For a slim book, written with some of the most beautiful, scrupulously punctuated, well-modulated prose you’ll ever read, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is also one of the most violent. The violence isn’t ritualistic or softened by comic excess, as it is in the other two books of the trilogy, The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist. Here, it erupts unexpectedly, corrosively. I can hardly think of another novel that turns the table on the reader so completely. For much of the book, you’re either smiling or laughing out loud, but as the story proceeds, and abruptly in its last pages (as we learn why Pete is locked in the attic), a chill sets in. Against all odds, this very funny novel becomes truly scary, and as though blundering into Pete’s own camouflaged pit, the reader falls onto the sharpened stakes of the book’s terrifying ending.
The dead ex-mayor comes as close as any character to naming what ails the little palm-shrouded town. At that same Rotary luncheon where Pete delivers his talk, Kunkel stands up to announce, “We’re all murderers here,” a piece of truth-telling that outrages his neighbors and leads, in no small part, to his demise. Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World makes a similar charge, attesting to the barbarity not of the past but of the present, and the response from the reader, especially the American reader, is likely to be just as uncomfortable, angry, and full of guilty recognition. In a reversal of Marx’s famous line about history in The 18th Brumaire, the major events in this novel occur first as farce and then as tragedy. Kunkel’s death scene, though creepy, is played mostly for laughs. His calling everyone a murderer is similarly charged with humor. But by the book’s end we realize the dread seriousness of the mayor’s words. It’s as if Antrim has wrung out every bit of comedy from the texture of his tale, leaving a poisonous residue.
Of course, the novel does much more than castigate. It is, after all, a work of literature, and provides a more classical catharsis than might be expected from a novel with considerable experimental qualities. Despite his oddness, we like Pete. In this altered world, he is our only guide. You can’t help wishing that Meredith would come back to him. You hope things go well for him on the first day of school. When they don’t, and when Pete’s true character is revealed, the reader experiences emotions every bit as intense and purgative as Aristotelian poetics stipulate: terror at what Pete does and pity for his victim, poor “little auburn-haired Sarah Miller.” You finish this book hollowed out, stunned by the lengths to which Antrim has gone to make real and palpable, in a piece of unrealistic fiction, the nature of evil. In addition, the reader’s sympathy with Pete, won little by little throughout the course of the book in such a light-fingered fashion that you might not even notice it, serves as a form of self-incrimination. Pete’s unawareness of the dark forces inside him has the effect of making the reader wonder how much this might be true of everyone. Finishing the book, therefore, you feel terror at, and pity for, your own self.
Despite its lugubrious subject matter and its acerbic estimate of human nature, this novel is the opposite of destructive, however. In its humor and deep sadness, and especially in the rigor of its prose and the intelligent flow of Pete’s thoughts, however loopy, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World delights as well as lacerates. With genuine artfulness Donald Antrim enacts something of the resurgence that Pete hopes to do by burying Jim Kunkel’s foot. “Indeed,” Pete writes, “it was as if it were not Jim Kunkel’s foot being buried, not Jim’s foot at all, but a flesh-and-blood vessel containing the Hopes of Men — Jim, me, anybody and everybody — for a better, wiser world that might spring from soil made fertile by blood and bone.” Despite the arch tone of that sentence, it nicely describes both Antrim’s intention and achievement. This necrotic book buries itself deep in your brain, and despite its purulent content, gives life.
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SEE A TOWN stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish. That’s what my wife, Meredith, calls the ocean. Her father was an oysterman. Of course, that trade’s dead now, like so many that once sustained this paradise. Looking from my storm window, I can see Meredith’s people scavenging the shoreline. Down they bend, troweling wet dunes with plastic toy shovels: yellow, red, blue. The yellow one, I know, belongs to Meredith’s mother. I want to call to Helen, to wave and exchange greetings, but I know she’ll never acknowledge me after the awful things that happened to little auburn-haired Sarah Miller, early last week, down in my basement.
Tragic.
The diggers make their shabby way up the coastline. Who would’ve imagined a subsistence industry erected around the magical properties of dead sea creatures? But it’s true. Look inland. There’s the converted elementary school with wall clocks endlessly proclaiming three o’clock. It’s a factory now. They’re in there, day and night, making starfish fetishes and totems of cowry, sea cucumber, washed-up wood. I can hear crunching routers shaping precious black coral into the rings and charms everyone around here wears, and I hear the lawn-mower growl of a dozen diesels parked outside the school and giving extra electricity through high-voltage cables blackly snaked beneath the jungle gym, across the basketball blacktop, around the chain-link fence wrapping the tennis courts.