A genuinely funny sendup of contemporary American politics.
In Rogers’ political satire, after the two major political parties collapse, there is a mad dash to commandeer the White House and uncover a scandal that will oust the current president.
In a display of apathy-as-protest, American voters simply ignore a Congressional election, neglecting to vote in any meaningful number of representatives and forcing the rebranding of the two dominant political parties. In an event that comes to be known as “The Great Realignment,” Democrats and Republicans are rechristened Stalactites and Stalagmites, or “Tites” and “Mites” for short. Like so many other politicians, Senator Sheffield Belmond, a Stalactite from Minnesota, has his ambitious sights set on the Oval Office, but his “sincerity, sterling progressive credentials, legislative obscurity, and darn Midwestern likeability” just aren’t quite enough; President John Stafford, who belongs to neither party, is widely popular. Belmond hopes to find a scandal to unseat Stafford, as does Speaker of the House Jan Staffort, a trans woman who resents the president for having such a similar last name—a strangely plausible motivation in this politically astute novel by Rogers. Digging up dirt on the president turns out to be a daunting task since it appears that Stafford is “possibly the least corrupt president we’ve had in at least twenty years.” An opportunity arises, though, when United States Army Lt. Park-Raak, a man who loathes Stafford, finds “impeachment grade information” indicating that the president is involved in financial impropriety. Park-Raak shares the evidence with his girlfriend Elle Crafton, a reporter for the Washington Herald. At the heart of the potential scandal is “Pisanionium,” a recently discovered element that somehow has artificial intelligence properties built into it and is used to power Phycenook, the dominant social media website.
The author inventively creates an absurd political cosmos that is deliciously reminiscent of the real one, a considerable feat given Washington’s inclination to self-parody. The story can lag a bit—the plot is freighted with excessive attention to superfluously granular details. Still, Rogers concocts an alternative political universe realistic enough to be evocative of the contemporary scene while remaining profoundly and entertainingly ridiculous; one bill Staffort sponsors delinks federal legislation from the law of cause and effect, catalyzing comically ludicrous scientific and philosophical debates about its defensibility. And Belmond is a prolific poet—he’s written thousands of poems—including this slice of artless callowness: “An old fellow out of Nantucket / had a list: before he kicked the bucket, / He thought it’d be nifty / To visit all fifty / States, but developed melanoma, so had to adjust it.” Mercifully, the author avoids any heavy-handed political grandstanding or sermonizing—this is a work of humor, first and foremost, not a didactic polemic. The author is not interested in scoring cheap partisan points—his target is the whole of political culture. As a result, the novel should appeal to any reader in search of a well-executed political farce that offends widely and equally. This is an intelligently conceived work, and most enjoyable.
A genuinely funny sendup of contemporary American politics.Pub Date: June 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798218553951
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Intra Murus Prss
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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