Run Robbie Run
Jon Pepper's political farce Run Robbie Run arrives as a razor-sharp satire of American democracy in terminal decline - and it's wickedly funny.
Set during a fictional presidential race, the novel follows two spectacularly unfit candidates: Dewey Fenwick, an 87-year-old former president who can barely stay conscious long enough to recognize his own campaign staff, and Robbie Crowe, a lazy, self-absorbed billionaire who stumbles into the nomination without earning a single vote.
Pepper's comic gifts are immediately on display. The opening scene, in which campaign aides frantically try to rouse Dewey from a Golden Girls dream before television journalists arrive, is a masterclass in political absurdity. But the novel's real engine is Robbie - a man so thoroughly unprepared for the presidency that when asked about his vision for America, he hums a few bars of What a Wonderful World and tells his aide to write it down.
The satire cuts in all directions. The party machine, corrupt billionaire puppet-masters, a fawning media, campus radicals planning "mostly peaceful" firebombings at the Chicago convention - no faction escapes Pepper's pen unscathed. The fictional surveillance program "America's Just Rewards," essentially a social credit system dressed up in loyalty-points marketing, provides the novel's chilling undertow beneath all the comedy.
The supporting cast is superb: Dinda, the idealistic campaign intern who slowly realizes the party has no actual principles; Senator Hiram Fry, a straight-talking old warhorse who delivers the novel's most sobering warnings; and Marty, Robbie's long-suffering aide whose deadpan exasperation carries the humor throughout.
Pepper writes with the confidence of someone who has watched Washington up close, and it shows. Run Robbie Run is sharp, fast, and bracingly cynical - a comic novel that lands its punches because the absurdity never strays too far from reality.
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