His take on what the customs agent assures him is “the greatest country on earth”? “Snake nest. (“Sabotage successful,” he writes.) Trying, like many of us, to make sense of contemporary American life, Pygmy fails because so much of popular culture is short on logic and meaning. Along with other “social losers,” he represents the United States in a model UN conference, unaccountably wins a spelling bee and takes part in a science fair during which the plants in a competing hydroponics garden are exposed as marijuana.
He arrives in the United States with a strong accent and a strong distaste for everything American, including his host family: “vast cow father, pig dog brother, chicken mother, and cat sister.” While planning his rather murky act of terrorism (“Code Name: Operation Havoc”), Pygmy begins to accommodate himself to American life, especially high school.
In this wildly experimental text, Palahniuk ( Snuff, 2008, etc.) creates such a compelling character in Pygmy that we accept the boy’s biases and epithets as completely appropriate. A series of dispatches written in fractured and occasionally hilarious English suck readers into the mind of exchange student and would-be terrorist Pygmy.
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