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Original Essays | October 14, 2009
By Emily Pilloton
About six months ago, at a fundraising event for the nonprofit I founded, Project H, a six-year-old girl handed me a pickle jar full of pennies....
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America's Report Card
by John Mcnally
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Synopses & Reviews America's Report Card offers a brilliant vision of contemporary American life that is frightening, darkly hilarious, and tinged with satire. John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who forge an improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world overshadowed by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind — a world in which hulking government bureaucracies and vast corporations join forces to numb the populace into apathy with various standardization and surveillance programs. But McNally sees hope in the daily experiences of his characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by going about their own very particular lives, people circumvent the official program and begin to actively claim lives of freedom and dignity. America's Report Card is an arresting and humane portrait of life taking place in the margins, outside the stunted imagination of government and media. As in his critically acclaimed novel The Book of Ralph, McNally dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan — a lonely, confused, purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so little about high school that on her final standardized test, she writes an essay heaping scorn on the test administrators even as she asks her faceless reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a fairy-tale graduate student life, with just enough money and clout to keep him in books, vodka, a threadbare apartment, and a beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the bohemian dream starts to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring standardized tests and finds himself surrounded by people who are either plodding blindly along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories. When Charlie and Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumble upon their own bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from their habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed course. The official version of American life today may get the broad strokes and primary colors right, but America's Report Card reveals how the government and the media overlook the corners and shadows where our individual realities unfold all too often in chaotic, precarious, and bewildering ways. This wholly original, wildly entertaining novel mirrors our part in the dark but frequently redemptive comedy that is life. Review: "John McNally dedicates his new novel to Ann Coulter, whom he calls 'America's Iago.' If he's lucky, this might provoke the conservative pundit to lay off the 9/11 widows for a moment and give McNally a little free advertising in one of her tirades. Or maybe Sean Hannity will denounce his book for suggesting (several times) that President Bush is a terrorist. To which McNally would probably ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) yell, 'Bring it on!' 'America's Report Card' is a gangly comic novel that starts by making fun of conservative education reform ('No Child's Behind Left Untouched') and ends by accusing President Bush of genocide. McNally is a clown wearing brass knuckles, and with this sometimes clever, sometimes goofy story, he may finally incite on the fiction best-seller list the kind of brawl that's been raging away between liberals and conservatives on the nonfiction side. After all, for all their alleged liberalism, angry speeches to the choir, poetry readings and group letters, America's literati have not produced much polemical fiction during the war on terror. Part of this may be because it takes longer to write a novel than to assemble the reasons that 'Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot,' but we've already seen a number of less barbed novels that involve the events of 9/11. Maybe novelists fear their work will quickly sound dated if it's tied to today's political questions instead of to more timeless issues of love and grief or government incompetence in general. Whatever the reasons, we're still more likely to follow characters into the bedroom than into the voting booth. But not here: 'America's Report Card' is the kind of book you might buy at an 'Impeach Bush' rally. And that says something about its subtlety, too. The novel follows two stories that eventually converge in a zany conspiracy of murder and totalitarian control. In the first, Charlie Wolf has finished his graduate degree in film studies, and since 'there wasn't a single practical use for anything he'd done,' he decides to stay in Iowa City with his horny Russian girlfriend and pursue 'migrant work for the overeducated underemployed.' They're both hired as part of a huge team to grade 'America's Report Card,' a national aptitude test given annually to all grade-school and high-school students. McNally is a hoot when satirizing the inane procedures for evaluating these tests in a vast, windowless sweatshop — somewhere between Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and Dickens' 'Hard Times.' Charlie settles into this mindless work, fueled only by donuts and coffee, eager for the periodic excitement of breakdowns and fights in nearby cubicles. Rumor has it that the whole grading enterprise is just a scam to procure future government contracts for the testing company or, more ominously, a massive government project to track the psychological profile of everyone in the United States. But eventually Charlie doesn't care. Meanwhile, far away in a southwest Chicago suburb, 17-year-old Jainey O'Sullivan is struggling to make sense of her mixed-up life. Once a precocious, happy girl, she's now a super-cynical, punked-out cartoon art student marking time until graduation. Her mother doesn't have a clue. Her father is in prison for assault. Her brother is holed up in the attic wearing combat fatigues, studying the Bible and praying to his crossbow. Part of McNally's satiric style is to throw a perfectly respectable liberal punch, then duck into absurdity. It's a disorienting technique, but it keeps the novel from falling into the rut of propaganda. The latest crisis in Jainey's life, for instance, involves her favorite teacher, Mrs. Grant, who committed suicide because federally mandated regulations were working her to death. Mrs. Grant's complaints sounded like the usual teachers' union grievances, but on the other hand, she was something of a nut case. When Jainey goes to pay her respects, she finds, among Mrs. Grant's artwork, a life-sized doll of President Bush dressed up as Osama bin Laden. Few readers are likely to miss the implication of this symbol, but, just in case, Jainey begins carrying it around with her and researching America's programs to control, cheat and kill people throughout the world. (D'oh — there goes the Bill O'Reilly book club endorsement!) McNally's concern isn't primarily about cuts to social programs, the erosion of civil rights or even deceptive wars abroad. It's about the mentally enervating effect of living in what he sees as the constant state of outrage and fear that the Bush administration inspires. By the time Jainey takes the America's Report Card test at school for the last time, she's so agitated that she can barely think straight. The essay question about a contested student election sounds a lot like the 2000 Bush-Gore election, but that doesn't matter to her. She brushes the question aside and writes a plea for help: 'I don't know who reads these things and I can't imagine what kind of sad life you must have but let me tell you a little bit about myself.' She goes on to claim that someone killed her art teacher and now they're trying to kill her. Charlie, as you may have guessed, eventually grades that essay. (To be fair, this is the only event that's easy to anticipate in this wacky story.) Deeply depressed by his girlfriend's rejection and broken down by months of toil in the assessment center, he decides to devote his life to protecting Jainey from nefarious government forces. The adventure that follows is wildly energetic, often chaotic and never resists a diversion as it careens toward a conclusion that's oddly terrifying and sweet. What 'America's Report Card' really hopes to assess are the psychotic symptoms that ordinary people have begun to display as a result of our government's surveillance and brutality: a) disillusionment b) paranoia c) rage d) all of the above. When you're finished, put your No. 2 pencil down and enjoy a government-sanctioned moment of silence. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World." Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "In America's Report Card, John McNally takes on domestic espionage, the American school system, and the mutative nature of love. Brilliantly written, McNally's unblinking novel is an earnest and hilarious portrayal of the American psyche at its worst and its best." -- Erika Krouse, author of Come Up and See Me Sometime Review: "At last — a post-9/11 novel with imagination, guts, and integrity, and one that actually shows real people being sucked into the American nightmare. John McNally is a marvelous writer and should be applauded for producing this timely, stylish, and often hilarious book. This is Don DeLillo's White Noise for the overeducated, underemployed generation of Americans who, for the first time ever, will be poorer than their parents." -- Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting Review: "This is a great book. In America's Report Card, John McNally manages to be fierce and funny, darkly strange and completely relevant. For all the bottled rage in this book, it is ultimately a story about human connection, and an enduring one at that." -- Tom Barbash, author of The Last Good Chance and On Top of the World Synopsis: Jainey O'Sullivan cares so little about school that she told the government exactly what she thinks of its stupid standardized testing. Test scorer Charlie Wolf sees her as someone who needs rescuing after he reads her essay, and soon they forge a strange, tentative connection in this hilarious and humane portrait of folly, luck, and paranoia in the age of the Patriot Act. Table of Contents Contents PART ONE The Test, 1995 Spring 2004 PART TWO The Teeth, 1997 Summer 2004 PART THREE The Hunt, 1995 August 2, 2004 August 3, 2004 August 4, 2004 PART FOUR The Lycanthrope, 2004 Two Days Before Election Day One Day Before Election Day Election Day
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780743256261
- Subtitle:
- A Novel
- Author:
- Mcnally, John
- Author:
- McNally, John
- Publisher:
- Free Press
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Social life and customs
- Subject:
- United states
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- July 2006
- Binding:
- Hardback
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 288
- Dimensions:
- 9 x 6 in
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