Enter the Aardvark
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3.1 • 16 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In this “blisteringly innovative and outrageous” (The Observer) novel that the Los Angeles Times describes as "somewhere between Nabokov's Pnin and Veep,” a young politician discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a journey to find out what it means.
Early one August morning, millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R) receives a strange package in the mail. Inside is an enormous taxidermied aardvark. What does it mean? Well, everything. Hurtling from the beginning of the universe to present-day Washington, DC, this astonishing, edge-of-your-seat novel is at once a piercing look into the sick heart of our democracy and a profoundly moving meditation on the nature of love, power, and evil. In the end you will not only know the meaning of the aardvark, you will see our current reality through new eyes.
*One of Time Magazine's Must-Read Books of 2020*
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Politics are far from a laughing matter these days, but Jessica Anthony’s irreverent and unabashedly weird novel pokes fun at the toxic hypocrisy of current-day Washington. This wacky story involves a stuffed aardvark that takes a circuitous route from the workshop of a reclusive taxidermist in Victorian England to the bachelor-pad town house of a cocky Republican congressman with a big secret to hide. Shifting between these two men’s stories, Enter the Aardvark explores closeted gay love, human vindictiveness, and the natural history of an odd African mammal. It’s a fast, entertaining read that definitely fits the bill for anyone looking for something different.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anthony (The Convalescent) stitches together stories from repressive Victorian England and venal contemporary American politics in this marvelous, tragic farce populated by characters uncomfortable in their own skin. In Namibia, 1875, naturalist Sir Richard Ostet sends an aardvark specimen back to England to be stuffed by his friend and love interest, taxidermist Titus Downing, whose unparalleled creations are famed for how the artist captures each animal's jiva, or the "immortal life-essence of each living being." After Downing's uncanny aardvark shows up on the doorstep of U.S. Congressman Alexander Paine Wilson in present-day D.C., the press digs into its past owners, including Hermann Goring's father, and its presumed sender, Wilson's secret male lover, triggering a career-threatening scandal for Wilson, an ambitious, Ronald Reagan obsessed Republican who proudly wields a "0" rating from the ACLU. Anthony alternates between the congressman's travails and Downing's taxidermic preparations, which reveal the hidden beauty within the creature's "appalling morphology." While the overly broad satirical portrait of Wilson detracts from his plotline's emotional resonance, the novel's smooth comic machinery builds toward a satisfying climax that reveals how the aardvark's history bears on the congressman's present. This idiosyncratic satire is full of wonders and warnings.)
