1) I HAD to read this book because my secret Satan gave me this assignment (@Dejan, you bastard, you got what you deserved from your Satan in return) 2) WHY was this published? Answer: cause Sean Penn 3) What the fuck did I just read.
I have a feeling I might be writing a bit of a longer rant review very soon. But just in case I don't - just don't read this. Read anyANYany other book, but this one. (perhaps not Grey by SMeyer, but this one comes close)
BlogReview
To say that I gave this book 1 star would be overstating it. I forced myself to read it through and I got to the other side stronger. After this book, there’s nothing that the publishing industry could throw at me that I wouldn’t be able to finish. (except perhaps for this book’s sequel. Yes, there is a sequel.)
Sean Penn, a well-known normal movie star, wrote a book that was published in 2018 that is a critique of something, I’m sure. All I got was a feeling that he wanted to spew comments on the society but felt that his twitter presence was not enough. This book reads more like a series of comments written on pieces of toilet paper padded with a thesaurus.
The book’s protagonist is the titular Bob, and the plot is the titular him doing stuff. We follow Bob around as a secret government agency pays him to hammer people to death. I guess. I’m not sure. His neighbours think he’s strange and report him to the police, but this strangeness leaves no real evidence, it’s just that feeling the people have. And Americans being Americans and having yelled “Woolf” too many times, nobody pays real attention to their accusations. And that’s that. I forgot to mention that the idea behind his assassinations is to reduce the carbon footprint of the society by killing the elderly. Fun.
We also find out he is a divorcé and that his ex-wife is a crazy person who now owns an ice cream truck. We see him hang around with a Jew on a boat and then the two of them join a drug lord’s yacht party. So many fun things. Oh, and there’s a journalist who suspects something.
All this is delivered in a pretentious attempt at “bizarro” style that is almost impossible to read. This is something Chuck Palahniuk does masterfully – this style where the writing constantly puts a spotlight on itself. But Penn is no Chuck. Where Chuck sprinkles the weird writing to make the weird story seem nestled in all the weird and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy even when he is talking about spiking a guy’s food and drinks with hormone therapy, here we just have off putting thesaurus bashing.
Listen to this: “Here it seems that the desert itself has been deserted.”
“Behind the windows of the beige stucco building that sits behind a dilapidated, sporadically visited parking lot where brown weeds burst through fissures in pavement…”
“Ah, but when these considerations tickle the tumult of actionability, only then does he relinquish their delicious danger, and find himself buoyantly liberated to move away from the definitively empty bed.”
“He thought of her beauty and the lure of her shaved and shapely cinnamon sticks standing at the trailer’s screen door.”
“Dreams died like destiny’s deadwood.” (what a missed opportunity here, if he’s only written “Destiny’s Child”)
Now all of this would be enough to make one stop reading. But I didn’t have that luxury, I had to go on. And boy did the fun continue. In addition to this writing “style” there were moments when even he realized that this might be a problem for some of his readers. So, Penn decided to help the poor sod who was reading this because of idolizing the author (that’s the only person I see finishing this book without having a gun pressed against their head). Whenever there was a turn of phrase, he used that might confuse the intellectually limited reader, Penn graciously helped them by providing freaking FOOTNOTES. Some were ok, I guess. But come on. “The five-sided puzzle palace had an autonomous private contracting budget” --> the Pentagon.
“As you were.” --> standard military command (no shit Sherlock! Who doesn’t know that?
“…he has started calculating the g/km of his burnings” --> grams per kilometre (I know Americans are perceived as being stupid, but that stupid?)
Now, ok, you might say this is the narrator, not the Author. I don’t buy that.
And to finish it off we have:
Random stereotyping of Jews and the way their talk
Completely not random western view of the Muslim world
Every woman being insupportable receptacle for his penis but with smeared lipstick on her teeth.
A completely disconnected anti-Trump rant that came out of the blue.
Bob making a woman laugh so much she keeled over, and a bit of poop got out of her and wetness could be seen between her buttocks.
I KNOW!!!!! I KNOW!
Now, to some more memorable quotes “A driver drives.”
“With that, he absquatulated.”
“a fugitive from Jordan who’s fled a case of fraud.”
If you’re wondering, wow, this is so bad I might just have to read it, just don’t. Read 50shades of grey books, or the Covid Erotica I mentioned at the beginning, or even bad fanfiction. Anything but this. Or you could just read a thesaurus – the same amount of fun, but you won’t end up hating yourself.
There's satire and humor here and this audio book is timely. The political landscape is current and even Bob Dylan's recent award of the Nobel Prize in Literature is here.
I think I understand what this piece tried to do, however I'm not sure it succeeded. At times very funny, (Francis McDormand I'm looking at you), and other times flat out WTF confusing, (Welcome to Nightvale anyone?), I'm trying to figure out if I should listen to this again. Sometimes authors, (Pappy Pariah, are you Sean Penn?), get too witty for their own, (or my own) good.
To give Bob Honey the benefit of the doubt: it probably didn't help that I listened to this audio on election day and the day after what I consider to be a stunning outcome. Perhaps in a less charged atmosphere I would have taken away more than I what I did. Then again, perhaps not.
I decided. I'm not listening again.
It's free at Audible if you want to give it a try.
I think this is the worst book I've ever read. The constant alliteration is bad. The interspersed bits of poetry are bad. The plot is entirely nonsensical, even for what I think was largely a PTSD induced fever dream. I think Penn was going for something like Palahniuk's writing but with no understanding of how either reading or writing work.
The narrator, part way through, introduces himself as a random character Bob meets in a diner. There are four or five references to the fact that Bob "just does stuff," all of which are wildly cringeworthy. How do you even write this and not think "this is fucking stupid" and then do it repeatedly?
This is all without getting into the blatant misogyny and racism and the almost literal beating Trump's presidency over the head with a hammer for basically no reason. Bob just gets into it sometimes.
I don't fucking know. Everything about this was bad but life feels better having read it because it can really only go uphill from here. Don't buy this, but if you want to feel better about yourself go get this from the library.
While there were well-written passages, the rest was precisely the kind of pretentious, overwrought, pseudo-intellectual bullshit one would expect from Sean Penn.
Sharp, clever, so smart it needs footnotes to keep up, I abandoned it because it's too sharp, too clever and too much of what I already know about the world EXCEPT for one thing. I didn't know that Sean Penn wanted you to know, REALLY know, just how fuckin' smart he be. Congrats, it's in writing, the rare and much sought after: a work of fiction with footnotes.
It’s good, it’s weird, it’s timely, and it tries too hard. The alliteration grows tiresome, the acronyms are annoying and the footnotes could have been way more useful if they injected a wee but of humor. But all quibbling aside, I liked it. I’m just not sure why.
This book has in its favor brevity and two good epithets (Trump is "the Mussolini of Mayberry" and his sons are the Uday and Qusay of their generation). It refers to the murder of five police officers in Dallas, indicating that the book went through production quickly, maybe too quickly: the book also says approximately "Zimmerman's Nobel-winning lines [about the sun not being yellow]." Sean Penn promoted the book on Bill Maher on 16 September and on Stephen Colbert on the 27th (when he claimed to have received the manuscript in May), the Nobel committee announced its selection of Bob Dylan on 13 October, and the book was released on the 18th.
Think back to high school or your time as an undergrad. Do you remember that super pretentious "writer" that thought he was an intellectual and the best writer ever. He wrote this book. I swear, Penn used a thesaurus on every word in this book and chose the largest word on the page. He goes into such unnecessary detail; I'm pretty sure he read numerous Wikipedia to become knowledgeable on so many random, specific topics.
I only made it halfway through this book before I had to abandon it.
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