A sprawling, cleverly imagined spoof of political culture and the miscreants it spawns.
A satirical skewering of the machinations of a despicable fictional American president.
Vermont-based author Manning exhibits a well-honed sense of the absurd in a silly but humorously absorbing debut. Wilhelm “Hick” Richter is the current American president, a double-chinned, Trump-esque, coke-snorting scoundrel his 13-year-old son, Billy, describes as “mean as a gutter rat” with a dyed comb-over and nefarious ties to corrupt international entities. Disgruntled with his young wife, Savanna, and their newborn baby, Richter continues to maintain nefarious ties to corrupt international entities while Georgina, one of his daughters, runs his sketchy companies. Cody, another daughter, snoops around and uncovers her father’s corruption and alerts the FBI. She is kidnapped and drugged by someone hoping to make her accept her father’s innocence by, among other things, forgetting some incriminating evidence surrounding her mother’s death. Cody’s brother Billy, who himself has bugged the Oval Office, is determined to swoop in, save her, and have his father implicated. Add to the cast Richter’s chief of staff Baron “Bugsy” Knowles and a host of unscrupulous druggy hoodlums, and you’ve got a serpentine stew of dirty politics. There’s also the smart, young Jeremy Green, who plans to hijack Richter’s reelection plans with his own campaign. Richter enters into a deal with a Russian ambassador named Boris to reveal secrets about a robotic prototype in exchange for help securing his reelection. Cody narrowly escapes her captors and goes on the run, while Richter’s legions of “Hick Brigades” crisscross the nation inciting violence and discord in honor of their philandering leader. Manning lays the head-spinningly satirical groundwork for all of these eerily familiar antics with the ease of a seasoned comedian. If it all sounds insanely zany, it is, yet Manning’s imagination, ambitious plotting, and comic timing are impeccable, and the outright corruption is hilarious. The hijinks steamroll common sense toward the conclusion, when the parade of bumbling idiots makes one final plan to dispose of poor abused Cody. This is a brilliantly conceived parody.
A sprawling, cleverly imagined spoof of political culture and the miscreants it spawns.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Encircle Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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