The First Trump Lost the Election Novel
Any writer out there who thought he or she would be the first to turn Donald Trump’s humiliating 2020 election lost and even more humiliating reaction into fiction gold had to line up behind the author of this book. Simply put: he got there first. And this imagery proves it as it reads like a news report covering that election humiliation if maybe just one or two things had played out a little differently:
“That first Tuesday in November, online conspiracy theories, compromised ballots, and bands of armed poll protesters undermined the integrity of the vote in six different battleground states. The country slid into three days of chaos. On Saturday, the President declared the entire election invalid. He ordered a repeat, claiming it would require at least three more months to secure and implement. Half the electorate revolted against the plan. The other half was gung-ho for a retry. Where suspicion was total and facts were settled with the like button, there was no other way forward but to do over.”
Books
One of the coolest pieces of imagery leading to a mind-blowing metaphor for books is included in this novel. The language is precise and efficient even as it purposely engages deception to carry the reader to that kicker at the end which gives an all-new appreciation to the hobby of collecting books:
“Up through the diminishing hill of Kentucky, past the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, through counties that had little use for science of any kind, we listened to Flowers for Algernon . I’d read it at age eleven. It was one of the first books in my two-thousand-volume library of science fiction. I bought it in a used bookstore—a mass market paperback bearing a creepy image of a face halfway between mouse and man. Paying for it with my own money felt like cracking the code of adulthood. Holding it open in my hands, I wormholed into a different Earth. Small, light, portable parallel universes turned out to be the only thing in this life I’d ever collect.”
When You Put it That Way
There is a growing subgroup of Americans who are falling further into a vortex of anti-scientific thought stimulated by the inescapable fact of life that scientific research is by definition always in flux. Evolution of scientific knowledge is the only thing about it that remains solidly in place. Some people mistake the contradictions that arise as a result of this evolution with being fundamentally untrustworthy. Most of those people make little sense when they attack the scientific method. The narrator, however, does not make this mistake. Probably because he is himself a scientist:
“I never believed in the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. When a condition gets three different names over as many decades, when it requires two subcategories to account for completely contradictory symptoms, when it goes from nonexistent to the country’s most commonly diagnosed childhood disorder in the course of one generation, when two different physicians want to prescribe three different medications, there’s something wrong.”
Robin
That son who is mentioned in the example above is the narrator’s young son, Robin. He is suffering from some disorder that is likely somewhere along the autism spectrum, but is never explicitly identified. Instead, imagery is used to convey a mystery condition which, nevertheless, many parents will immediately recognize:
“Robin and I walked from the neuroscience building to the lot where I was parked. He held my forearm, chattering. He hadn’t grappled me so much in public since he was eight. Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no `Robin,’ no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.”
