Since I’ve already posted the Kirkus review of my novel, Thumperica! A Novel of the Ghost of America Future, I feel that, in the interest of presenting a fair and balanced view, I have a responsibility to post the following review from Shelley Gorin, a woman of undeniable taste and depth. Enjoy!
Thumperica!: A review by Shelley Gorin.
The definitive evidence for me of a book being worth reading, or at least being something I’m connecting with on some level, is that overly-cliche’d “inability to put it down.” No matter how “quiet” I try to get in order to have time to read, my life ends up full of nearly-nonstop interruptions. If I’m not really into a book, those interruptions will have me justifying putting it down constantly, and then having an excusably-hard time getting back into it. If I’m really drawn in, however, I’m shushing the interruptions and sacrificing sleep to get it finished.
Thumperica was both of those for me, at different times. That’s just the normal consequence, I think, of a major hurdle that naturally has to be overcome when setting the stage for the events of a story that’s just enough outside our humdrum daily life and circle of awareness to require some deeper explanation. America TM’s state at the opening of the book seems almost completely unbelievable without such further explanation… almost.
Due to the nature of having to lay a LOT of groundwork and presenting a rather fantastic world (that most of us would not like to admit openly – or even privately – could actually come true), there was a lot of detail and explanation that came along with the core story, especially at the outset. At the start, copious amounts of footnotes seemed almost distracting. They ended up, however, being one of the book’s strengths, and something I clung onto to help me navigate the difficult groundwork.
The first handful of chapters were admittedly hard for me to stick with – they hit me like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, that was so detailed and so outside my brain’s normal ability to retain an overload of information outside its little bubble, that I had to keep re-reading pages and chapters it to try to get it to stick. There was a LOT of detail in Thumperica’s first chapters that left me going, “Wait, what? I can’t remember what that was. Who was that again?”… and a LOT acronyms. I couldn’t read it, originally, any time my anxiety was flared up, because my brain just got overloaded with info and stopped taking it in.
However, instead of leaving it and not coming back, I kept going back to pick it up and push through. Part of that was a promise – I said I was gonna read it! Most of what initially hooked me, though, was the hidden humor and the play on names… I’d be reading along, trying to keep up, and suddenly do a spit-take. There were also a few times I thought, “Oh man, Lloyd’s not right in the head,” and smiled. But mostly I stuck it out because there was just enough “could be true” woven in, that I wanted to see just how this whole mess of a nation might turn out.
In all frankness, Thumperica is a WEIRD book. It is clearly written by someone who has little interest in following status-quo success recipes for best sellers. It’s probably not going to make the New York Times best seller list (though who knows?), but it’s a worthwhile read. I want to say it was about a quarter of the way through that I found I was staying up late to finish chapters, or I was shushing interruptions. It happened subtly. But sticking it out through the initial info overload was worth it, once the chess pieces started to move.
There were many moments where I felt the plot was over the top – a country couldn’t POSSIBLY become THAT effed up. And yet, if Scripture tells us that things like adultery actually occur in the heart, or that a man is as he thinks in his heart, Thumperica is a frightening exposure of just how dark, depraved, and gluttonous mankind can be, if we are brutally honest with ourselves. And if that fantastic and depraved world is unrealistic, the fantastic and depraved thoughts in our own minds are not. As such, Thumperica is a book that might make you a wee bit uncomfortable, if you’re prone to self-examination. And if our basest human instincts (not simply sexual, as some might assume, but greed, power, control, all-who-aren’t-like-me-are-bad, or mine-is-bigger kind of thinking) are left to run amok; if we become, personally or as a country, increasingly desensitized over generations to things like basic human conscience and dignity, and we re-write the rules or re-spin the sacred to support such things, is it truly that far-fetched?
Is that not exactly what we’ve already done as a nation? We can’t be naive enough to think that we as a people have not been guilty of genocide, degradation, or humiliation of races and peoples on the scale of Hitler, in our past. The kind of world presented in Thumperica is certainly extreme, but it is already in existence; it already HAS been in existence. And it may be in a bit of existence in each of us.
Further back in mankind’s history, “civilized” humans once killed other humans for entertainment; they certainly have killed for lust or power or greed in our generation as much as in the first. If someone held a magnifying glass to our basest thoughts or perhaps gave them free reign, it’s frighteningly possible that things could decline to the state in which Thumperica begins. They seem too far-fetched and yet too near to what we wish not to see in reality; they could have easily been predicted by Irving’s Owen Meany, and it feels as though they were. There are elements of this book that seem to be a nod that one. And though my first instinct was to laugh and how absurd it all sounded, there is enough in my life experience to say that the comedy of it all reveals a real tragedy underneath.
I am left wondering what my own part might be in the macabre play, if I keep my eyes closed. I truly did not know where this book was going, or could possibly go; it certainly didn’t go where I thought it would. It didn’t wrap up with a neat little bow, and it didn’t follow predictable patterns of overused plot devices. But that’s the reality of the world in which we live – rarely does anything go as expected, and even knowing that mankind repeats itself endlessly (“nothing new under the sun,”) that knowledge doesn’t help us prevent those twists and turns, or even stop the unfairness of it all.
But sometimes…. sometimes, evil will overreach and be its own undoing. And that is the hope for those seemingly doomed under it all in this book and in life – if we question those things our conscience can’t abide, and we’re willing to risk fighting for it, even when the odds are stacked, maybe evil things will stumble.The book certainly leans strongly left, but even those leaning strongly right can find good substance here, if they’re willing to set aside party and politics enough to let it simply be a magnifying glass on mankind left to its own devices. It wouldn’t matter what party or what political leaning a person claimed, the potential is there for anyone willing to question what blind allegiance to blind national ambition can lead to.
Thumperica is NOT a book I’d recommend my mother read, or a Sunday School class, or anyone easily offended – unless being offended is the very thing they need. There are elements to the book that won’t be fitting for the book club, but they just might be the food for thought we need in the days and years ahead.
