Lacking Character

January 15, 2018
The first novel from White (Memories of My Father Watching TV) in 15 years is a comic, absurd delight. The queen of spells dispatches a masked, Zorro-like courier to rural Illinois in order to deliver a message to the marquis of N— (a thinly veiled Normal, Ill.). The marquis is down on his luck and spends much of his time playing Halo, but the message he receives from the masked man (whom readers learn is named Percy) is a request for the marquis to care for the masked messenger. Percy, it turns out, is a sort of subhuman puppet or animated doll created by the queen, essentially “lacking character” but possessing most of the other human traits necessary for contemporary suburban existence. The queen promptly forgets about her creation but eventually travels from the Hebrides to Illinois to find Percy performing “ritual abasement” in exchange for housing. The marquis, meanwhile, sends his grandson and manservant out on a rambling quest to find some money, or at least a job. In a metafictional sleight-of-hand, White gradually switches his authorial role from narrator to active participant in the story. White is a postmodern master, and in this wild satire he transforms the banal into magic.

February 1, 2018
White (We, Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data, 2015, etc.) merges the social satire of his fiction with his nonfiction's interest in identity in the age of data totality.In the city of N____ somewhere in central Illinois, a masked and leather-panted stranger named Percy has shown up at the door with a message to deliver to the Marquis, a hashish smoking "Halo" addict whose estate has fallen on hard times. Percy is a creature of the Queen of Spells--a sort of Morgan le Fey-esque fairy godmother from the Outer Hebrides--whose essential innocence is the result of his having originated as only so much "flabby cack," to which he is probably destined to return. Meanwhile, his message--a request to enroll him in the local community college--is fatefully mismanaged, and Percy is lost among the sycophant sex predators, patricides, tattooed gym gods, and porn-faced burnouts that make up White's bleak idea of 21st-century America. From this early point, the novel particulates into a swirl of styles, indulgences, and high-profile interruptions from the author himself. White's latest exploration of the satire of social dysfunction is endlessly inventive and endlessly imitative--cribbing forms from such diverse masters as E.T.A. Hoffman, Jonathan Swift, Flann O'Brien, and many more. With nods to the pantheon of avant-garde cultists within whose milieu White swirls (David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Martin Amis, and Don DeLillo all come immediately to mind), the novel bills itself equally as a bomb tossed into the bunker of literary convention; an algorithm endlessly replicating the capitalist apocalypse; a picaresque through which White's mad characters tilt at real giants disguised as miniature-golf windmills. The result is a profane wrestling match between high style and low comedy which owes as much to Rocky and Bullwinkle as it does to Gauguin's Vision After the Sermon, though, like both, it requires a willing audience to witness its exertions.Exhaustive and exhausting, the novel only sporadically comes together to present something like a vision, but in the ruin of its parts, some runic message might be scrawled. Or, then again, it might not.

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March 1, 2018

This new work from White (We, Robots) opens with the Queen of Spells sending a messenger to the Marquis. This messenger is Percy, whom the marquis ignores. The queen then follows up with a visit in person. When she discovers Percy missing, she is not pleased. The message turns out to be an oddly pedestrian request to enroll Percy in a community college. Largely composed of a series of humorous incidents, the story includes numerous minor characters such as the Marquis's grandson Jake, and Jake's promiscuous wife, Fanni. The narrative takes place mainly in an unnamed city in the center of Illinois but moves to other locales. It is deliberately somewhat purposeless; the fabric of the narrative consists of endless clever circumlocutions. The Marquis's obsession with the computer game Halo and with himself are the primary themes, seconded by ubiquitous humor and puerile witticisms. Perhaps the intent is to create a distancing, Brechtian experience and a reexamination of the novel form? VERDICT Lacking Character is certainly not lacking character. The book is, in fact, manifestly overflowing with character. Intentionally impenetrable, its attraction seems to be the clever narrative meandering. Recommended for the most patient readers.--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2018
After several experimental novels praised by the likes of John Barth and David Foster Wallace, White was regarded as a master of off-kilter literary styles before turning mostly to social criticism (We Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data, 2015). In his first novel since 2004, White merges both interests for a blistering, madcap romp through the current zeitgeist. On a mission from the Queen of Spells, a Zorro-like clone named Percy delivers a sealed message to the marquis of a college town in central Illinois. The marquis, a Halo-obsessed pothead, just wants to get back to his video game. Or maybe he's downplaying the message: a request from Percy's creator to help him enroll in community college. As Percy gradually discovers his true nature, he encounters numerous eccentrics, including the marquis' grandson, Jake, who panders to his wife, Fanni, whose insatiable appetites for food, shopping, and sex leave Jake desperate to find work. The jocular narrator, a sort of twenty-first-century Tristram Shandy, routinely interjects, allowing White to raise questions about free will, purpose, and form.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)