LISA MAIRE
While English has long ago become the default language of airports and tourist kiosks, this global domination has taken its toll on the mother tongue of Virginia Woolf and Muhammad Ali. The sheer quantity of non-native speakers, combined with Internet translation engines that churn out instant, literalist mistranslations, has created an abundance of comical, mutant strains of the language. Maybe it's a frustration-release mechanism after all the spam e-mails that offer erection cure-alls in computer-mangled prose and phone conversations with heavily accented operators at outsourced call-centres, but these days English speakers find bottomless mirth in hearing their language intentionally mutilated.
Whether it's Borat or Everything is Illuminated or LOLCats, educated people aren't laughing at imitations of foreigners (or, um, cats) speaking English imperfectly but at our enlightened selves and the pretensions that are concealed by our perfectly conjugated verbs and proper syntax.
- Pygmy, by Chuck Palahniuk, Doubleday Canada, 241, $29.95
In U.S. author Chuck Palahniuk's newest novel, Pygmy, the foreign speaker is the novel's eponymous narrator and protagonist, a teenaged spy from an unnamed country who has infiltrated the United States, along with a number of his other operatives, as a foreign-exchange student.
Pygmy, who acquires his nickname from his host family, speaks in unerringly ungrammatical sentence fragments. "Only one step with foot, operative me to defile security of degenerate American snake nest," he observes upon his arrival at the airport of an unnamed Midwestern city. "Den of evil. Hive of corruption."
Settling down with the Cedars, his American host family, which includes a host mother obsessed with sexual appliances, Pygmy is bent on unleashing a shadowy terrorist act called Operation Havoc. In chapters written as official dispatches, the teenage spy, indoctrinated at the age of 4, freely quotes dictators like Hitler and Idi Amin ("You cannot run faster than a bullet") and has fully absorbed an ideology that includes exerting sexual dominance over the weak. In an early scene that sets the tone for the rest of the book, Pygmy outfights, sodomizes and then robs a school bully (who later professes his love for him): "Blue star of fighting anus leak blood into thin stripes down white legs. Everywhere patriotic. Here so great American nation."
Palahniuk, best known for the film adaptation of his novel Fight Club and the bestselling novel Choke, re-imagines the passion play of the bullied American high-school student from Pygmy's hostile point of view: "For official record, American education facility devoted humiliation and destroy all self-respect out native youth. Conspire to degrade all dignity." Through Pygmy, Palahniuk excoriates the craptastic cheer of a Junior Swing Choir class and the hormonally induced awkwardness of school dances, and tosses in a school shooting at a Model United Nations gathering for one last kick to the face of the U.S. public school system.
As a counterpoint, Pygmy offers dispatches that recall the "formative history of operative me" in his home land. In one episode, he remembers a laboratory mouse tortured as a lesson on the necessary cruelty of the state, and in another, he recalls an exceptional student at spy school who's killed to teach them not to "strive achieve personal celebrity of spotlight and applause."
Meanwhile, as the science fair approaches, Pygmy drugs the Cedars with Rohypnol at Thanksgiving dinner and gains access to a deadly neurotoxin at his host father's top-secret research facility with a U.S. defence contractor. Pygmy, who has grown attached to his host sister, is forced to choose between the sense of purpose of a totalitarian regime and the personal liberty found in the United States.
Early in the novel, a character asks Pygmy, "You a gook? A nigger? A sand flea? ... what breed of wetback bitch are you?" Clearly, Pygmy is supposed to represent every kind of foreigner, and to that end, Palahniuk has crafted a voice for him that is not reminiscent of any particular flavour of accented English.
Unfortunately, the voice is also inconsistent, unconvincing, and lacks the accidental poetry of a lot of broken English. For someone who can't properly line up a subject with a verb, Pygmy has a surprisingly strong vocabulary, often using more complicated words to describe a basic noun, like using the phrase "religion propaganda distribution outlet" instead of "church." At other times, the exchange student will also lapse into slang - the term "butt floss" to describe thong underwear - that stands at odds with the rest of his way of speaking. Elsewhere, when Pygmy describes "[rotating]face to one side, then other side, repeat to make head meaning 'no,'" he sounds less like an exchange student and more like an extraterrestrial.
Ultimately, Palahniuk's poor bad English only distracts readers from what's essentially a boilerplate satire on American society and its excesses. Palahniuk is lobbing his tomatoes at barnyard-sized targets like Wal-Mart and mega-churches, which have been mocked and criticized more effectively in the past. Not one of the characters, not even Pygmy himself, ever moves beyond a very thinly imagined caricature, and one quickly becomes desensitized to Palahniuk's steady stream of shock and narrative cruelty. Pygmy wants to be an indictment on American numbskullery, but it ends being more like an example of it.
Kevin Chong is a writer living in Vancouver. His most recent book is the music memoir Neil Young Nation.