Głosuj na pana Robinsona i lepszy świat!

by Donald Antrim, Mikołaj Denderski (Translator)

Groteskowa powieść, której akcja toczy się na amerykańskiej prowincji. W miasteczku doszło do spektakularnej egzekucji burmistrza, wszystkie szkoły zostały zamknięte, a mieszkańcy spędzają czas na budowaniu zasieków wokół domów i spotkaniach w klubie rotarian. Narrator powieści, Pete Robinson, nauczyciel zafascynowany praktykami Inkwizycji, postanawia założyć szkołę we własnym domu i wystartować w wyborach. Surrealny świat jak z koszmarnego snu w wielu aspektach niepokojąco przypomina ten, który dobrze znamy. W prozie amerykańskiego pisarza uderzają literacka wyobraźnia, giętkość języka, czarny humor. To pierwsze polskie wydanie powieści Antrima. W Stanach Zjednoczonych ukazała się ona w 1993 roku i dziś jest już klasyką.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Humor, Literary Fiction, Dystopia, American, Contemporary

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Donald Antrim is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999 The New Yorker named him as among the twenty best writers under the age of forty.

Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot. Antrim has been associated with the writers David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, and the visual artist Christa Parravani.

He has taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for spring 2009. Antrim teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Melki · Rating 4 out of 5]

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, oblivious to traffic, blood-soaked and carrying his wife's corpse.

And before you know it, the whole town is drawing and quartering a man, using their Toyotas and Subarus instead of horses.

Antrim presents an interesting examination of a town gone nutso. Warring neighbors plant mines and dig spike-embedded pits, calling them lawn-based defense cavities .

By the time Robinson's wife discovers she has the ability to turn into a coelacanth at will, it just seems par for the course.

Strange times, strange book. The disturbing ending ensures this one won't be forgotten any time soon.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

My 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. Computer POS precision noted.)

At that time I was gadding about Lower Manhattan in a haze of grief for my dead lover, mid-30s-male sexual hunger, and frustrated seeking for a hit in my newish career as a literary agent. Numbing pain via reading was an old, old habit of mine. This novel's premise, which nowadays we'd call bizarro, was so askew that I was sure I'd be diverted and possibly edified.

Like so many expectations....

So the read itself was successful, I kept the book somehow in spite of literally thousands of others falling away; but damned if I want to re-read it. Antrim's first novel is jam-packed with brio. His narrative voice isn't assured, it tries too hard to clever-clever its way out of some cul-de-sacs with limited success, but still tells a true story. Ours was then a country of receding community ethic, a sense of a destiny shared was eroding ever-faster, and its lack of usability as a ground-cover in the garden of liberty we're supposed to be maintaining was alarming to many of us.

As a reminder, the first government shut-down was almost a year away but had already been set in motion by the politically tone-deaf Clintons proposing a National Health Insurance Plan that would've saved tens of thousands from death or debilitating debt. (I never said they were wrong, just tone-deaf.) Antrim's Civil War fit beautifully into that deep and accelerating fault line's growth under the national garden's soil. His satirical intentions were spot-on. His storytelling voice wasn't quite up to the task but he was close enough for me at that time.

So today (post-boo boo kissing) I picked the book up for the first time in many long years, flipped around, and was chuckling again. I told the mildly sulky YGC Rob why I wasn't continuing to fuss over him and, I am gratified to report, sent the book home with him after I sold it by mentioning missile attacks on a gated community and drawing-and-quartering by Subaru.

Since it's a story with far greater relevance to today's 20-somethings than even to my then-30-something self, I'm hopeful it will reinforce his sense that the morality he sees enacted around him is pathological and not emulatable. And I'm enormously tickled in the vanity area that owning a book that I demonstrably bought for myself on a particular date before he was born made him covet the object.

Everybody wins. Like it should be.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 sweet
But I feel your education has been somewhat incomplete

Kafka (1915)
K. was informed by telephone that there would be a small hearing concerning his case the following Sunday. He was made aware that these cross examinations would follow one another regularly, perhaps not every week but quite frequently.

Donald Barthelme (1976)
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him.

Donald Antrim (1993)
Today I’m not sure I’d favour drawing and quartering an ex-mayor and Chamber of Commerce volunteer. That’s what we did to Jim Kunkel after the Stinger incident.

Yes, strange, violent and random things are being described in a voice of ironic normality. And this has been going on for years.

So anyway, in this thankfully brief novel, we’re in American suburbia, there’s a low-level war going on between two suburbs, people are throwing up fortifications round their houses, areas are mined, schools have been closed (because of withdrawn funding, not because of this guerrilla war), and Pete Robinson is thinking of running for mayor. First he has to bury the various parts of the dismembered ex-mayor (currently in his freezer) in various sacred places throughout town, intoning passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead over them. Oh, and Pete's wife has become a coelacanth. (Not literally, spiritually.) You get the picture? Yes, this is bizarro fiction, of which there is now quite a lot.

I took a chance on the notoriously bizarro Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot after some serious raving by one of my Goodreads friends. Here we have giant heads that appear in the sky; there is the world's greatest dishwasher who is a person; there are over 600 clones of an ancient pop singer's backup dancer; there is a person who keeps getting murdered; indeed there is a lot of fun going on. However, I found that some of the odder science fiction writers had got to this level of wackiness already. But I did like it, because Mr Boudinot has impressively weird ideas and he doesn’t waste them writing mild comedy sketches strung together by room-temperature standup riffing.

Franz Kafka, you rock. Donald Barthelme and Ryan Boudinot, you also rock. Donald Antrim, you are John Denver.

[Bonadext · Rating 4 out of 5]

Questo è il primo romanzo delle scrittore statunitense Donald Antrim, un libro folle, una favola nera e grottesca dove il sogno americano ha la sua conclusione. Il romanzo si svolge in un futuro distopico (ma che sembra attualissimo) in una piccola comunità chiusa e autogestita, dove la follia (intesa come violenza e alienazione) è cosa di tutti i giorni e non desta scalpore a nessuno degli abitanti. L'atmosfera che si respira è "plastica" ed il non-senso sembra regnare sovrano per tutto il libro. E' una lettura che può non piacere a tutti, ma lo stile di scrittura è piacevole, ricco e brillante.

[Daisy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Supposedly a satire, supposedly clever. I say supposedly because if you are unsure what is being satirised I’m almost certain it isn’t working.
Suburban dwellers dig moats and fill them with broken glass, pits with sharpened stakes, local open spaces are strewn with land mines. The mayor has been rent asunder in a modern approximation of the medieval torture of quartering (here he has each limb tied to an SUV which then drive off in different directions) and so the town’s resident medieval torture expert (and school teacher) who organised this execution, sees an opening for the position that he can fill.
And that’s it. That is the story apart from some dubious fetishising of his POC wife and a strange side narrative about her going into trances and becoming a fish.
Mr Robinson sets up a school with predictable horrific consequences and we leave him where we met him, hiding out in his attic.
Maybe there is a lot to this book, maybe it has some profound insights into contemporary America. If it does I didn’t grasp them. I resent the 160 pages reading time I wasted on this.

[Sarah]

Well that was different...

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antrim is truly one of a kind. He twists the small town world in a way that is horrifying at the same time that it feels completely normal (in an insane kind of way, of course). The mundane and the utterly bizarre are just so perfectly blended, the same way that humor and tragedy are blended, that I couldn't help but love this book. I found myself feeling several contradictory things while reading, but I was feeling nevertheless. In short, this is some amazing writing. I was enthralled from the very start.

[Dennis Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rarely am I as conflicted about a book as with "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World"! Antrim clearly knows what he's doing. He creates a dark dystopian future that resembles our own time enough to make things scary. His prose is wonderful and the sequence where Robinson contemplates the events that have transpired worm themselves into ones subconscious. Mankind is coming ever closer to a breaking point. A paradigm shift seems the only solution unless we want to pursue the violent path we're on to its inevitable conclusion.

[Mark Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 slightly precocious creative writing assignment - some early interest quickly transitioning into uncomfortable shuffling and relief when it was all over.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 US suburbs, to which all of this is very particular). It's depressing and stifling, a world of bland housing developments with aspirational street names, hobbies, and sad neighborhood infidelities. At the same time, everything's really, really off in suburbia, represented in the background by literal storms on the horizon and the steady rise of putrid waters in sinks and cellars, and foregrounded in, among other things, the neighbors' aggressive paranoia and creative defensive solutions. The same is true for the narrator, who sees himself, his feelings, and all of his actions as wholly sensible, describing them calmly and with some enthusiasm and pride, while we, reading along, clearly see how warped he is. While Eugenides finds Mr. Robinson sympathetic, I found him grotesque from the start, making the book hard to read and harder to enjoy. That said, the tiny twisting is ingeniously done. It's a very effective version of dystopia, a chilling jovial, suburban version where what's normal has been allowed to slide just beyond where we are now, into something cheerfully nightmarish (asking us, of course, if we're already there). And Mr. Robinson, too, is cheerfully nightmarish, a monster who sees himself as a savior within the confines of his community. A major theme of the book is education, but here, education, books, learning, and teaching are misused and abused; Antrim seems to be saying that the whole architecture of knowledge and thought can be as destructive as it is instructive or productive. The book, though short, speaks to a lot. There are bits that give pause about the normalcy, the banality, of war. Mr. Robinson presents his perverse and even horrifying sexual thoughts as unexceptional, understandable proclivities. Humans' connections to nature are investigated and challenged. Ultimately, I didn't enjoy reading this book (it's stomach-churning, it's like realizing you've been swimming in a pool with a dead thing at the bottom), but it's amazingly effective, making us as readers question what we accept as normal. It kept reminding me of a time I visited a colleague's house. He was showing me around with great pride, but I had to step carefully, because there were dog droppings everywhere - not just outside on the pavement leading to the house, where they were profuse, but inside the house as well. He chuckled at them and then blithely went on, pointing out the home's delights; this book felt like an amplification of that.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insieme alla sua bellissima moglie Meredith, Pete Robinson vuole aprire una scuola domestica nella propria abitazione, usandola come strumento di consenso e di propaganda per le giovani menti, un trampolino di lancio per una sua successiva candidatura a sindaco della propria cittadina, una comunità di villette con giardino ben curate, di parchi pubblici e di spiagge in ordine, apparentemente un paradiso terrestre.
In questa comunità fanno però capolino tutte le ossessioni dell'uomo occidentale, a tal punto condivise nei pensieri e nei comportamenti individuali dall'essere considerate come aspetto normale della propria vita sociale, fino a sfociare nella follia collettiva.
Questa follia si manifesta, ad esempio, nel desiderio di sentirsi sicuri, una sicurezza che viene esercitata con la deliberata reclusione in comunità chiuse e con la costruzione di inquietanti opere di fortificazione tra le abitazioni; nella simulazione della guerra, condotta nei parchi pubblici tra le varie famiglie che compongono il vicinato e che si contendono il territorio con mine antiuomo e mitragliatori; nelle discutibili lezioni scolastiche dello stesso Robinson, che insegna ai suoi giovani alunni metodi di tortura e teorie della guerra; nei deliri della moglie Meredith, che si isola in lunghe e frequenti sessioni meditative e che durante esse arriva a credersi e a comportarsi come un pesce.
Gli elementi disturbanti non mancano in questa narrazione grottesca, e lo sono ancora di più perché inseriti in un contesto molto simile, praticamente sovrapponibile, alla nostra realtà. E l'inquietudine ed il turbamento che ne derivano stanno proprio nell'eventualità di poter percepire come normali simili aberrazioni.
Scritto come una sorta di macabro flusso di coscienza, un viaggio allucinante nella mente deviata di un comune uomo occidentale, vivente in un mondo parallelo ma molto simile al nostro, un mondo irreale ma realisticamente descritto, dove l'alienazione ed il cinismo sono spinti ai massimi livelli, Votate Robinson assume i toni di una favola nera, una satira tagliente e caustica che porta alle estreme conseguenze tutte le nostre ossessioni, le nostre nevrosi e le nostre isterie collettive, mostrandocele attraverso la nitida lente di ingrandimento di un lucido incubo a occhi aperti.

[Kyle · Rating 1 out of 5]

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, but in each instance it was never enough. The satire I get. The humor is completely dry and wack-a-do; it's presented in this very serious and straight-faced way that usually gets a smile out of me, but instead never struck me as particularly exciting. You have in this story a man, Pete Robinson, living in suburbia with his wife. But their suburban ideals involve draw and quartering the former mayor (who caused the deaths of many by launching missiles at a picnic), traversing spiritual realms to become their inner animals, digging home-defense pits/moats filled with sharpened bamboo spears and water moccasins around their front lawns, and recreating scaled model torture chambers in their basements... All of it reminiscent of other (better) absurdists. And the plot should've worked for me, but it didn't. The main reason is because of the end.

For such a book to be categorized as "Humor/Comedy" only is false advertising, because this is for sure, too, a horror novel. To avoid spoilers, I won't say much about the ending, just my general reaction, which was first disgust, and then disappointment. Mr. Antrim was certainly going for shock value, but he lost me long before those final pages. Pete Robinson is a delusional, detached narrator, and his unhinged mind is referenced by the lack of structure to this story: there are no chapters here. It is straight through Mr. Robinson's observations from moment to moment without any transitions, even between hours and days. There was a particular section that unnerved me regarding Pete Robinson, and that is his focus on the young Sarah, a child of seven years of age. The way he talks about her (although brief) is pedophilic, and he expressly states he shouldn't be thinking those thoughts. My issue here, too, is with the author, for explicitly sexualizing a child.

I tend to have no boundaries or limits when it comes to literature and film; slowly desensitized over the years by the likes of Cannibal Holocaust, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and A Serbian Film, but there was just something totally off-putting by Antrim's and Robinson's observations of Sarah that rubbed me the wrong way.

There was potential here for something truly quirky and bizarre, but it just didn't work. Maybe at the hands of a different author? Who knows. Regardless of all that, I've already moved on, and am starting the process of quickly forgetting about this book starting now...

[J.I. · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 matters, and especially our casual attitudes towards violence and fetishization of that which could possibly be called "natural".

Where it stumbles is, unfortunately, on that same pillar that anchors the story, that of the unreliable narrator. It is a strange and a surreal world that we see in this novel, and that we cannot entirely trust the judgement, the logical structure and the actual goings-on of this community makes what is supposed to be happening (and why) and what is really happening (and why) and where this rests in the satirical realm of this world sometimes too difficult to fully comprehend. Beautiful sentences cannot get you entirely past the unease that comes from a lack of clarity.

There is something here, and it is crazy and wild and raw and beautiful, but it could have been more, if it were better understood.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 place truth can still speak is in irreal comic horror satire fiction, and it's still less bewildering and terrifying than tomorrow's news.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm too conventional or suburban or vanilla or whatever, but the ending of this book does not work for me. While I expected something bad to happen -- something other than what did happen -- I held out hope that I would be wrong. There were many funny scenes, albeit quite dark. They are not worth how I feel after finishing this book. Thus, my low rating.

[michal k-c · Rating 2 out of 5]

Damn no cops in this city or what?

[Milaii · Rating 1 out of 5]

Na początku zastanawiałam się czy to jest tak dobre czy tak złe. Z ostatnim zdaniem wątpliwości prysły.

Książka porusza tematy egzystencjonalne, zadaje pytania, ma mnóstwo niedopowiedzeń. Czytelnik jest wrzucony w sam środek pewnych wydarzeń, do świata, którego nie rozumie. Jednocześnie autor tak kombinuje z formą, elementami kontrowersyjnymi, rozciąga tę gumę eksperymentu, tak że w moim odczuciu to było już przekombinowane. I najzwyczajniej świecie źle się to czytało.

Długie zdania, tasiemcowate dygresje w opisach, udziwnione słowa. Mnóstwo mieszkańców, z których nie wiadomo kto jest kim.

Natomiast dla mnie styl pisania zabił wszystko. Pomimo, że ta książka próbuje być czymś więcej, ja bym ją raczej plasowała wśród książek rozrywkowych.

Próbka stylu pisania.

„Gleason, który pracuje, a przynajmniej do niedawna pracował, na przystani jachtów, gdzie rozpyla włókno szklane na kadłuby rekreacyjnych jednostek pływających, zastosował tę samą technologię przemysłowego aerozolu przy pokryciu własnego domu białym lakierem o śliskości kompozytu, przemieniając go w fantastyczny, garbaty, pozbawiony okien schron z zakręcanym okrętowym włazem zamiast drzwi.” Ten opis na tym się nie kończy, ciągnie się hen dalej. Ja przynajmniej musiałam przeczytać to zdania dwa razy, żeby wyobrazić sobie, co autor miał na myśli i czytelnik musi być w ciągłej gotowości do pełnej koncentracji.

Myśl o tym, aby ją porzucić pojawiła mi się wielokrotnie w trakcie czytania. Stąd tak niska ocena. Aczkolwiek mam również poczucie zmarnowanego potencjału. Książka ma ciekawy pomysł. Ciekawego anty bohatera. Małe miasteczko. Fajny klimacik lata.

[Josiah L · Rating 1 out of 5]

According to the intro by Jeffrey Eugenides this book is "a work of the utmost originality and artistic courage and it gets better, and deeper, each time you read it." I wish I could say this book inspires me to reread it.

Supposedly, this book is "satirical without becoming satire." And I am very unsure how the plot line (?) of the main character's wife entering a state of hypnosis where she believes she is a prehistoric fish and she can fuck her husband as a fish but he becomes a water bison and drowns is somehow a "metaphor to describe the estrangemenr within marriage and the impermanence of love." This is without mentioning the sexualizing of children and the conflation between sex, war, and torture...

The book is certainly original and the reader will definitely close the book and leave thoroughly disturbed; I think the author is prompting us to be disturbed at ourselves and at the state of our society, but I leave the book simply disturbed.

[John Pappas · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best of the trilogy, and, to me, the key to understanding The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers. Antrim gives us, in this novel, a suburban America where violence is so normalized, so banalized, that home-owners create elaborate moats, fences, punjab pits and other defenses to scare away potential threatening visitors. The mayor, drawn and quartered by Toyotas after firing a Stinger missle into the Botanical Garden, states that all of the members of this sea-side community are "murderers", by tolerating the violence and viciousness that's steadily built up in this community. The message is clear here -- Antrim asks what we become when we tolerate the normalization of violence, and the substitution of argument for discourse. Brilliant in its satire, disturbing in its scope and implication and the most fully realized of Antrim's three novels.

[Katrina · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 way worse and appreciated the outcomes, if not enjoyed them. I suppose it was the fact that I saw it coming and it felt forced like the author was just doing it for shock value more than anything else.

[B. Rule · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book is wickedly funny. Playing with the violence that undergirds all human community, Antrim contrasts the blithe concerns of a small-town functionary with the total breakdown of social order. As he muses about starting a school, running for mayor, or sleeping with his wife, guerillas patrol the local parks, suburban dads fuss over their punji-spike pits, and torture gets meted out for minor infractions. Antrim also makes hilarious hay of popular self-help movements, as the narrator's wife's guided meditations lead to increasingly literal atavistic regression into a coelacanth. The success of the project arises from Antrim's deadpan delivery; the absurdities pile up but he plays it straight.

[Steve Garriott · Rating 4 out of 5]

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).

[Anna D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

well that was disturbing

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

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 tackled similar topics with much more success. So rather than going into detail about everything I disliked about Mr. Robinson, here are some recommendations in the same grim vein:

Shirley Jackson's masterful We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A mysterious American Gothic tale that retains heart and humanity even as it becomes increasingly paranoid and claustrophobic.

Freshwater. A really difficult one to explain, but in short, the life of a mentally ill young woman as told by her alternate identities/the voices in her head with beautiful and poignant prose. It's everything you could want from an unreliable narrator, plus a hefty dose of magical realism with roots in folklore.

The Beauty. Society crumbles and something grotesque (or is it beautiful?) rises in its place. Body horror and atrocities described with eerie normality. (Seriously though, content warning for body horror).

The Road. Dark and utterly humorless, a post-apocalyptic classic that strips humanity to its core. Goodness fighting to survive against a tsunami of horrors. There are some scenes that are pretty beyond the pale, but I never found it unbearable.

[Tomislav · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having been warned not to read the Introduction first, I finished the novel before going back to the Introduction. Just as well, as it retells many scenes of the book and would have been one big spoiler. I also feel it overinflates the novel’s significance. No, this was not actually “early” dystopic fiction, which began at least 50 year earlier, in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Not sure it even is dystopic fiction, as the events are completely through the eyes of a very unreliable narrator.

The short novel is told by psychotic Pete Robinson, an unemployed schoolteacher living in a hollow and sharply declining coastal town. He is obsessed with medieval instruments of torture, and they come to life in the town as a result of his lack of moral sense. The residents quietly ogle each other and slide into acts of gruesome violence, yet maintain a superficial veneer of civic behavior. In the end, children vividly illustrate various historical responses to the madness. The point, I guess, is as conveyed by Robinson’s Rotary Luncheon talk entitled “The Barbarity of the Past: How Ancient Fears Inform the Organizing Principles and Moral Values of Modern Life.” I’m afraid I don’t have enough intellectual detachment, to set aside Robinson’s amorality for the sake of the literary statement. Yuck. I’d like to throw this book into Turtle Pond Park, hoping to detonate landmines with it.

[Thom · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 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.

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.

[Adam Lundy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Excellently written. I will say, however, this book is just gross. Spoilers: the main character lets things get perversely out of hand as the plot progresses, but you can't exactly hate him for it if you read through to the end because you're technically complicit as well. One of Donald Antrim's friends excellently stated once that the thing about surrealism is that you find yourself in tacit agreement with totally bonkers or messed up behavior for a split second before coming to your senses in horror. I regret reading this book because it highlights what I'm oddly okay with reading.

[Między sklejonymi kartkami · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5/5

EDIT: Dobra, po paru godzinach emocje opadły i koniec końców chyba bliżej mi do 4 gwiazdek, bo większość mi się bardzo podobała 🙈

Myślałam, że będą 4 gwiazdki, ale zakończenie powieści w tym miejscu nie do końca mnie przekonuje. Czytając ją w wersji elektronicznej, naprawdę zdziwiłam się, że już nastał koniec, bo do ostatniej chwili nie czułam, że oto nadszedł ten punkt kulminacyjny zapowiedziany w enigmatycznym tonie na samym początku. Problem leżał chyba w wyważeniu roli poszczególnych wątków. Poszczególne składowe były świetne, groteska i satyra na małomiasteczkową społeczność przepyszna, ale całościowo mi się to w głowie nie spina.

[Ellen Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

*********SPOILERS*********



I was excited to start this book. By 2/3 of the way through, it began to elicit strong emotions that stemmed from both the nonsensical content and the flippant irreverence conveyed. There was a warning in the foreword but it was not strong enough.

The main character was annoying and puerile, the premise inane. I liken the musings of the main character to that of a drug induced monologue wherein the individual fancies themselves a philosopher full of wisdom who spews his thoughts endlessly without inquiry regarding whether anyone actually wants to listen.

The other characters had little depth, no meaning. Thus, the interactions were surface and without connection. The obsessions of the main character focus on the hypersexualization of women and (very) young girls with some fascination regarding mayhem and death thrown in.

I don’t often regret time “wasted” reading a book but this one is an exception.

[Ariana Stotz · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 ⭐️ what a strange strange book. i started off confused reading this but after accepting that it’s not meant to make explicit sense i enjoyed it much more. this author did a great job twisting this small town into a nightmare but i was definitely left with many questions and concerns after finishing.