PYGMY
By Chuck Palahniuk
The stranger from a strange land who comically misunderstands
our crazy world has a pedigree that runs from Montesquieu's Persian Letters to
Borat. In the case of Chuck Palahniuk's Agent 67, nicknamed Pygmy, a secret
agent from an unnamed communist dictatorship sent to unleash Operation Havoc and
"create infinite damage dead" in the United States, he even sounds
like Borat. Which makes the reading of his dispatches from capitalism's den of
vipers a deliberately disorienting experience. And while the language is
sometimes used to clever or humorous effect --Pygmy's version of a pick-up line:
"Respected potential reproductive vessel, request engage preliminary
foreplay ritual prior genital coitus" - it doesn't get any easier as things
go along.
Posing as an exchange student, Pygmy is adopted by a
"typical" American host family and attends the local "American
education facility devoted humiliation and destroy all self-respect out native
youth." The name of his new hometown is blacked out in his dispatches but
it may as well be the Simpsons' Springfield. In due order Palahniuk skewers all
of the usual targets: the dysfunctional nuclear family, blood and guts in high
school, religious hypocrisy, the cynical media, and the "plenteous
plentitude" of Wal-Mart.
The plot revolves around cartoonish poles of sex and violence,
Palahniuk's only real themes. The violence includes the now obligatory school
shooting, bone-crunching ninja maneuvers (the Barracuda Deadly Eye Gouge, the
Pummeling Kangaroo, the Monkey Mash), and a brutal homosexual rape that would be
graphic if it weren't rendered opaque by Pygmy's pidgin. As for sex, there are a
series of running gags concerning vibrators and the secondary mission of the
terrorist clique to impregnate as many young women as possible, using their
"reproductive weapons" in Pumping Rabbit "fertility
attacks."
We have been here before, indeed many times already with
Palahniuk. And for all its hysterical gesturing, the satire this time out is
both predictable and curiously anodyne. Pygmy, a political zealot with a head
full of quotations from figures like Lenin, Hitler, Mao, and Nixon, is finally
opposed not by American innocence or virtue but the sensibly apolitical and
apathetic American middle class - well-fed, well-meaning types capable of
absorbing satire and terror with equal indifference.
Notes:
Review first published in the Toronto Star May 10, 2009.
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