Donald Antrim’s debut novel, originally published in 1993 and re-released last year
by Granta, with a foreword by Jeffrey Eugenides, reads like a fresh
satire on contemporary America. Whether this is down to the author’s great
prescience, or the failings of political leaders to make progress beyond the
final years of the George Bush administration, is up for debate[1].
What’s obvious is that this hilarious and fantastical novel is well worthy of
your attention.
Antrim works in the genre of American Gothic; his world is a dark cousin
of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, in which the mayor, Jim Kunkel
has been drawn and quartered after he ‘made that sorry, stupid show of
indiscriminately lobbing Stinger missiles into the Botanical garden' and
the 'present civic administration was little more than a front for
corrupt Rotarians’. His protagonist, Pete Robinson, is the town
scrivener. The post of scrivener plays a small but important role in American
literature, being filled by the proto-anarchist refusenik Bartleby in Melville’s
classic novella. Bartleby causes disruption through passive resistance, his
continual assertion that ‘I would prefer not to’. Pete’s personality, on
the other hand, is characterised by complacent self-assurance bordering on
delusion, and it is this mentality (described by himself as ‘alpha-male
insouciance’) that leads the town into chaos.
Pete’s narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time, opening with a
cinematic sweep over a beautiful southern California town gone to seed, 'done
up in wisteria & swaying palms and smelling of rotten fruit', with the
locals 'scavenging on the shoreline'. Disturbing details are picked
out, and Robinson hints at 'the awful things that happened to little
auburn-haired Sarah Miller, early last week, down in my basement'. We are
informed that the community is no more. Homes have become private fortresses,
surrounded by moats filled with spikes and broken glass, and the local park is
studded with landmines, the product of turf war between private militias. At
the same time, the infrastructure of the town is disappearing: 'We lost
the schools when the taxpayers elected to defund the system,' Pete
explains, with the buildings turned into factories for 'shaping
precious black coral into the rings and charms everyone around here wears'.
The corrupt town council is dominated by folksy speeches appealing to fear and
self-interest: ‘Little Jeff's at home with the sitter tonight,’ runs
one example, ‘and let me tell you I feel better knowing there's a network of
electronically triggered fragmentation bombs armed & ready in the
nasturtiums outside his window’.
The execution of the former Mayor is redolent of neo-liberal Desert Storm fantasies about Saddam Hussein, and also hints at a deeper desire to do away with interventionist government: 'Jim's death had to happen. Jim was no ordinary citizen. He'd once been mayor... Now he would suffer a death consistent with dire actions, appropriate to high station: an old leader turned rogue, sundered by the people’. This reads like the rhetoric of the Tea Party taken to a grotesque degree; however, like all great satirists, Antrim does not focus his rage solely in one direction[2].
The execution of the former Mayor is redolent of neo-liberal Desert Storm fantasies about Saddam Hussein, and also hints at a deeper desire to do away with interventionist government: 'Jim's death had to happen. Jim was no ordinary citizen. He'd once been mayor... Now he would suffer a death consistent with dire actions, appropriate to high station: an old leader turned rogue, sundered by the people’. This reads like the rhetoric of the Tea Party taken to a grotesque degree; however, like all great satirists, Antrim does not focus his rage solely in one direction[2].
Robinson himself seeks to uphold civic virtue. After the school system
has been abolished, he plans to begin his own home school for the children of
the community. As townsfolk hurl library hardbacks into the local park to test
for mines, he tags behind, rescuing as many books as he can, whilst
entertaining vivid fantasies of 'carrying literature out of the wilderness'.
Yet it was Pete who provided the impetus for the town’s descent into anarchy.
It was a talk he gave, on the rather Foucaultian theme of discipline, in which
he attempted to ‘draw parallels between ancient and modern concepts of
punishment and guilt, and to demonstrate a few ways contemporary society has
internalised, even subtly institutionalised, the barbarity of the past',
which inspired the horrific execution of the ex-Mayor. Mr Robinson presents
himself as the promoter of responsible patrician governance but he secretly
fetishizes the implements of despotism, maintaining in his basement a 'reproduction
of a Portugese interrogation chamber (circa 1600), complete with rack,
miniature shackles' and so on. His school is a farce; his self-absorption
means that he forgets to recruit any other teachers, whilst his pedagogical
impulses result in him delivering a lecture on the inquisition (a time when 'diversity
in all its forms was punishable by death or imprisonment') to children aged
three and over. He is the epitome of complacent liberal self-congratulation,
his every positive action made queasy by his habit of mental slogan writing
from which the novel takes its name.
For the most part, Antrim’s style is dry, with even the most fantastical
events rendered in the breezy, matter-of-fact tones of Keillor’s Prairie
Home Companion shows, even down to the closely observed sex scenes.
Occasionally, though, something else breaks through. The town people begin
taking part in fervent rituals, placing themselves into trance-like states.
Encouraged to channel her spirit animal, Pete’s wife metamorphoses into a
coelacanth (Pete is disappointed to find himself taking the form of a great
plains buffalo). These scenes are recounted in vivid detail; whether the
delusions are Pete’s own, or a form of collective madness, is unclear.
Elect Mr Robinson… is a short book, but one which packs a great
punch. Reading it in 2013, details like the execution of a tyrannical leader,
the descent into inter-communal warfare, and the image of the secret torture
chamber, seemed utterly contemporary, while the description of fear-mongering,
self-interested libertarianism resonated with post 9/11 political discourse.
Like Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods, Antrim has
focussed on a dark aspect of the American Dream, twisting it into a grotesque
satire. This is a novel virtually devoid of hope, opening and closing with
individuals being torn apart, and with the twin spectres of Torquemada and Paul
Wolfowitz looming over it. The reader is left with the disturbing
sensation that twenty years on, we are all living in Mr Robinson’s idea of a
better world.
[1] As Robert Anton Wilson delighted in
pointing out, George Herbert Walker Bush is an anagram of ‘huge berserk rebel
warthog’. Make of that what you will.
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