Sean Penn takes a break from movies, publishes first novel
The actor, who wants a break from the film industry, debuted his first novel, ‘Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff’
Sean Penn, Oscarwinning actor, has other passions these days. “I’m not in love with the job of acting anymore,” says Penn, whose films include Milk, Mystic River, Dead Man Walking and many others. “In fact, what I want to do is write books.”
Penn fears the world is so overwhelmed with “content” that even great movies are quickly forgotten. But he still believes in words. This week, Penn joins such literary heroes as Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, not to mention such acting peers as Ethan Hawke and James Franco, as an author of fiction. Penn’s novel is called Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, a title not out of place for someone whose off-screen adventures have led to encounters with everyone from Mikhail Gorbachev to El Chapo.
Bob Honey, its volatile and alienated protagonist like/unlike the writer himself, is a hot tour of the US and beyond as a Trump-like figure known as “The Landlord” rises to power and Bob Honey longs to be “unbranded, unbridled and free.”
Bob Honey has an improvisational style and a trail of alliterations (“Quite intentionally, to a fault,” Penn acknowledges). The book’s back story follows a scattered path.
Last year, Penn released a brief audiobook under the pseudonym Pappy Pariah. He expanded on it and published a hardcover under his own name, although he says that opinions contained within, including a poem that chastises the #MeToo movement, are not necessarily his own.
During a recent interview, the 57-yearold Penn talked about writing, movies, #MeToo and his changing tastes in books. He has more trouble in mind for Bob Honey, depending on whether he thinks the public will care. Some reviews have been rough (“Sean Penn The Novelist Must Be Stopped” reads a Huffington Post headline), but the novel has made the top 100 on Amazon.com and hit No. 1 in a category Penn should appreciate: absurdist fiction.
ON WHY HE WROTE THE NOVEL:
“I needed to step away from the news cycle some time during 20152016. It was occurring to me that the debates I had found even myself part of in the public arena had become that which were dividing us as a country more and more, that we entered the conversations now as three-year-olds and to be in the conversation was to be a threeyear-old. The only way I felt I could respond to it was a kind of satire — to choose to laugh, instead of vent, or instead of rage.”
ON READING MEN:
“I realised after I wrote this book that my reading of fiction has been, and I hadn’t thought about it before, almost entirely mono-cultural. It’s almost been entirely American men, the authors I have read. I’m anxious to change that... My real history of going to bookstores and buying a book has been the rugged men tale tellers and I find that my interests do go beyond that.”
ON #METOO:
“One of the interesting things that I note has not come up in the discussion of sexual abuse, be it by a partner or a parent or a legal system, and it’s sort of surprising that there isn’t within any of these movements any express concern or dialogue when it comes to the age consent in this country.”
“Here we are talking about sexual abuse and you’re still seeing in this country teenagers being married. I think for a movement about protecting young people, about protecting women, that if we are to add to our empathy those who were exploited for their ambition, among the other things, which is not my business to say that that’s a fair thing to be protected from or not.”
“The expectation for me in my adulthood was that I was responsible for that. We are all different and people have different strengths and weaknesses at different times in their lives. But when we’re talking about kids, it’s just clear.”