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Summary
Summary
" It seems wrong to say that so dystopian a novel is great fun to read, but it's true. I suspect that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson would love this book. " --Salman Rushdie
From legendary actor and activist Sean Penn comes a scorching, darkly funny novel about Bob Honey--a modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin.
Bob Honey has a hard time connecting with other people, especially since his divorce. He's tired of being marketed to every moment, sick of a world where even an orgasm isn't real until it is turned into a tweet. A paragon of old-fashioned American entrepreneurship, Bob sells septic tanks to Jehovah's Witnesses and arranges pyrotechnic displays for foreign dictators. He's also a contract killer for an off-the-books program run by a branch of US intelligence that targets the elderly, the infirm, and others who drain this consumption-driven society of its resources.
When a nosy journalist starts asking questions, Bob can't decide if it's a chance to form some sort of new friendship or the beginning of the end for him. With treason on everyone's lips, terrorism in everyone's sights, and American political life sinking to ever-lower standards, Bob decides it's time to make a change--if he doesn't get killed by his mysterious controllers or exposed in the rapacious media first.
A thunderbolt of provocative words and startling images, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff marks the fiction debut of one of America's most acclaimed artists.
Author Notes
Sean Penn won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performances in Mystic River and Milk , and received Academy Award nominations as Best Actor for Dead Man Walking , Sweet and Lowdown , and I Am Sam . He has worked as an actor, writer, producer, and director on over one hundred theater and film productions. His journalism has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle , The Nation , and HuffPo. This is his first novel.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Actor Penn creates quite an iconoclast in his wacky first novel, an expanded revision of an audiobook he narrated and wrote under the pseudonym of Pappy Pariah in 2016. Bob Honey has been in the waste business for years and ends up as a hit man wasting humans. The divorced, middle-aged, California burb-based loner exhibits bizarre behavior (wrapping wire around his house, mowing his long-neglected lawn at three in the morning) that has garnered police blotter citations over the years. With a successful septic-tank pumping business, Honey goes international, ending up in Baghdad, where he is kidnapped and recruited by an underworld king called "Loodstar" for a ludicrous plan to knock off American senior citizens, under the guise of improving the environment. Bob foments chaos wherever he goes, his convoluted, alliterative commentary flying by ("the maintenance of femininity cannot be measured by masquerade, masculinization, or marvels man-made") as Honey summarily knocks off seniors with his trusty mallet and takes potshots at his ex-wife, the film industry, U.S. corporate skullduggery in the Mideast, and American society in general-not to mention his final diatribe against the current president. Penn pushes the envelope of absurdity, but many readers won't be able to get past the self-indulgent prose. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Noted actor and director Penn tries his hand at fiction and pulls it off reasonably well.There's not much clef in Penn's debut roman, although his protagonist, the titular Bob Honey, does log a little time visiting New Orleans after Katrina and fulminating about the sad state of the world. Bob, "God's squared-away man," is a pronounced nuisance around his California neighborhood, the kind of fellow whom the neighbors are always ratting out to the constabulary, a report from whom reads, "Neighbors complain of excessive lawn mower noise0300 hours. When patrol arrived at scene, all was quiet. Scent of fresh cut grass permeating the air." Divorced, creatively spiteful, Bob pursues the oddest of career trajectories, selling septic tank systems here, working angles there to "explore opportunities in the waste management sector" in Baghdad right after the U.S. invasion. Oh, and to boot, Bob isn't above scratching out a few bucks by executing oldsters whose only crime is drawing down the social welfare coffers, "a reckoning of their uselessness in a world where branding is being." Things get more tangled from there. Penn paints with a broadly satirical, Vonnegut-ian brush throughout, though as this slender story progresses, he gives nods (by way of sly footnotes) to the likes of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. That story is sometimes too absurd, sometimes too labored; on encountering sentences like "But as the music and its pulse rose, Bob began to follow, finally finding the spastic gesticulations that would purge his pond of pirates," the reader might be forgiven for wondering if Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High had not somehow found his way to a wayward thesaurus, a suspicion that won't abate when the alliteration comes faster and thicker ("rarified resins liquefied during a life languishing unloved") as Bob's life becomes ever more unmoored. Still, it's good fun, and as a bonus, Donald Trump gets a nice drubbing, too.A provocative debut. Not entirely successful, but James Franco and B.J. Novak better watch their backs. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The first novel by actor and director Penn is a charmingly weird tale of an eccentric fellow, Bob Honey, who is viewed by his neighbors and, indeed, by most of the rest of the world as a crackpot, the kind of guy who obsesses over irrelevant minutiae and complains about the silliest things. He's an introvert, a man of moral purpose with a commitment to pocket protectors, who likes his life to proceed in an orderly fashion. He's also well, we should let Bob keep some secrets here. Let's just say Bob has a secret life, a vocation he keeps very much to himself, and when readers discover what it is, many will hoot with delight, so out of left field is the truth about Bob Honey. Penn takes on an ambitious challenge here, and he succeeds spectacularly. Bob is a wonderful character, the kind of guy you can't take your eyes off because his eccentricities are just so . . . eccentric. The story is convoluted, sure, and occasionally surreal, but that's part of the book's almost immeasurable charm. Expect reactions to the novel, which began as an audiobook in 2016 narrated by Penn but published under the pseudonym Pappy Pariah, to vary Penn's celebrity will ensure that but those who appreciate the wildly offbeat will be ecstatic. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: There will be lots of off-the-book-page attention given to this unique venture into fiction by an actor, and that will only serve to heighten demand.--Pitt, David Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
what have you done this time, Sean Penn? What is this book-shaped thing that lies before us? Is it just a lark - a nutty novel you wrote because you're famous and they let you? Or is it more than that - a furious, despairing takedown of America as the country battles its own worst instincts? If it's the latter, why did you bury your truest feelings and loveliest writing so deep in muck? "Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff" might have had the power of a manifesto. Instead, it's a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy. Penn originally created "Bob Honey" for a short audiobook in 2016, which he narrated but playfully denied writing, insisting it was the work of a guy he'd met in Florida named Pappy Pariah. Bob is a 56year-old Californian with "an ultraviolent skepticism toward the messaging and mediocrity of modern times." Professionwise, he is one of the following or some combination thereof: a globe-trotting entrepreneur, a contract killer who murders elderly people with a mallet or just a delusional homebody whose neighbors think he's weird. Unwaveringly true to its title, "Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff" has no formal plot. Our antihero sits on his sofa recalling possibly imaginary exploits and lamenting the state of the nation, which he regards as "a shopping mall with a flag." He loathes his ex-wife, who's now happily coupled with her divorce lawyer and driving an icecream truck, the twinkly music of which punishes him from a distance. He pines for a sex-positive young woman named Annie, who may or may not exist and who inspires such purple rain as this: "Effervescence lived in her every cellular expression, and she had spizzerinctum to spare." Occasionally, Bob will attempt to be more social by throwing a misbegotten barbecue - or he'll go out and dispatch a senior citizen with a blow to the head. (The folks who issue the kill orders believe the elderly stand in the way of marketing and globalization.) What narrative tension "Bob Honey" does have comes courtesy of a man claiming to be an investigative journalist who shows up at Bob's door and, as Penn might put it, punctures his peace and piques his paranoia. If that sounds like an unfair swipe at the prose, take a look: "There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations." That's a sentence about hunting, by the way. To be fair, "Bob Honey" is perplexing and unquantifiable by design. Penn has clearly ingested the Beats, as well as Hunter S. Thompson and Chuck Palahniuk, and he evokes their trippiness to advance a sincere argument: that right now, America is enough to drive any rational, empathetic person nuts. Some of Bob's adventures - helping victims of Hurricane Katrina, nosing around Baghdad at the outset of the Iraq War - overlap with the author's own habit of following his conscience and not waiting for invitations. That seems like a nice, self-effacing wink to the reader, suggesting that Penn the Untamable Activist is also just figuring out stuff as he goes. STILL, FOR A WILD RIDE, "Bob Honey" IS conspicuously un-fun. For every perfect, plain-spoken sentence ("It is on that couch where Bob feels safest, almost embraced") there are dozens of linguistic traffic jams where you can almost hear the words honking at each other to get out of the way. Penn wants us to feel Bob's agonizing quest for simplicity in the language itself. Fair enough. But the result is indeed agonizing, particularly because - unlike with the original audiobook - we don't have the distinguished actor on hand to read this thing out loud. The trick is to just let the oddities stream by: "Behind decorative gabion walls, an elderly neighbor sits centurion on his porch watching Bob with surreptitious soupçon." Eventually, "Bob Honey" induces something like Stockholm syndrome - you admire the novel just because you're surviving it. In the last third of the book, Bob becomes suspicious about the mysterious employer for whom he wields his mallet. He drives his Pontiac to Miami in search of answers. Along the way, he's assailed by news of the 2016 election and plunges deeper into his existential funk. Bob fumes at his fellow Americans for not embracing the unnamed female candidate: "Too shrill? Too hawkish? Isn't it true that you never wanted qualifications? ... Was she the worst possible candidate or are you the most arrogant, ill and unqualified electorate in the history of the Western world?" As for the Donald Trump stand-in, Bob considers him not just one but all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: "You are not simply a president in need of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention. We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin." It may be that Penn wrote "Bob Honey" as a satire just so he could publish that last sentence without the Secret Service pulling up. Bob's outburst gives the novel a climax of sorts. It seems imposed on the story - and sounds more like the author talking than Bob - but it's a relief to finally feel a blast of anger blow through the book. In the evocative final pages, Penn offers a working theory of who and what Bob truly is. However, his real interest here is capturing what America has become - and taking a mallet to it. 'Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff' is a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy. JEFF GILES is the author of the novel "The Edge of Everything" and its sequel, "The Brink of Darkness," which will be published this summer.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff PRELUDE TRANSCRIPT SHERIFF'S BLOTTER - WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA SEPTEMBER 15, 2001 "911 . . . What's your emergency?" "Yes. My name is Helen Mayo. I live at 1531 Sweet Dog Lane. I don't know if I have an emergency, but I do have a new neighbor and I'm sorry if I just think he's [loud dog barking renders caller unintelligible]--Nicky, please!--I'm sorry that's just my little doggy--if I just think he's behaving strangely, and perhaps, the police would like to take a look, or maybe go and . . . you know, sniff it out. Sniff, chat, whatever it is that you do." [more dog barking] "It's a little difficult to hear you, ma'am. Can you describe the strange behavior, please?" "Well, it seems he's wrapping some kind of insulated wire around his house." "Insulated wire, ma'am?" "Yes, or maybe a clothesline. He's spooling it into his toolshed. I don't know his exact street number, but it's just two doors from me and across the street and I can see him from my kitchen window and, well . . . I don't know. I just think the police should be involved." "Okay, ma'am. Thank you for your call. We'll go ahead and notify patrol." "Thank you. Bye bye. [renewed loud dog barking] Who's a good boy-ee?" SHERIFF'S BLOTTER - WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 7, 2003 Numerous residents of Upper Sweet Dog Lane reporting overgrowth of a neighbor's lawn. A 30-day notice has been posted. SHERIFF'S BLOTTER - WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 23, 2003 Resident at 1528 Sweet Dog Lane was cited for illegal posting of placard admonishing, "International Airports Boast Morbid Mannequins at Duty Free." At 2200 hrs., a patrol car, dispatched to the address, served the citation to the location. Resident was either not home or nonresponsive to officers. The citation was left at resident's door. SHERIFF'S BLOTTER - WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 24, 2003 At 0634 hrs., Woodview County Sheriff's office was contacted by cited resident. "Woodview Sheriff's Office." "Yes, ma'am. I am resident 1528 Sweet Dog Lane and in receipt of a citation for illegal posting. To whom it may concern, it wasn't my sign." (Without sufficient evidence to the contrary, citation was rescinded.) SHERIFF'S BLOTTER - WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 29, 2003 Neighbors complain of excessive lawn mower noise--0300 hrs. When patrol arrived at scene, all was quiet. Scent of fresh cut grass permeating the air. SHERIFF'S BLOTTER - WOODVIEW COUNTY, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 1, 2004 "911. What's your emergency?" "Yes, this is Helen Mayo on Sweet Dog Lane." "Yes, Ms. Mayo. What's your emergency?" "Well, I just don't know. But that neighbor, I've called you about him before. He's cut his hair in a rather disturbing way." "He's cut his hair, Ms. Mayo?" "Yes, but I wouldn't bother you with a fashion, you know." "No, I'm sure you wouldn't, ma'am. But you have to help me understand your concern." "Well, this hairdo of his, it's something like a Nazi, or a woodshop teacher. And as you know, I'm not the only one on this street who has registered my concerns about this man. Despite numerous complaints or reports or what have you, I'm just baffled that you all have never actually engaged this gentleman. That you people haven't made any official law enforcement contacts. Forgive me if I . . . that with all his strange behavior and haircuts and all that . . . you know what I mean . . . I'm not saying he looks Arab, mind you. He's a white man. Anyone could see that, but I still think that the police should, well, you know . . . yes, sniff him out, just sniff that man out!" Station One SEEKING HOMEOSTASIS IN INHERENT HYPOCRISY SUMMER 2016 Cactus Fields, a Low-Cost Home for Assisted Senior Living, looms like a large khaki-colored brick isolated against a backdrop of distant ambient light. Its draped windows and solitary silhouette sit in a seemingly endless desert tableau. Here it seems that the desert itself has been deserted. And there they are, the brand-less beasts of yesteryear. Moist, sagging eyes, illuminated by the rarefied strobe of a passing car on the interstate. Behind the windows of the beige stucco building that sits behind a dilapidated, sporadically visited parking lot where brown weeds burst through fissures in the pavement, eight senior residents have been awakened by the power cut. They huddle side by side in plastic chairs. Portraiture of sagging faces falling in and out of indelicate light and shadow. Theirs, a blotchy batch of colorless dermal masks. That last life spark extracted from their oblivion, a reckoning of their uselessness in a world where branding is being. Bound by brutal boredom. Then . . . mercy comes. POP! POP! POP! A chosen three down. The elderly are being executed by a talented blunt force. Gloved hands reconnect wires in a power box out back. Eight now reduced to five whose day will come. A dull white Pontiac ignites its engine, rolls over the fissures of weed onto the interstate and under its driver's breath, "It wasn't me." Excerpted from Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff: A Novel by Sean Penn All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.