Pygmy

Palahniuk's eponymous protagonist, a highly skilled terrorist, infiltrates an American family by posing as an African pygmy on a student exchange. He relates his sinister albeit humorous escapades in a stunted and ungrammatical prose. While the style is essential to the plot and effective in the novel, it is overwhelmingly problematic in an audio version: read aloud, Pygmy's peculiar speech patterns sound like bad beatnik poetry. While Paul Michael Garcia handles pacing and rhythm admirably, his professionalism cannot alone make this a worthwhile listen for anyone but the die-hard Palahniuk fan. A Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 2). (Oct.)