Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff
A Novel
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
“An incredibly interesting work.” —Jane Smiley
“A straight up masterwork.” —Sarah Silverman
“Blisteringly funny.” —Corey Seymour
“A transcendent apocalyptic satire.” —Michael Silverblatt
“Crackling with life.” —Paul Theroux
“Great fun.” —Salman Rushdie
“A provocative debut.” —Kirkus Reviews
From legendary actor and activist Sean Penn comes a scorching, “charmingly weird” (Booklist, starred review) 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 United States intelligence that targets the elderly, the infirm, and others who drain 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 startling images and painted “with a broadly satirical, Vonnegut-ian brush” (Kirkus Reviews), Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff is one of the year's most controversial and talked about literary works.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
