America Fantastica
Not sure, probably hyperbolic satire on steroids.
“If he doesn’t like facts, he invents them.” Page 211.
All about the news, and then, fake news.
Stupid online algorithms — I checked out The Things They Carried — read it in Kindle format, in part, then got engrossed in other books. But both the library and amazon kept recommending other texts by the author.
I didn’t finish The Things They Carried, in part, holidays and family, and in part? Almost too painful with the self-examination part of the process. Makes me want to dive back Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, root source for many modern war novels.
Halfway, then three-quarters of the way through the novel, though, I will dredge deep and compare to their forms of satire, and it made me think of Vonnegut’s classic. Trying to fit the pieces together, kore slapstick comedy? Less tragedy? More humorous with less pathos — still unsure.
America Fantastica
Following so closely on the heels of reading a portion of his earlier book, the style is unmistakeable. Pacing and delivery, it’s just the content is different.
One teacher always suggested that every — most — all authors were telling the same story, over and over, just in a different guise. America Fantastica should win numerous book awards for its content, and approaching politics, which, in the last years, leaves us all a little gun-shy.
“Mythomania had become the nation’s pornography of choice.”page 332.
There are a half-dozen quasi-spiritual metaphysical texts in my inbound stack. Read a page or a chapter, shoved a bookmark in the text, swear to get back to it, at a later date. America Fantastica jumped to the front of the stack, and then, I stayed up late, compulsively trying to finish reading it.
I’m still not sure what kind of a story it is.
Acerbic wit and specialized satire from the last few years.
