America Fantastica (2023)
By Tim O’Brien
Mariner, 464 pages
★★★
Tim O’Brien insists that America Fantastica is the last novel he intends to write. If you only know his Vietnam War works such as The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato this one will surprise you. It is a lampoon of contemporary America that draws comparisons to Jonathan Swift, though Carl Hiaasen might be a better analogy. It drew both praise and criticism, the latter because it’s often difficult to know if O’Brien is laughing with us or at us.
It rather depends on how sensitive you are, but any way you slice it, it would be hard to call this an optimistic work. Many of those who praise the novel argue that it’s a perfect put-down of our current era of fake news, racism, violence, Trumpism, and the loony right. Set in 2019, America Fantastica gives us anti-hero Boyd Halverson. He is one of life’s losers. His ex-wife Evelyn is the daughter of Trump stand-in Jim Dooney, an amoral and filthy rich egoist with more than few screws loose. For example, he owns a major league baseball team whose entire roster he fired and proceeded to play solo against the Phillies. (It didn’t go well!) Boyd holds serious grudges against Evelyn and her father, though he’s no pillar of the community himself. He manages a J C Penny’s store, but prior to that he was a “journalist” who specialized in increasingly bizarre disinformation campaigns he hoped would land him a position with Fox News.
Halverson snaps, figures he’s owed $300,000, walks into a Fulda, California bank and pulls a robbery. He has to settle for $81,000, which is all the bank had in cash. In the process, he takes teller Angie Bing hostage. She’s a diminutive redhead who claims to be a sincere Pentecostal Christian, though she’s also a motormouth, has an overactive libido, is a raging materialist, and has a boyfriend named Randy who is dumber than homemade sin and a homicidal sociopath without a conscience. (You can’t have something you can’t spell!) O’Brien calls him, “a piece of stupid wrapped up in cowboy clothes.”
Boyd and Angie are the mismatched principals of a non-great American road trip. There are hitmen, an heiress, ex-cons, Iraq War vets, rich SOBs, Covid deniers, and a parade of Angie lovers who might or might not be in the ex- category. What seems to be lacking are pursuing cops and there’s a reason or two for that as well. In other words, it’s a world of players and games-players. Halverson wants revenge and Angie seems to want to convert Boyd, spend all of his money, and shame him into making his move on her. She’s happy to explain why he should pursue her sexually and what’s wrong with him for not doing so. Gee, could it have anything to do with what she says Randy will do when he catches up to them?
America Fantastica is often laugh-out-loud funny, though whether the guffaws should be bitter or appropriate is open to interpretation. O’Brien skips us through conspiracy theories that are too ludicrous to make up, like one that claimed that a dozen American presidents–including Lincoln and Kennedy–never existed. He argues that “laughing at evil is the best revenge,” yet O’Brien also calls his book a slice of “mythomania.” Is America Fantastica an absurdist work? Undoubtedly, but when O’Brien states that “mythomania had become the nation’s pornography of choice,” is he being reportorial, cynical, world-weary, satirical, or all of the above?
My take is that America Fantastica suffers from uneven pacing and tone. Like many who have written road trip novels, O’Brien never quite made up his mind if he wanted to write a series of weird vignettes or a tightly-threaded narrative. This ultimately gives us the literary equivalent of a goulash with too many ingredients, some universally tasty and some that are an acquired taste. I liked America Fantastica, but like lots of other readers I was unsettled by it. Is America really as screwed up as O’Brien infers? It might well be, but do you see what I mean about being unsettled?
Rob Weir
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