Monkey droppings - short people ain't got no reason to terrorize us

In today's exciting episode, a master lets down his audience.

Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk

Agent 67 has a slight problem. The terrorist operative, dubbed ‘Pygmy’ by his ignorant classmates, has infiltrated an American high school as a foreign exchange student from an anonymous totalitarian country. He and his fellow operatives plan to unleash “Operation Havoc” on an unsuspecting populace, but the perils of America’s consumerist society present unexpected challenges.

Chuck Palahniuk also has a problem. The American author rose to substantial prominence with his brilliant debut novel Fight Club, a blistering attack on American culture that read as part manifesto, part roaring good read.

Since then, Palahniuk has carved himself a comfy niche as an edgy cult satirist who never shies away from the profane, the scatological, and the painfully biological. It says much about Palahniuk’s canon of work that his last novel, Snuff, concerning a porn star trying to break the world record for the most sexual partners in one day, was a relatively tame affair for him.

Palahniuk’s problem is; where can he go from here? Efforts such as Diary and Lullaby revealed an author unafraid to travel new avenues, and his often-astonishing novel Rant gave us a glimpse of a true heir to the late J.G. Ballard, but other works such as Snuff and Haunted played to Palahniuk's worst tendencies, and found the well of pop culture topics running precariously dry.

Enter Pygmy, Palahniuk’s tenth novel, another assault on the western way of life that is guaranteed to offend almost everyone in some way, and a large step backward for the novelist. Palahniuk assails themes such as consumerism, sexuality, religion, peer pressure, school shootings, xenophobia, conformity, and individuality with his usual abandon, but Pygmy finds an author on a downward curve, content to use novelty and shock in place of content and substance.

Presented as ongoing communiqués from agent 67 to his masters, Pygmy is written in a pidgin English dialect that is initially off-putting. The lack of definitive articles and adjectives leads to a novel written solely in sentences such as “For official record, during American winter youth attend compulsive levels of teaching; during summer, American youth must attend shopping mall.”

The concept is not entirely successful (why would Pygmy write reports in English rather than his native tongue?), but it can lead to some offbeat and memorable descriptions of western culture. When Pygmy visits a Wal-Mart, the store presents itself as “squirrel maze of retail distribution centre puzzle of competition warring objects, all improved, all package within fire colors…All object printed: Love me. Look me. Million speaking objects, begging. Crown American consumer with power of king, to rescue choose and give home or abandon here for expire.”

It’s an interesting choice to be sure, and one that is sure to garner praise in some quarters for its ‘bravery’. However, the structure proves too limiting, and seldom does the conceit rise above anything other than a gimmick.

In the past, Palahniuk has demonstrated an ability to leaven the more outrageous aspects of his novels with a deep understanding of character. Pygmy’s construction discourages such empathy, giving us a cipher for a protagonist and a series of increasingly bizarre proceedings that jolt and titillate, but never impress as being anything more than snapshots.

By Pygmy’s end, Palahniuk’s style has drained the story of all possible tension, resulting in a book that reads as unfocused rage at anything and everything. What should have been invigorating, as in Fight Club and Choke, is instead airless and empty, a shell of a good idea.

It’s far too early to declare an end to Palahniuk’s reign as the preeminent alternative author in America, but Pygmy finds the author running on empty. Pygmy has big themes and an enormous potential for effective satire, but in the end, Pygmy is, well, small.

MONKEY IS DEEPLY DISAPPOINTED

Originally published (heavily expurgated version) in the Winnipeg Free Press, April 17, 2009.

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk - review

Is Chuck Palahniuk a genius, a literary stylist, a pop culture icon, the next J.G. Ballard, or a gross-out artist extraordinaire?

At times none of the above, at times all, there is one thing he is definitely not: boring.

From his first novel Fight Club onward, the cult author has careened through the grotesque underbelly of literature, spilling forth tale after tale of the disenfranchised, the violent, and the bizarre, with decidedly mixed results. While Diary displayed an author in firm control of his material, his last effort Haunted was spectacularly uneven, a set of stories that sacrificed his talent on an altar of stomach-churning imagery.

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey finds Palahniuk revisiting a favourite theme; the quest for spiritual meaning through the manipulation of violence. Along the way, he tosses in science-fiction themes, deformities, conspiracy theories, spider attacks, car crashes, the Tooth Fairy, possible zombies, and messianic complexes, to keep things from getting dull.

Presented as the memories of friends, enemies, and various intellectuals, Rant covers the short life of the legendary Buster ‘Rant’ Casey, pieced together, as one friend puts it, “out of the details we each had to dig up from the basement of the basement of the basement of our brains.”

Depending on whom you talk to, Buster was either a futuristic Huckleberry Finn, “the worst Patient Zero in the history of disease,” the most successful “naturopathic serial killer” ever, or various epithets unsuitable for public consumption. As Buster himself says, “You’re a different human being to everyone your meet.”

After a childhood that consists of intentionally courting death through rabies, Buster moves to the city, a futuristic urban nightmare where the population has been severed into a form of “segregation by time,” where people are either function at night or day, but not both. There, he participates in “Party Crashing,” a form of urban demolition derby that “rejects the idea that driving time is something to be suffered in order to achieve more useful and fulfilling activity.”

Buster seems content at first to revel in his twisted nature, working as an exterminator, collecting specimens of spiders, and quickly contaminating all around him with his unique strain of rabies. But inside the contradicting recollections of his monstrous deeds, there is a hint that Buster has transcended humanity, and a myth of biblical proportions may be taking shape.

Palahniuk gets a tremendous amount of mileage from sprinkling pop-cultural references throughout his outlandish plot. Alongside a liberal helping of William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, Ballard’s controversial Crash (concerning sexual fetishists of car accidents) is the most obvious homage. Yet just when the plot finally appears to be straightening out, Palahniuk throws in thematic references reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ and Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko.

The result is a plot that never stops, multiple points of view, shifting perspectives, contradictory information, nauseating side trips, truly dark wit, and a skewed take on humanity so warped that the effect on the reader verges on the vertiginous. It doesn’t make a lot of surface sense, but there is an intriguing undercurrent of logic that drives Rant’s increasingly preposterous events.

It can be best to look at Rant as a carnival, chock full of roller coasters, hucksters, human oddities, and fast food. It may not be to everyone’s tastes, and many will look upon its thrills as cheap and unworthy of discussion. But Palahniuk, acquired taste though he may be, knows his audience, and mixes the highbrow and lowbrow with aplomb and vigour. Like a carnival, you may feel queasy afterward, but you sure won’t forget that you visited.

Originally published in The Winnipeg Free Press, June 3, 2007.