
Nick Gillespie on the Reason Roundtable podcast raved about this book. The inner flap assured me it was "an original and hilarious satire of our political culture and those who rage against it." The back cover blurbs (one from Jim Carrey!) contain words like "exquisitely wicked"; "dangerous sense of humor"; "so funny, so clever, so alive"; "hysterical"; "smart, hilarious, and audacious"; and "Infuriating, perverse, contrarian, scandalous; nihilistic, and very, very funny."
And I'm pretty sure I didn't even crack a smile the entire way through.
It's probably me. Who am I to tell Jim Carrey and those other folks what's funny? Your mileage may vary, and probably will.
The first-person narrator is Anna, a New York writer who's in professional turmoil because her novel about opioid addiction in Appalachia has been reamed by the NYT for being classist. At loose ends, she falls in with an Objectivist walking tour of Ayn Rand-relevant Manhattan locales. And resolves to head out to Los Angeles to write a movie about Rand. Or maybe a sitcom. Or perhaps an animation. When things fall through, she skips back to New York to deal with a family death. But then its off to the isle of Lesbos, where there's communal meditation and lecturing under the eye of the Master. And there's also this hot guy who is obsessed with a YouTube compilation of Tom Cruise running scenes.
At one point Anna witnesses:
I found myself standing at the kitchen island with a group of Big Boy's friends. They all looked about twenty-five and had quiet, doting girlfriends who all looked about nineteen. Within the group, the boys were telling jokes, or rather giving micro-performances in response to verbal stimuli.
I liked that well enough to stick a post-it to the page so I could quote it here. But only because it reminded me of what the author, Lexi Freiman seemed to be doing: telling "jokes", or rather writing a series of prose performances in response to critical stimuli. I looked in vain for humor.