Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

April 2, 2018
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.

April 1, 2018
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 noise--0300 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.

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Starred review from March 15, 2018
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)