Washington Post book critic Ron Charles unleashed on the "toxic waste" of America's "deadly gun culture" in reviewing three liberal novels on Wednesday. The headline was "Drawing a bead on America's gun culture."
First, there's Congressman Steve Israel, who's just published snarky novel number two, called Big Guns. He imagines a gun-control push causing a gun manufacturer to demand gun ownership be made mandatory, "assisted by a band of political prostitutes and racist fanatics." But Charles was not impressed:
Where we crave something subversive and shocking, a satire commensurate to the American carnage, we get, instead, one-liners that feel Bob-Hope-fresh. And ridiculous as the characters in Big Guns are, they pale [in ridiculous-ness] next to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre or politicians like Marco Rubio and Rob Portman, who tweet their prayers at grieving parents while accepting millions from the gun lobby.
Then there's Jennifer Clement's Gun Love, which revolved around a girl named Pearl who lives in a broken-down car in a Florida trailer park, where there was "always someone skulking around with an itchy trigger finger," and men would shoot pointlessly at the water and drink beers. It was an "enclave of subsistence living...fenced in by paranoia." Charles gushed:
Full of sorrow and aching sweetness, Gun Love provides a glimpse of people who dwell every day knee deep in the toxic waste of our gun culture. They may be America’s forgotten children, but after reading this novel, you are not likely to forget them.
The third novel is How to Be Safe by Tom McAllister. After a monstrous mass school shooting, the plot focuses on an English teacher who was wrongly suspected in the crime.
Anna is that most scorned, most unwanted figure: a bitter woman. She recognizes that all our mass shootings have one thing in common, and she dares to claim that our obsession with guns is closely tied to something destructive about masculine sexuality. “As soon as Adam discovered his erection,” Anna quips, “the world was doomed.”
....That acid wit makes How to Be Safe particularly unnerving. Anna delivers the most caustic lines with a straight face sharp enough to cut your throat: “In America we send children to school to get shot and to learn algebra and physics and history and biology and literature. Less civilized nations don’t have such an organized system for murdering their children.”
Charles concluded with the wish for all guns to be buried in the ground:
Like nothing else I’ve read, How to Be Safe contains within its slim length the rubbed-raw anxieties, the slips of madness, the gallows humor and the inconsolable sorrow of this national pathology that we have nursed to monstrous dimensions. Who doesn’t feel the unbearable futility and hope in Anna’s voice when she rages against her town’s plan to build yet another memorial?
“No stone. No American flags every three feet. No ribbons. No priests and no Bible. No symbolic floral arrangements to represent vitality or youth or rebirth. No poet reading a poem about rising from the ashes. No obelisks, for God’s sake. Just dig a huge hole and fill it with guns.”
