Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
By LYDIA KIESLING posted at 6:00 am on July 27, 2012http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/el...On three occasions I have performed my civic duty and worked as a poll inspector on election day, an experience for which I reaped the pride of performing one’s civic duty and 150 U.S. dollars. On the occasion of the 2008 primary election, I assisted a gentleman who, like many San Francisco citizens believing themselves to have registered as independent voters, had in fact checked the box for the far-far-right American Independent Party. When these voters showed up on election day, they were presented with a bewildering list of candidates from their party of record. This man told me, “I am trying to vote for the President of the United States of America,” gesticulating to his ballot as if to say, “not this mess.”It’s a little bit how I feel when I look at The New York Times bestseller list or trawl the front table of a reputable book shop, fondling the covers, reading the backs, feeling frustrated and indecisive and confused: which among these is the yearned-for genius? It’s a wholly unjust parallel, because my wholly unreasonable sense that there aren’t enough geniuses who write novels to amuse me is in no way comparable to an American citizen’s actual voter disenfranchisement resulting from paperwork ambiguities.* But to me, novels are the highest office of the land, and I have very specific and very high expectations for them.Donald Antrim came to me in three economical little volumes. I did not know about Donald Antrim, ... I am grateful, because now I do know about him, his books anyway, and I believe him to be one of the great American writers alive today. Here is my yearned-for genius.Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World — the first of a trilogy that also includes The Hundred Brothers and The Verificationist – hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. In this grim and comic novel, the titular Robinson, an educator and pillar of his Florida community, narrates his descent into a madness even nastier than the one gripping his compatriots. This is America of the heavily-armed future (more heavily-armed, we should say), maybe the fevered dream of the aforementioned American Independent Party (from their website: “We also insist that those who violate our immigration laws…be punished for their crime in a way that will deter them from future offenses.”) The residents of Antrim’s novel build death traps in front of gracious homes — including Robinson’s wife, Meredith, who reclines “in an aluminum chaise, idly carving and shaping bamboo stalks macheted, the previous day, from thickets lining a nearby canal. ‘I love our old house,’” she says, sounding for the world like my very own mother planting an azalea.Mr. Robinson is trying to get a new school going in an increasing fractious and militarized community, where taxpayers have defunded public education and feuding neighbors plant mines in public parks. Mr. Robinson has his eye on a mayoral run; he gives pedantic lectures on medieval torture to rapt audiences. He feels left out as his wife, the center of a new spiritual movement, swims away from him in “icthyomorphic trances.”In his introduction, Jeffrey Eugenides called Elect Mr. Robinson “a book without antecedents. To compare it to other books is to invite frustration: the templates don’t match up.” In one sense this is true, because the book, all of the books, enact a collision of the real and the surreal that is novel, and extremely jarring (also thrilling). But I hark back to English class (the one place where Freud’s taxonomies are still ascendant) and I think that part of the success of this novel lies in its heavy invocation of the unheimlich , and not only because it describes a balmy burg where Rotarians draw and quarter civic leaders with their Japanese cars. For me it’s the uncanny echo of the great feckless men of American literature — the heroes of Bellow and Irving, their comparatively harmless peccadilloes — that titillates.....These novels should be read together — Antrim’s prowess, the profound and various weirdness of his three narrators is best appreciated in concert. The Hundred Brothers is literally a novel about a hundred brothers jostling around in a rotting mansion — among them “Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist” — a bunch of guys being guys until it’s time for a symbolic ritual sacrifice in the labyrinthine library. As Jonathan Franzen (the songbird conservationist) correctly observes, “The Hundred Brothers is possibly the strangest novel ever published by an American.”...The trilogy ends with The Verificationist, which, like a joke at a professional conference, opens with a group of clinical psychologists having breakfast in an all-night pancake joint. The narrator’s predilection for starting food fights and instigating mayhem leads Bernhardt, the most grotesque and overbearing from among his colleagues, to hold him around his midsection almost for the duration of the novel. Pinned by Bernhardt, our narrator ascends for a night flight — both a respectable narrative (and religious) trope and the stuff of psychotic breaks.Taking place mostly on a ceiling, The Verificationist was probably my least favorite of the three in terms of plot (a ludicrous metric for these novels, I suppose). It might, however, contain the greatest number of killer lines and passages. Holding the narrator aloft, “Bernhardt the horrible father whispered into my ear, ‘You’re nothing but trouble, Tom. That’s why we love you. I know it may surprise you to hear that we love you, but it’s true. I’ll say it again. We’re your coworkers, and we love you.’” Or: “‘I can’t believe it. You bayoneted Dad! And I trusted you,’ declares the girl — brilliantly commandeering, in the way offended people so frequently will, events that occurred years in the past, using them as retrospective evidence pertaining to present circumstances.” Like the other novels, The Verificationist is very funny; like the others, it ends dark and sad.The oldest of the trilogy, Elect Mr. Robinson is already almost two decades old, sufficiently old to qualify it, I guess, for re-release with a new introduction. But I suspect it’s not so much a function of age that has these books reappearing now. Rather, someone out there knew they hadn’t had their fair shake. They knew there were people who needed these novels — frustrated people and weird people and people who prefer a very correct, very unusual deployment of the English language: formal but personal, arch, hilarious, possessed of a slightly antiquarian flavor. Even very great writers don’t often write like this.So when you’ve surfeited yourself on hunger games and vampires and zombies and lukewarm bondage and everything else that dulled our synapses this year — when you need a new genius — don’t despair, choose Donald Antrim.
From the first line of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, Donald Antrim displays his talent for beautiful, brilliant and crystalline clear description. “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 same opening paragraph notifies us that the story ahead is tragic, that our narrator may not be blameless and despite the wisteria and swaying palms this suburban neighborhood may not be paradise. It certainly isn’t––paradise that is. On the surface people are friendly. They greet each other with smiling faces and dote over each other’s children. There might be a drainage problem the town needs to deal with, but there seem to be no existential threats to these happy, sun-drenched seaside dwellers. A husband (our narrator, Pete Robinson) and wife chat amiably as he digs and she lovingly carves the bamboo punji sticks for their front yard security pit. It’s not as efficient as their neighbor’s moccasin filled moat but it is nicely crafted. At a recent town meeting a few overly concerned citizens questioned the hazards such pits pose, but Bill Nixon’s speech put the issue to rest, “I don’t want some animal lover telling me to put up a chain-link fence around my lawn-based defense cavity...Friends, little Jeff’s home with the sitter tonight, and let me tell you I feel a whole lot better for knowing there’s a network of electronically triggered fragmentation bombs armed and ready in the nasturtiums outside his window.” (As a reader I can’t help but think I’ve heard arguments like this before––fairly recently in fact. But where? In regard to what?)New age spiritualism, the cleansing power of buried organs, scale models of medieval torture chambers, the role of education in forming a child’s character are among the many topics and issues addressed by this strange novel. Donald Antrim has given this work one strange stylistic feature: there are no chapters. There are no sections: only sentences and paragraphs. This makes it difficult to find a good place to take a break. This sort of run-on quality induced in this reader the illusion that Mr. Robinson’s voice was in my own head. It was difficult to get away from him, in the way that it’s difficult to get away from your own thoughts. This is disconcerting because you really want to guard against the kind of thinking that seems to come naturally to Mr. Robinson. Is it a novel about the fragmentation of society? Or is it about the fragmentation of one fictional character’s mind? All I know is that even though I can recommend the book Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, I cannot, by any means, endorse Mr. Robinson for office.
What do You think about Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World (2001)?
Another one of those quotidian novels set in an unhinged universe (which all owe some debt of gratitude to Philip K Dick). The book takes place in a staid seaide town with a relaxed attitude towards extreme violence: the local park is studded with landmines and the residents one-up each other to see who has the most elegant death-pit in their yard. Our eponymous hero is a pedantic, though personable schoolteacher attempting to start up an elementary school in his dank basement (the town's only school was closed and replaced with a factory for making coral talismans). Initially, the book seems like just another off-kilter picaresque, but bit by bit we come to realize that something is very, very wrong with our narrator. Aside from his hilariously deficient sense of judgement, he is also posessed of an almost psyhopathic insouciance, which allows him to cheerfully disregard the warning signs slowly coalescing around him. Signs all tpo apparent to us, the readers. When all the ominous portents do finally resolve, the result is one of the more mordantly funny endings I've read in some time. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to recall the last time a novel made me laugh out loud - and uproariously at that. A deliciously sinister and surreal read.
—Patrick Nichols
This black comedy and satire of suburban angst is both delicious and appalling. Somewhere in a place very much like Florida the neighbors are installing black moccasin-infested moats and the public park is disputed territory in clan warfare (watch out for the landmines). The elementary school has been converted in a factory, and one former educator (the titular Mr. Robinson) bides his time creating a 1:32 scale model of a medieval dungeon/torture chamber. On his offhand advice the ex-mayor is drawn & quartered with SUVs. But now there's an opening for a new mayor!
—Edward
Published in 1993, Donald Antrim's Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World can be perceived as a remarkably prescient metaphor to post-9/11 America. The seaside suburban community where the action of the novel takes place is a microcosm of the fear- and warmongering, the hostility, and the hysteria that was prevalent in the politics, media, and communities of this country in the early 2000s. You've got every family building deadly pits in their yards with only a vague sense of unrest as a reason. The schools have been closed, education put on hold so that children can be trained in the art of jungle warfare. And an odd, animal-centric spiritual movement has emerged to captivate all without question. In the midst of it all is our narrator, Pete Robinson, a teacher, who comes across as affable and civic-minded, but has a fascination with torture and "The Barbarity of the Past."Although Elect Mr. Robinson has some shocking set pieces and a creeping horror, much of the novel is pretty damn funny. It's often described as a black comedy. Maybe I'm a bit desensitized, but I didn't find it quite so dark. Well, most of it. It's more of a midnight-blue, like the depths of the sea that the coelacanth--the prehistoric fish and spirit animal of Pete's wife, Meredith--traverses.I wish the novel were longer. The end is abrupt yet fitting. Still, I wanted more. Antrim's prose is fantastic and his imaginative set pieces amazing. There's also a sadness that seeps into the work and adds depth. I would have happily read more of Mr. Robinson's tale, but I'll take what I can get.
—Josh Luft
