An engaging and scabrous alternative-universe farce about the American government.
In this satire, sham news articles, memos, prose, and dialogue transcriptions follow the fantastical fortunes of the George H.W. Bush presidential dynasty, whose members are human-alien hybrids in thrall to insect extraterrestrials and opposed by a group of talking fish and others.
Robinson delves into the conspiracies and extremes of the UFO and Edgar Cayce cults for this broad lampoon. The premise proposes that Texas broke off from the United States to become a right-wing/racist police state. The New England family of patrician Prescott Bush is appointed to the Texas presidency and intelligence services. It turns out that all of Earth’s ruling elite families are secretly human-alien hybrids who answer to ageless, spaceship-riding insect ETs from Atlantis. The principal insect agent is W. Averell Harriman, aka Dogsbody Harriman, a praying mantis. Dogsbody’s foes are the Lemurians, who include talking fish and mer-people. They are led by a lunar diving beetle forced off the moon by Atlantean aggression. Prominent on the beetle side: Abraham Lincoln, occasionally sighted in Texas aquatic habitats astride a horned “devil-water-cow.” The narrative becomes alt-history shaped by fish versus bug intrigues. Bush scions George H.W. and George W. are both disappointing clones, given to multiple malapropisms (“This really gets my groat, people correcting my English”). Though they are promised prominence by Dogsbody, subversion by the fishy terrorists and the maneuverings of rivals John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon thwart the Bush family’s ambitions temporarily. There are assassinations, drug smuggling, the invasion of Panama, sexual perversions, and the Reverend Moon. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the most famous Bush family escapades (attacks on Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Great Recession) do not enter into the picture. The complex burlesque recalls such surreal confabulations as Robert Mayer’s I, JFK (1989) and Chuck Barris’ Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1984). In its best parts, Robinson’s yarn captures the nasty wit of vintage National Lampoon political parodies; other times, it treads into bad taste, working real-life tragedies (First Lady Laura Bush’s teenage car fatality) into the kooky cosmology. The striking tale provides redeeming social value in the occasional impressions of the government encompassing amoral power blocs and game players, treating the common folk as so many insects as they scheme outrageously for control and privilege.
An engaging and scabrous alternative-universe farce about the American government.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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