Each time I read an announcement about an upcoming Chuck Palahniuk novel to be released in the near future, I experience two separate and conflicting reactions at the same time.  I get that little tingle in my stomach, excitement slowly building, that I always used to get when I was a kid when my mother announced that the family would be visiting the local water park the upcoming weekend.  Then I feel a little bit of panic, creeping slowly up my neck, and I am afraid for myself as a Palahniuk fan and for Palahniuk as an author.  Will this next novel be a let down?  What kind of wild and mildly offensive story will he unleash?  Will it, like his compellingly constructed but ultimately disappointing Haunted, end up being violent and amoral purely for the sake of violence and amorality?  Purely for shocks?  Will this novel create in me a need to rethink my position in society; the position of others in society; our obsession with materialism, capitalism, and money; the ramifications of heavily entrenched gender roles, or for that matter any hegemonic social roles?

Palahniuk’s last novel, Snuff, certainly wasn’t a disappointment.  The content was racy, but Palahniuk’s minimalist narrative style has a way of cutting through any discomfort an open-minded reader might initially feel by delivering the characters with all of their flaws displayed openly, stripped of any real devastative power.  The ultimate result of such sterilization is a text that can introduce difficult-to-breach social topics in ways in which readers have not yet considered.  While I didn’t think Snuff was as intensely symbolic and heady as some of Palahniuk’s other works, I found that it deconstructed a lot of the mystery, or more aptly fantasy, away from pornography in a way that prevented me from being distracted from the story by its content (this is where I believe Haunted failed).  Pygmy, I believe, is in the same vein as Snuff.  And while there isn’t really a “surprise ending” (which is what I’ve come to expect from Palahniuk’s novels), and the pages don’t really fly by like they seem to with Palahniuk’s other novels, there is a thread of intense humanity that runs through the narration that I haven’t experienced in any other Palahniuk novel.

As with all of Palahniuk’s other works, Pygmy is narrated in the first person.  But he’s decided to take a slightly different approach this time, and tells the tale from the point of view of an unnamed member of a group of terrorists that have come to the United States masquerading as high school exchange students (“Pygmy” is the nickname that is given to the narrator by his host family).  The terrorists originate from an unnamed country (probably a good idea on Palahniuk’s part) that seems to be an amalgamation of North Korea, China, and whatever country would exist if al-Qaeda formed its own nation.  Not only are the narrator and his posse terrorists, but their plan is to hatch some sort of terrorist plot (the reader does not discover what the exact plot is until close to the end of the novel) that will eventually kill millions, if not tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions, of Americans.  On top of that, the entire narrative is delivered in broken “ESL English.”

Now, Palahniuk was very careful not to mock any specific ethnic accent and instead opted for a generic non-native speaker voice which, again, was probably a good idea on his part.  At first the narrative style can be a bit off putting, but as the novel progresses you begin to see how much freedom this style of narration has given Palahniuk.  Flowers become “plant life sex organs” and “vagina and penis of daisy and carnation,” the figure of Jesus Christ on a cross at the local church becomes “fake statue plaster dead male,” and a spelling bee becomes a “spelling war” during which students are “dismissed from battlefield” when they spell a word incorrectly.  Yet again, Palahniuk has found a new lens through which we can view the world.

Palahniuk has stated in many interviews and in a few non-fiction essays and blurbs that he has written that all of his protagonists search for a way to reconnect with society.  Towards the beginning of the novel they find themselves cordoned off by deeply entrenched hegemonic forces that seek, to a certain extent, to enslave the members of a particular social or cultural group to a particular ideology or mindset.  Pygmy faces this same challenge, and Palahniuk smartly chose that challenge to be a socio-political set of values that embraces fascism as a valid way of motivating social “progress.”  The obvious parallels to our contemporary problem with fundamentalist terrorists (to a certain extent left-wing but primarily right-wing terrorists) aren't to be overlooked. Ultimately, the question of how to understand what a terrorist could possibly be thinking when he or she decides to kill what we consider to be innocent people lies at the center of Palahniuk's narrative, and it's not an easy question to answer.  And while Palahniuk does seem to have thought deeply and sincerely about the process that one must go through in order to become what amounts to a murderer, even he can't completely solve the riddle that his newest novel seems to be trying to unravel.

I certainly loved this book and actually find it a little less abrasive (and I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way) than almost all of his other works.  There are few authors who have the ability not only to think like and understand someone who would traditionally be thought of as an enemy to our way of life, but to empathize with them as well—to show them as they really are, internal conflicts and all.  It’s not as morally powerful a work as I think it probably could be, but it’s a place to open dialogue.  And sometimes that’s what we really need anyway.