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Well that was different...
There is a lot going for this novel, beginning with the beautiful and restrained language. Atrium can paint a lovely sentence, and it is a tone of paranoia and acceptance that saturates nearly every sentence that makes the increasingly surreal world make a kind of dream logic sense. There are moments of outright political satire (the american public voting to defund all schooling), but this is largely about about communities, and the insanity of our rituals in the face of larger, more pressing m...
Preposterous! As if townfolk would really commit atrocities between small talk. As if neighbors would wave to each other behind grins armed to the teeth. As if the means of logic were indifferent to any ends. As if educated people would cling to any feelgood claptrap. As if we would fret over the kitchen sink, uneven hedgetrimming, the right style of bow tie knot when the roof is falling, tide is rising, food supply vanishing. As if... it's yesterday's news, known and nugatory, and the only plac...
Damn no cops in this city or what?
I can't remember how I first learned of this book, but I seem to recall hearing it was about a teacher who decides to run for mayor.And it is. But . . . Let's take a look at the last line of the first paragraph: I want to call to Helen, to wave and exchange greetings, but I know she'll never acknowledge me after the awful things that happened to little Sarah Miller, early last week, down in my basement. Okay. Then there's this: Many picnickers died that day. I recall Ray walking up Main, obl...
Real Rating: 3.5* of fiveMy Young Gentleman Caller hefted a bin for me today, its lid slipped, and this book bonked his noggin. Bin safely deposited, piffling nature of injury established (to my satisfaction if not his, I suspect he was angling for sympathy/guilt banana bread as his desire for more of that comestible is a refrain in our recent conversations), I picked up the book and was right back in the Sixth Avenue B. Dalton circa 1994. (The receipt tells me I bought the book December 8, 1994...
First of all, let it be known that I'm a sucker for bizarro fiction. The weirder and more absurd, the better. I loved last year's Welcome to Night Vale, and found it a perfect balance between humor and offbeat horror. Here, though, Donald Antrim concocts nothing short of a failure!From first reading the synopsis, I was in. Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World seemed right up my alley in terms of genre: social satire, darker than black humor, and a tones of underlying dread. It had all of that,
Starts out promisingly enough and the cool, forensic way in which Antrim describes the ritualized public execution of the town's ex-Mayor is particularly compelling. But the switch into outright surrealism is too abrupt and ultimately feels gratuitous. The central themes of collective nervous breakdown and identity crisis are interesting and with more subtle development could potentially have been edging into Kafka-esque territory. In the end it felt more like sitting through somebody else's sli...
I think I'm getting way more cynical with these type of books as I grow older and maybe in my early twenties this book would have been given an four star rating, but as it is...it scrapes a two - just barely.Elect Mr. Robinson does have it's charms. I found the relationship between Robinson and his wife to be the more engaging part of the story. There was also enough characters to keep me interested. I suppose what the nail in the coffin for me was the ending.It wasn't too dark for me, I've read...
Well now... That was rather disturbing. No spoilers, but I think you'll agree that Mr. Pete Robinson is creepy from the start. The final scenes bear this out. But what is Robinson? What part does he play in this little drama of small town life that takes a sharp turn into the bizarre? Antrim is an amazing writer. I'll keep his books on my list of guilty pleasures (if pleasure is the correct word to use).
The thing is, it's such a bizarre book, and unpleasant, but so thought-provoking. Jeffrey Eugenides proclaims in the forward that there's nothing like it (though I think Edward Scissorhands, which came out a few years before Mr. Robinson, has quite a bit of the same energy, if considerably sweeter). Antrim has taken the quotidian world and just twisted it a tiny, tiny bit, enough to set it askew, with bits spinning off into insanity. So everything feels familiar (at least if you've lived in the
Jeffrey Eugeniges in his fanboy introduction says that when he first read this I was suddenly pulled into a never-before-experienced realm : the sunken world of a strange and marvelous book. Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World is that very rare thing : a book without antecedents.O Jeffrey Eugenides, you may be very sweetBut I feel your education has been somewhat incompleteKafka (1915) K. was informed by telephone that there would be a small hearing concerning his case the following Sunday. He...
On paper, this book seemed like a sure win for me. Dark, macabre humor, a surreal yet mundane setting, a confusing and unreliable narrator, a glimpse of civilization as it breaks down into something primal and strange...it sounded thrilling. Ultimately though, it felt like too many ideas went into the oven and all of them came out either half-baked or burnt. I don't normally write reviews, but after finishing this book I found myself nagged by all the other books I've read recently that have tac...
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. What’s obvious is that this hilarious and fantastical novel is well worthy of your attention.Antrim works in the genre of American