A rambling, curious, convoluted entertainment tailor-made for fans of political fiction who want a fantastical, vividly...
A political sendup skewers the presidential campaign process.
Human rights advocate and author Cooper’s (World One, 1990) opus echoes the current state of contemporary unrest in Washington, D.C., and the world at large. In the book’s preamble, dejected Democratic National Committee Chairman Jerry McClellan concedes his position in the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, in which “George W.” emerged victorious and swiftly turned the country’s political canvas a Republican shade of red. Dejected, mourning America’s ill-fated future, and “happy to have a safe place to hide,” McClellan takes up temporary residency in a used bookstore, dusting off a copy of a novel titled My Name Is Jesus Christ and I’m Running for President, agreeing that “Jesus Christ would make for the perfect moral values candidate in 2008!!!” Cooper’s ambitious literary undertaking becomes a novel within a novel as readers follow McClellan as he devours the anonymously authored story of Jesus’ campaign for the 2020 presidency. Cooper’s serpentine narrative finds the son of God descending from the heavens into Los Angeles on Christmas Eve in 2019 on the first stop of his “Born Again Comeback Tour,” which soon becomes his 2020 campaign for president of the United States. While definitely not for religiously sensitive audiences, the author’s eccentric and often hilarious satire depicts Jesus as a deity who also embodies an Everyman. He pops vitamin B12 and D pills, attends psychotherapy sessions to process the trauma of his crucifixion, and rubs hand cream into the scars of his stigmata. Meanwhile, alternately narrating in first person, is Jesus’ hypercritical, hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting older stepbrother, who tunes into a remote live-feed to watch the Messiah’s every move from a Mexican safe house. Commenting that the charged atmosphere surrounding the deity’s revival is “a bit like watching daytime soaps,” the stepbrother sees Jesus being interviewed by the media about his intentions throughout his Second Coming and beholds the spectacle of a receiving line of Hollywood celebrities like Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez, and Bono. Both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Nancy Pelosi make feverish pitches to become Jesus’ disciples. Jesus is soon persuaded by the people to run for presidential office as a Democrat, but his stepbrother steps in as the opposing Republican candidate in a heated race complete with debates, Arab terrorists, and Stephen Colbert. This melodrama more closely resembles a whirlwind kaleidoscopic fever dream than a campaign trail chronology. By incorporating both first-person narratives of Jesus and his malevolent stepbrother, the novel becomes a unique and humorous political caricature parodying the country’s electoral process, its numerous hypocrisies and mudslinging behaviors, and (if thinly veiled) Donald Trump’s cabinet selection process. The rousing tale’s drawbacks, which include its meandering exposition and numerous typographical errors (“River Jordon”; “Long Ranger’s”; “Katherine Hepburn”), will perhaps be forgiven by readers enthralled by Cooper’s creatively inspired grasp on the concept of farcical political lampooning.
A rambling, curious, convoluted entertainment tailor-made for fans of political fiction who want a fantastical, vividly realized escape from the bizarro reality of contemporary government.Pub Date: June 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9619914-3-2
Page Count: 554
Publisher: Americus Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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