VOTE TO MR. Robinson for a better world

VOTE TO MR. Robinson for a better worldDonald Antrim’s first novel, is a satire that resorts to the absurd to criticize some irremediably divided United States, deeply paranoid and completely obsessed with violence and sex.

It takes place in a city on the coast of Florida whose citizens have linked the mayor, whose public spaces have been bombed or mined, full of fortified houses surrounded by defensive pits, patrolled by a pair of transnochened guerrillas.

Follow the steps of Pete Robinson, a primary school teacher fascinated by medieval torture who wants to run as mayor. To do this, the different parts of the former Desmembrada may be built while singing passages from the Egyptian’s book of the dead, gaining the confidence of the residents of their urbanization and setting up a school in their own home for students between six and eight years old.

Although I feel that in some sections a tad could have been polished, VOTE TO MR. Robinson for a better world works. After all, it has an effective prose in its ironic distancing, a clear and well articulated message, a dystopian suburban scenario as an interesting backdrop, a protagonist full of edges and darkness and a couple of extremely effective scenes when we move us or transmit tension.

The only sticks that would put the novel is that, although the whole leaves a mark, none of its parts is very memorable in itself. On the other hand, I have not been unable to find meaning to the subtram of Pete’s wife being a woman-human (in fact, I have not understood the fixation of the work by the sea and her fauna, and I think Meredith is a rather missed character in general).

Be that as it may, VOTE TO MR. Robinson for a better world It is a good novel, especially considering that it is the author’s first. I recommend it because of the fierce criticism of the United States that it performs, for its iconoclastic black humor and for certain ideas that, in its excessive extravagance, border the Bizarre genre.