GREENFIELD FOR PRESIDENT

A debut novel in which satirical darts strike political targets that don’t move around a lot.

Like his father before him, Jeremiah Greenfield is an accomplished liar. Unlike his father, Jeremiah doesn’t care much for lying. But truth-telling isn’t very satisfactory either, he discovers, since few seem eager to listen to him, and those that do listen hate what they hear. So Jeremiah marks time more or less aimlessly—getting good at lying, but not doing much with this talent or caring much about anything at all, really, until his little-league job on a small town newspaper turns big-league indeed by dint of an almost accidental scoop. Catapulted into fame and fortune, he becomes powerful. His opinions begin to matter. People seek him out to bask in the brilliance of his neat way with a lie. Among the seekers are representatives of the Committee to Resurrect the American Presidency (CRAP), a shadowy organization that bribes or scares dissenters into behaving the way it wants them to. CRAP informs Jeremiah that he’s presidential timber, the ideal candidate to head a new third party ticket. He cottons to CRAP’s view of him, but what he doesn't realize is that he’s being set up. His subtextual job is to siphon off votes, thus guaranteeing the election of CRAP’s real choice, the incumbent, no mean shakes of a liar himself. Jeremiah outperforms expectations, however, and is suddenly in danger of winning. CRAP is forced to step in, and Jeremiah is forced to step out (in a manner of speaking), this to the dismay of not many except the one or two who, against heavy odds, have managed to find him endurable.

Political satire 101. Or, when targets balloon as large as Robbins’s, the fun goes out of deflation.