodigy who by the age of 4 had already mastered chemistry, and who was subjugated to intense verbal exercises for the purpose of obtaining a perfect grasp of the English language, and who is able to quote, verbatim, the perfect English of several other characters and brutal dictators within this novel, and yet, he is unable to craft a single, complete sentence throughout the entire novel? I find this hard to believe, much like the rest of this novel.
Allow me to give you an example of the main character's broken English: when he talks about a door, instead of saying it is open or closed, he says 'door healed in wall or no healed in wall,' despite using the word 'open' the way it is intended to be used in other sections of the book. When he refers to places or things, for instance a church, the narrator is unable to find the word and thus has to resort describing a church as a 'religion propaganda distribution outlet of city.' This may be a good description of what a church is, but the implication is that the narrator, despite his wealth of knowledge on American culture, overwhelming success at a spelling bee, and general use of larger, more complicated English words, is unable to find within his vocabulary the simple word 'church.'
I could, of course, go on and on about the writing style and the various inconsistencies found within it, but there is more to talk about with this book, namely, the plot.
One of the aspects of Chuck's writing that I have always found to be enamoring, is his creativity in plotline. Certainly, this story is not without its fair share of creativity. In that regards, Chuck does not disappoint. It is an interesting story, unfortunately, it is completely muddled by Chuck's desire to shock his readers by placing disgusting scenes of depravity liberally throughout the novel. I have no problem with depravity, but I do have a problem for using these scenes as plot devices designed to shock the readers.
Perhaps the first of these particular 'shock' scenes describes a moment when the main character (who is in the seventh grade) proceeds to anally rap another character (also in the seventh grade) in the bathroom of a Wal-Mart. There is absolutely no reason for this scene other than for shock value. There is no motive for his actions.
But it doesn't end there. It continues with another scene in which the kid who was brutally raped professes his love for the main character and then proceeds to commit a mass-shooting on his classmates (all of which are engaged in utter debauchery at the time - drinking, smoking, acts of a sexual nature- while at a class function) for the sole purpose of being killed by the main character.
And these scenes continue and continue. There is no end to the deplorable scenes that Chuck creates.
It seems that this book was written for no other purpose than to shock and disgust. For that, Chuck has achieved his goals; however, it doesn't take a clever author to write shocking prose. The real talent comes from crafting thoughtful and insightful stories.
Sadly, I feel that Chuck may have let me down for the last time. I will need to take another prolonged break his stories before I can once again enter Chuck's world. Pygmy was such a complete disappointment.
1 OUT OF 5 STARS
