RIGHTEOUS REBELLION

A Southern senator drives his state’s secession from the union and transformation into a sovereign Christian nation in Hooker’s satirical novel.

Pastor Gabriel Horne, head of the Jubilee Church of Revelation somewhere deep in the South, believes America is spiraling into decline, besotted by godlessness, communism, and the “slime and filth of disease, of Yankeedom.” He hears a voice assuring him that help is on the way—that help arrives in the form of Margaret Wurmser, a deep-pocketed real-estate mogul looking to develop beachfront property in his state. Blessed with her money, Horne pushes freshman Senator Loomis Gruber to secede from the union, declare his state an independent nation (“New Canaan”), and install himself as its first president. The new nation is a queasy mix of extremist, largely hateful principles, including Christian fundamentalism, antisemitism, and undisguised misogyny. (Altus Drech, New Canaan’s Minister of Homeland Security and Information, is an “unapologetic fascist” and admirer of Hitler.) At first, the new nation’s citizens receive their independence in a “rapturous mood,” but soon the populous begins to revolt, especially women angered by an edict issued by the Council of God affirming their inequality to men. In this farcically humorous tale, the creation of New Canaan quickly and predictably devolves into civil catastrophe, though that doesn’t stop it from inspiring other states to follow its dubious lead. While the narrative is ostentatiously ludicrous—the characters are all hilariously drawn comic stereotypes—the author achieves a menacing air of plausibility (secession and war have happened before, and states continue to threaten it, however disingenuously). The practical possibility of secession is beside the point, though—the novel vividly realizes a comic vision of the nation’s fragility as a result of its cultural fractures, divisions so deep a significant portion of the body politic holds another significant portion in implacable contempt. This is a genuinely funny book, filled with insightful commentary on America’s volatile present.

A political farce that is both thoughtful and entertaining.