ACTOR PENN PREFERS WRITING THESE DAYS

Sean Penn, Oscar-winning 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. “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. 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 (Atria Books, 2018), 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 United States and beyond as a Trumplike 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 plot involves septic tanks, lethal mallets and fireworks for dictators. The book’s backstory also 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.

Such lines as: “A platform for accusation impunity?/Due process has lost its sheen?” he describes as “a character’s thought pattern.”

Oscar winner is now a novelist ... ... though others may disagree