Name: Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World
Rating: 4 (2 reviews)

Donald Antrim

In a world marked by full-scale neighborhood wars in the local park and lawns encircled by trenches, civic-minded schoolteacher Pete Robinson finds himself increasingly obsessed with his darkly powerful wife, Meredith. A first novel. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

Originally published in 1993 by Viking Penguin.

A Novel

Edwin Lang

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is the rather grim but comical story of Pete Robinson, an ex-grade-school teacher, who with his wife Meredith, also an ex-teacher, made redundant after the tax payers decide to defund and close public schools to save money. The story begins with Pete at his desk in his attic surveying the seaside town thinking about his candidacy to be the next mayor. This had been Donald Antrim’s first book. It is a good book and is both troubling and impressive and reads beautifully. One sails through the story, almost effortlessly, and when Pete often expresses his love for his wife one feels both its depth and sincerity. We also feel the angst that he may somehow lose her. Meredith is a little bit of New Age and there is scene where under some form of hypnosis – in the book it is called an ‘icthyomorphic trance’ – she becomes an ancient fish (Coelacanth), an experience poor Pete is excluded from because of his inability to have a similar transformational experience of becoming fish-like, and it seems the first sign of a possible fracture in his otherwise excellent relationship he has with his wife, and we share Pete’s anxiety. Pete Robinson is also a history buff, with a special interest in the Middle Ages and something of an expert in medieval torture practices. He had often fascinated his classes with spectacular explanations of how the various instruments of torture work. Pete is affectionately known as ‘The Executioner’ because of an informal speech to a community meeting that led later to his suggesting the use a modified Medieval technique – quartering – when the townsfolk puzzled over how to send their ex-mayor to a well-deserved death. The story was simple, brilliantly so. There were a though lot of themes and it took me a long time to understand why I enjoyed the story and why it had meaning for me. At its surface Elect Mr. Robinson is dealing with issues like the breakdown in civility in middle-class America: the town sports death-traps on their front lawns; it doesn’t have any community service (or seemingly any government) – libraries seem closed; feuding neighbours plant landmines in their public parks. The author is successful now and also teaches at Columbia but he said in a recent interview that releasing this first book had terrified him. He requested frequent revisions and I could imagine that he probably drove the editors crazy with his anxiety and procrastination. I think why release of the book had terrified him was that the story had been about trust. Just prior to the ex-mayor’s quartering at the very beginning of the book, the ex-mayor asked Pete to bury him in sacred space, and Pete does – Pete is the kind of man one trusts. For all the townsfolk’s (and wife’s) eccentricities everyone seems to trust, and like, Pete. I think though what Donald Antrim is asking is whether he himself, or we for that matter, can really trust anyone? Our parents, or are they going to get divorced on us (as Donald Antrim’s had); will we have a home life – or is it going to be like what the town had become: umheimlich – from Freud meaning I think, un-home-like, weird and uncanny (Donald Antrim had been carted off to an all boy’s prep school in Virginia); can we trust our spouses, our work colleagues and bosses, our politicians, our institutions, our priests, our neighbours? I suspect that in Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World Donald Antrim suggests that the answer may be no. Edwin

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

Rarely am I as conflicted about a book as with "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World"! Antrim clearly knows what he's doing. He creates a dark dystopian future that resembles our own time enough to make things scary. His prose is wonderful and the sequence where Robinson contemplates the events that have transpired worm themselves into ones subconscious. Mankind is coming ever closer to a breaking point. A paradigm shift seems the only solution unless we want to pursue the violent path we're on to its inevitable conclusion.

'A dark, suburban fantasy ... richly funny, even whimsical, and bizarrely familiar.' - The New Yorker. Having accidentally inspired the local suburbanites to draw and quarter the town's blood-thirsty Mayor, Pete Robinson -civic-minded schoolteacher and enthusiastic historian of the Medieval Inquisition -embarks on a tenuous election campaign. But his sleepy town has entered a period of crisis; the local park is littered with landmines, the neighbours are building deadly moats around their homes, and his beautiful wife, Meredith, has discovered dark and powerful talents within herself, which threaten to transfigure their once serene lives forever. In amongst this chaos, can Mr Robinson satisfy the terrible will of the people? By turns funny and phantasmagorical, fiercely intelligent and imaginative, Donald Antrim's first novel of suburban civics turned macabre is a new American classic.

Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World

Gary Homewood

Re-read this for the first time since it's early 90s release.
An amateur historian of medieval torture techniques recounts his American middle class suburbs inexplicable descent into chaos and bizarre violence and his attempts at home schooling. Hilarious comedic set pieces, well paced and satirically observed, unhinged and shocking all at the same time. Utterly brilliant. Would make a great and probably polarising book club recommendation.

Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

Reviews

Highlights