Pygmy

Pygmy

By Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk reminds me of Lou Reed. I'll get to that toward the end of this entry but I wanted to put that out there right away as sort of a teaser, an enticement of what might be to come. But this entry is a little difficult to unpack, so allow me to take it slowly. I'll get there, but first, let's talk about Engrish...

Living in Asia offers local English speakers (both Grammar-Nazis and otherwise) a wonderful opportunity to witness the ongoing linguistic farce that is "English in Asia." We are able to revel daily in absurd linguistic usage, nonsensical syntax, obtuse grammatical structures and just plain gibberish. We are literally surrounded by what is colloquially known as "Engrish," in Japan or "Chinglish" in Taiwan. Perhaps you've heard of this phenomenon.

If you haven't, allow me to explain. In Asia, there is an overwhelming eagerness to use English language (English somehow denotes a product, business, event, landmark, etc... as international and therefore gains a certain amount of import amongst locals though doing next-to-nothing to attract actual English speakers). Therefore, in order to capitalize from it's reputation as an international language, English is splashed across everything. But what it actually says never seems to be of much significance.

I could document thousands of examples of bad English usage in Taiwan (for instance) but I will suffice with just the one to prove my point. This on a sign:

No Occupation While Stabilizing

I have no idea what they intended to say. Examples such as this are hilarious and garner furrowed brows and giggles from me and my wife as we try to discern exactly what it was they were trying to convey. It's as if they simply ran the Chinese through Google Translate and assumed that it works flawlessly. They spelled all the words right, at least.

Anyway, single sentences are amusing, but longer translations (such as museum displays, landmark explanations, park rules and regulations, pamphlets etc...) can get tiresome. Trying to read broken English over an extended period of time is not only difficult but also frustrating. When I encounter large swaths of bad English I rarely get through a few lines before developing a headache and giving up. Nobody wants to read reams of bad English. It's not worth the effort

Did you hear that, Chuck Palahniuk?

Pygmy is Chuck Palahniuk's 10th novel. I had read two of his novels (Fight Club and Choke) previous to Pygmy, so I can vouch for Palahniuk's ability as a writer.

Pygmy is told from the perspective of a 13-year old operative (Operative 67, aka Pygmy) from a fictional nation that seems to be an amalgam of North Korea, China, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, except perhaps more brutal. He is sent as an exchange student to mid-Western America to complete some sort of political sabotage known as Operation Havoc. Each chapter is a single dispatch from the Operative presumably back to his homeland via methods unknown. Pygmy chronicles the operative's life in small town America and his barely concealed scorn for the American way of life (along with much violence... after all, this is Chuck Palahniuk). Despite this book being touted as a comedy, hilarity does not ensue.

What does ensue is 241 pages of sheer, unadulterated literary torture. Since Pygmy's native tongue is not English, Palahniuk thought it would be hysterical to write the entire book in broken English. An entire book of headache-inducing sentence structures, inappropriate word choices and frustrating grammar patterns. If Pygmy's English got progressively better as the novel wore on, this gimmick would have been mildly excusable, but it didn't. Not even a little. Despite being one of the brightest students in his country's school curriculum, Pygmy seems to have zero ability to pick up English once immersed.

Not that he couldn't. He has a vast vocabulary and at one point in the novel he, along with the other exchange operatives, excel at a school spelling bee, spelling such abstruse words as pheochromocytoma and oocephalus. One would infer from such an intellect that picking up on the subtleties of English grammar would be a breeze. Not so.

And it's not like this gimmick couldn't have been done well. If I had an accent to play with in my head such as Russian or Highland Scottish or Bantu, perhaps I would have been able to wrap my head around this gimmicky bit of writing, but alas when you create a fictitious nation, a fictitious accent is difficult to image. I'm left with straight-ahead brutalized English. I simply refuse to delve farther into this book simply because I don't want to translate this inanity into Standard Written English. What's the point? You won't read it.

Which brings me back to why Chuck Palahniuk reminds me of Lou Reed.

Back in the early 1970s Lou Reed recorded an album called Transformer. It is one of the most influential pop records of that decade. You might remember his song "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" from that album, although the entire work is worth a listen. Transformer was the album that launched Lou Reed's solo career post-Velvet Underground and placed him in the envious position of rock god.

Which, of course was exactly what Lou Reed didn't want to be. Lou Reed is, was, and will always be an artist first, celebrity never. The fame that Transformer brought him was neither sought after nor desired. Reed actively disliked all the attention he received following Transformer.

Although this story has never been confirmed or disconfirmed, rumor has it that his next album, Metal Machine Music, was released specifically to scare his peripheral fans away so that he could quit being a rock celebrity and get on with making his own brand of music. Reed allegedly recorded the album to drive fans away. One thing is for certain, Metal Machine Music is perhaps the worse album ever made and reduced Lou Reed to a laughingstock.

I get the impression that this is exactly the same strategy being implemented by Palahniuk with Pygmy. Palahniuk's previous work has rendered him a colossal reputation in the literary world. He is (along with Neil Gaiman and Tom Robbins) the closest thing to rock stars that exist in the literary world. Perhaps a certain amount of Harper Lee is extant within Palahniuk. so much so that he felt compelled to write this drivel in order to drive off his peripheral fans.

At least I hope that's why he wrote this. The alternative, that he wrote this in earnest and without irony, is far more disconcerting.

A Long Way Down

A Long Way Down

By: Nick Hornby

I recall reading once that Margaret Atwood loved Mordecai Richler's new novel. She enjoyed it every time he published it. I have struggled to find the source of this quote (therefore the paraphrasing) and I'm not sure if she really said it, but even if I imagined it, it holds a good dollop of truth about Richler, and so many others.

While I love Mordecai Richler, I find myself agreeing with this (alleged) quote. It is a more concise way of verbalizing my theory on Diminishing Returns in Literature. I nicked the idea from the original Law of Diminishing Returns, the economic law that is, and I understand how the economic theory works, basically. My theory is only marginally akin to its economic brethren due to my complete lack of interest in economic theory, so please bear with me.

Essentially, my law of diminishing returns states that an artist (in whatever oeuvre) creates something that awes and inspires his or her audience. It could be their first piece or their fifty-first piece, it doesn't matter. if it is the audience's first exposure to said art, it typically impresses. The audience is then compelled to explore more of the artist's body of work and, while still impressed, each successive piece experienced by the audience impresses slightly less until such time that the audience comes to the realization that the artist will never again give the them the same feeling they got from the first piece they saw.

Another way of explaining it would be to compare it to heroin or cocaine (although having never tried either of these narcotics, I'm working from hearsay). Users frequently say that their very first hit of heroin or cocaine is better than any feeling they have ever experienced and that addiction stems from their eternal pursuit of that same "first time" feeling, which they never get again. While I'm not a junkie, I do understand this concept.

It happens in music (Radiohead), film (The Coen Brothers) and television (The Simpsons). A radiohead virgin listening to any Radiohead album (pick one, any one, really) will immediately love it to bits. They will then like each subsequent album they hear significantly less, not because they are worse, but because they are all essentially the same. My first exposure to Radiohead was The Bends and it has remained my favorite. But this blog is about books and the most obvious literary example I can think of for my diminishing returns theory is Tom Robbins.

The first Tom Robbins novel I ever read was Jitterbug Perfume and I can honestly say that it is one of a small number of books that changed my life. I can't say exactly how, but upon finishing that book I felt like I had come through something and was somehow different, more whole, more in touch. Perhaps imperceptibly, but changed nonetheless. I have two friends who say they had the same experience after finishing Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, respectively. It doesn't matter which Tom Robbins book you read, it just has to be the first one. That will forever be: The One. All others will fail to attain the same status.

I have read virtually everything Robbins has written and each subsequent novel has impressed me less and less. It's not that I read the best one first, it's that they are all essentially the same and, therefore, aren't equipped to hit me as hard as the first one ever did. They aren't bad, they're just not Jitterbug Perfume.

The same can be said of Richard Russo. I read Empire Falls first and each successive novel impressed me less because they were structurally the same. And as much as it pains me to say it, Margaret Atwood (if she did indeed say it) is right about Mordecai Richler. I read Barney's Version first and went backwards from there. Each novel seemed like a variation on Barney. I suspect those that read the Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz or Joshua Then and Now would say the same about Barney's Version. Other authors that fall into this category include Irving Welsh, Ben Elton, Leon Uris and Douglas Adams (sorry).

Well, add Nick Hornby to this list. I loved High Fidelity when I first read it about a decade ago. That book spoke to me, a certifiable music snob, like very few others could. Fever Pitch was pretty good too. Although I don't share Hornby's obsession with English football, I do understand obsession (mine is hockey). About a Boy was fine, How to Be Good was forgettable (in fact I picked up How to Be Good about a month ago and it took me 40 pages to realize I had already read it) and A Long Way Down was painful.

OK, it wasn't painful as such, but it was just sort of the same as all his others. I have nothing against Nick Hornby. He's literary elite, a rock star among writers with nothing to prove. He's found a formula that works for him and he has to tell his stories the best way he can and I respect him for that. Having never written a novel, who am I to say that he's fallen into a rut. It's just that I can't imagine picking up another Hornby book only to fall into another world filled with Hornby's hipper than hip characters.

One might argue that the literary law of diminishing returns is too critical. Perhaps we should just take solace in knowing what you will get from some authors. A literary comfort zone so to speak. But I know what I'm going to get from Kurt Vonnegut and Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth but they never fail to amaze me, book after book after book...

Aw, hell. Perhaps I'm simply as jaded as a Nick Hornby character. I think its time to read some non-fiction. Wash the palette clean.