Sunday, June 14, 2009

Foreign bodies
Christopher Tayler gets to the heart of Chuck Palahniuk's latest satire on American culture

Christopher Tayler in The Guardian, Saturday 13 June 2009

Chuck Palahniuk is one of those writers who get punished by critics for making them feel embarrassed about the eagerness with which their adolescent selves might have joined the writer's fan base. Fight Club, his first novel, published in 1996, made him famous when the film version came out three years later, and it could serve in a time capsule as a handy shorthand for a whole range of 90s pop-cultural "dissent", from Rage Against the Machine's first album to Adbusters magazine. His interest in male thwartedness is equally 90s in its colouring, though his homoeroticism and sex-and-violence material also put him somewhere in the grand tradition of William Burroughs and Dennis Cooper. No one could accuse him of being over-subtle - his later novels have such titles as Choke, Snuff and Rant - but there's something likeably direct and single-minded about his desire to speak to, and for, the confused ranks of American outsiderdom.
Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk
243pp,
Jonathan Cape,
£12.99
His new novel, Pygmy, concerns a conspiracy against American capitalism, a conspiracy known - in no great contrast to Fight Club's Project Mayhem - as Operation Havoc. The book opens: "Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67, on arrival Midwestern American airport greater" - here a word is blacked out - "area." Agent 67, who narrates the entire book in this mangled style, is a secret operative bent on terror, but outwardly he's a 13-year-old exchange student from a generically totalitarian developing world country.
He and his generically named co-agents are picked up at the airport by their unsuspecting host families and dispersed across a generic American suburb ("By not after next today, strategy web of operatives to be established").
The first phase of their mission involves attending high school, aka "American education facility devoted humiliation and destroy all self-respect".

1 comment:

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