Sean Penn just do writing
Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff; ★★g☆ review.
Sean Penn has done a lot of stuff in his long career: Oscar-winning acting roles, stints as a journalist, and a history of activism. With Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, Penn adds novelist to his résumé with polarizing results that are entertaining and maddening in equal measure.
His first book (Atria, 160 pp., ★★g☆) is an odd Trump-era tome. It stars a reclusive middle-age divorced man who has traveled the world as a waste management expert and sold fireworks to dictators; often freaks out his suburban California neighbors with his antisocial behavior; and on the side is a secret agent who assassinates the elderly via a trusty mallet upside their heads.
If all that sounds strange, it is. The narrative structure involves random lines of poetry, dystopian fever dreams and episodes featuring Bob Honey’s mad adventures, among them a fiesta onboard a drug dealer’s yacht in international waters; a helicopter inexplica- bly crashing on a lady’s house; and a “Yellow Lives Matter” march involving “deplorable” blond white guys with blue eyes. There’s a strong satirical streak here, in which Penn is rather unsubtle with his commentary on American poli- tics, culture and society.
Bob himself is a rather persnickety fellow. He hates advertising, social media and strangers who get all up in his business, which involves working for a shady government program that targets people using up the country’s resources. When investigative journalist Spurley Cultier begins showing up at his door asking why there are so many official complaints lodged against him, Bob is both put off and intrigued by a stranger with whom he can share parts of his story.
It’s a tale, though, that isn’t helped at least in the beginning by Penn’s sometimes frustrating writing style. He overdoes it in the early going with an addiction to alliteration — the too-frequent uses of phrases like “dutiful dragoman,” “cadres of cannibals” and “Wader’s whimsy for wheeling Wahhabist roadways” break up the flow as Penn introduces his protagonist.
That tendency lessens as Penn digs into the Spurley/Bob dynamic, and he even gets downright lyrical later when Bob goes on a cross-country trip spurred on by a love and a rival: “America, it seems to Bob, is no longer that beautiful girl who’d birthed him. But instead, the ghost of a girl he’d never known.”
Penn weaves a lot of real-world aspects into his satire, especially in an epilogue poem that mentions the Las Vegas shootings, North Korea, Louis C.K. and the Me Too movement. (“Is this a toddler’s crusade? Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play?”)
The 2016 presidential election itself acts as a backdrop to the overall journey, and Bob lays into his new commander in chief (named “Mr. Landlord”) in an excoriating letter. (Penn mentions “the violently immature seventy-year-old boy-man with money and French vanilla cotton candy hair.”)
There’s an interesting meta level to Bob Honey as well. The story was first a 2016 audiobook narrated by Penn and ghostwritten by “Pappy Pariah” — again with the alliteration — and Pappy actually shows up as a Kentucky holy man in the novel. “I’m the one tellin’ your story,” he says to Bob.
Just as Bob’s an enigma, so is Penn. His literary debut is a mixed bag of nuts that are hard to crack. But once you dig in, you’ll find some good stuff.