America Fantastica

May 1, 2023

In August 2019, discredited journalist Boyd Halverson walks into the Community National Bank in Northern California and steals $81,000 at gunpoint, then brings teller Angie Bing along on an extended ride that reveals the country's flattened morals and morale. Along the way, they're chased by hitmen, angry lovers, an heiress, a billionaire, and assorted others as Boyd seeks vengeance for the wrongs one man did him. The masterly O'Brien's first novel in two decades. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2023
A satirical romp through a country plagued by deceit. One day in 2019 a man named Boyd Halverson, who feels his life is "a breathtaking failure," robs a bank in Fulda, California and kidnaps the teller, a 4-foot-10-inch talkaholic named Angie Bing. They light out for Mexico and soon become reluctant allies as Boyd seeks to confront his former father-in-law, an unscrupulous industrialist named Jim Dooney. He ruined Boyd 10 years earlier--and forestalled a damaging news article--by revealing all the falsehoods on which the younger man, a compulsive liar, had built his journalism career. Dooney, fearing Boyd wants to kill him, moves from one mansion to another in Texas, Minnesota, and California. Angie's boyfriend, "a piece of stupid wrapped up in cowboy clothes," goes after his gal but gets waylaid by two ex-cons, on whom he gets medieval with a hoe. Dooney's successor at his conglomerate (and the current husband of Boyd's ex-wife) tells his CFO, a sadistic thug distantly related to mass murderer Richard Speck, to find Boyd and hurt him. The owners of the Fulda bank, who've been cooking the books for years, decide to rob the bank themselves. Running through all this amusing chaos are the shadows of Boyd's existential crisis, not least of which is the mystery behind his toddler son's accidental death. O'Brien also periodically pauses to rant on the national affliction of mythomania or lying, and takes swipes at the White House, fake news, big business, racism, and the extreme right. There are echoes of his famous Vietnam War novel, Going After Cacciato (1977), a book built on a darkly absurd pursuit amid individual and national uncertainty. O'Brien is less focused here, favoring scattershot barbs and humor over cohesion. Yet it's one of those books where you can sense the author enjoying himself and it's fun to be along for the ride. A broadly engaging and entertaining work.

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August 1, 2023
Once a promising journalist with Pulitzer potential, Boyd Halverson finds himself in reduced circumstances and even lower expectations. As store manager at Penney's, Boyd attends Kiwanis meetings and drinks too much, a shadow of his former life when he was married to the beautiful Evelyn, daughter of billionaire shipbuilder Dooney. Years earlier, Boyd's planned expos� of Dooney's shipbuilding malfeasance was dead in the water when Dooney preemptively destroyed Boyd's career by revealing Boyd's fictional academic and military record. Boyd is set on retribution when he holds up a small-town bank and takes diminutive spitfire bank teller Angie Bing along for the ride. So begins O'Brien's farcical satire that blends fierce social commentary and a searing indictment of our post-fact culture into a nonstop joyride. The resulting road trip is rich with colorful characters while Angie, the loquacious lilliputian, a devout Christian with selective morality, provides comic relief. The fantastical comedy of errors, the lauded O'Brien's first novel in many years, blends rom-com, caper, and buddy story into a relentless, skewering tale of greed, capitalism, betrayal, and ultimately, redemption. A sound bet for Elmore Leonard fans.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: National Book Award-winning O'Brien's return to fiction and the rollicking nature of this sharply comic tale will stir avid interest.

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Starred review from October 2, 2023
Hunter S. Thompson meets Sacha Baron Cohen in this amusing and alarming road trip to the center of America’s mendacious heart. In what O’Brien has claimed will be his final novel, the National Book Award winner (The Things They Carried) chronicles the downward spiral of former foreign correspondent Boyd Halverson. A long-ago Pulitzer Prize nominee, Boyd has seen his life torpedoed by his inflated résumé, which was leaked to the press by his billionaire ex–father-in-law, Jim Dooney, whose murderous corporate skullduggery Boyd was on the brink of exposing. After moldering for almost a decade while managing a JC Penney in fictitious Fulda, Calif., and plotting his revenge against Dooney, Boyd impulsively robs a nearby bank for $81,000 and abducts a none too reluctant young evangelical teller named Angie Bing. Shortly after setting off for Mexico, Boyd discovers he’s in over his head: not only because Angie’s disappearance has sent her jealous bozo of a fiancé on their trail, but also because the husband-and-wife bank owners, Douglas and Lois Cutterby, have brainstormed their own plan for recovering the stolen cash, since reporting the robbery through official channels would reveal their flagrant embezzlement. Then Dooney catches wind of Boyd’s long-stewing revenge scheme, triggering additional pursuit by psychopathic corporate muscle—and a full Fargo’s worth of darkly comic and intermittently deadly complications. Though the antic and off-color proceedings sometimes drag, particularly during some of Angie’s extended sermonizing, O’Brien keeps everything afloat on a cloud of pure gonzo bliss. If this is indeed the author’s valedictory novel, he’s bowing out with a star-spangled bang.

December 22, 2023

For his first novel in 20 years, O'Brien (The Things They Carried) has penned a wild take on the contemporary malady of "mythomania," or misinformation and delusion. Boyd Halverson, a journalist disgraced for playing fast and loose with the truth, now manages a small-town California JCPenney. He also manufactures right-wing misinformation on the internet. One Saturday morning, he commits a bank robbery as part of a plan to exact revenge on his former father-in-law, Jim Dooney, whom he blames for his downfall. During the robbery, Boyd takes an overly talkative teller, Angie Bing, as a hostage. The two eventually become uneasy allies on a road trip seeking Dooney, all the while pursued by two people: Randy Zapf, Angie's ex-boyfriend and a small-time criminal who imagines himself a much bigger operator, and Henry Speck, a bumbling hitman hired by Dooney's former business partner. (Henry is related to serial killer Richard Speck.) Boyd and Angie's misadventures take them from California to Mexico, Texas, and Minnesota, and finally back to California. VERDICT O'Brien's comic touch leavens what is at heart a grim vision of a society infiltrated by political lies that ultimately multiply until they come to fill the whole of American life.--Lawrence Rungren

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.