Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel

By Donald Antrim

"A dark, suburban fantasy . . . richly funny, even whimsical, and bizarrely familiar." —The New Yorker

In the seaside community of Donald Antrim's Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, the citizens are restless. The mayor has fired stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, and his public execution was a messy affair. As these hawkish suburbanites fortify their houses with deadly moats and land mines, a former third-grade teacher named Pete Robinson steps forward with a tenuous bid to replace the mayor. But can anyone satisfy the terrible will of the people? By turns funny and phantasmagorical, fiercely intelligent and imaginative, Donald Antrim's story of suburban civics turned macabre is a new American classic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781429977371

Donald Antrim

Donald Antrim is the critically acclaimed author of Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist, as well The Afterlife, a memoir about his mother. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, he has also been the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Public Library. He lives in New York City.  

Reviews for Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World

[ashleytylerjohn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This would be 3 1/2 stars if Goodreads had a better scale (why not out of a hundred? If you can't make such fine distinctions, rank books as 0/20/40/60/80/100 like they do on Criticker sometimes) ... it's very well-written, held my interest throughout, but I have to really enjoy a book to give it 4 stars, not just find it worthy. But it succeeds at what it set out to do and I have no editing suggestions, so I'm rounding up. (5 stars are for all-time favourites--the creme-de-la-creme).

This weird, strange book shows how to do weird and strange in a compelling and elegant manner (take that, Welcome to Night Vale!). There is a central conceit (society has collapsed in some unspecified way and Americans have increasingly turned violent) that is played out in a polite suburban setting, and then there is a dollop of extra weirdness (some dangerous identification with a spirit animal) that may be related to the central conceit, or may not, but if it was I didn't see it. And all the strangeness and weirdness springs naturally from the central conceit (aside from the spirit animal business), and makes sense, given the context (whereas Night Vale, which I also just finished, has a zillion inexplicable unrelated oddities that I found offputting).

It's an amusing book, but also a very dark book (it would have to be), with an especially upsetting ending (although it could be worse, I guess). As others have said, this one will stay with you. Not my cup of tea, because I vastly prefer Pride and Prejudice to Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, put I appreciated the satire, and have learned that I do prefer my post-apocalyptic fiction to be suburban-set rather than upon miles of dusty roads.

Oh, and because this may make a difference either way to undecided potential readers, this reads like Literature and not like Genre Fiction, not to suggest in any way that Literature is automatically better than Genre Fiction (any more than Classical Music beats Pop Music), just that they're not the same thing at all (see many, many essays on the increasingly blurred difference).

[richardderus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My Young Gentleman Caller hefted a bin for me today, its lid slipped, and this book bonked his noggin. Bin safely deposited, piffling nature of injury established (to my satisfaction if not his, I suspect he was angling for sympathy/guilt banana bread as his desire for more of that comestible is a refrain in our recent conversations), I picked up the book and was right back in the Sixth Avenue B. Dalton circa 1994. (The receipt tells me I bought the book December 8, 1994. Computer POS precision noted.)At that time I was gadding about Lower Manhattan in a haze of grief for my dead lover, mid-30s-male sexual hunger, and frustrated seeking for a hit in my newish career as a literary agent. Numbing pain via reading was an old, old habit of mine. This novel's premise, which nowadays we'd call bizarro, was so askew that I was sure I'd be diverted and possibly edified.Like so many expectations....So the read itself was successful, I kept the book somehow in spite of literally thousands of others falling away; but damned if I want to re-read it. Antrim's first novel is jam-packed with brio. His narrative voice isn't assured, it tries too hard to clever-clever its way out of some cul-de-sacs with limited success, but still tells a true story. Ours was then a country of receding community ethic, a sense of a destiny shared was eroding ever-faster, and its lack of usability as a ground-cover in the garden we're supposed to be maintaining was alarming to many of us.As a reminder, the first government shut-down was almost a year away but had already been set in motion by the politically tone-deaf Clintons proposing a National Health Insurance Plan that would've saved tens of thousands from death or debilitating debt. (I never said they were wrong, just tone-deaf.) Antrim's Civil War fit beautifully into that deep and accelerating fault line's growth under the national garden's soil. His satirical intentions were spot-on. His storytelling voice wasn't quite up to the task but he was close enough for me at that time.So today (post-boo boo kissing) I picked the book up for the first time in many long years, flipped around, and was chuckling again. I told the mildly sulky YGC Rob why I wasn't continuing to fuss over him and, I am gratified to report, sent the book home with him after I sold it by mentioning missile attacks on a gated community and drawing-and-quartering by Subaru.Since it's a story with far greater relevance to today's 20-somethings than even to my then-30-something self, I'm hopeful it will reinforce his sense that the morality he sees enacted around him is pathological and not emulatable. And I'm enormously tickled in the vanity area that owning a book that I demonstrably bought for myself on a particular date before he was born made him covet the object. Everybody wins. Like it should be.

[randymetcalfe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Most of the sinks in Pete Robinson’s town are clogged. Maybe that’s a sign of something. But if it is, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg because there are claymore mines planted in the public park, most of the homeowners have dug bear pits or filled moats around their homes, a blood-feud has erupted between the Bensons and the Websters, and not long ago the former mayor was drawn and quartered. Fortunately, Pete’s knowledge of medieval torture practices was very much in demand. If only the school where he had taught history hadn’t been closed. But maybe he can do something about that too. That is, if he can convince his “coelacanth” wife, Meredith, to help him in his endeavours.This is frighteningly compelling reading, which really sounds like it ought to be an allegory for something. But probably isn’t. It just sounds like an allegory because it is so beyond the ordinary. Even while Pete reasons, in his own mind, in a ploddingly ordinary fashion. Which might also be a sign that there is something clogged in Pete Robinson.Donald Antrim writes with assurance and panache, and just a modicum of total craziness. Okay, maybe more than just a modicum. I found myself shaking my head as I read, yet also smiling at Antrim’s hyper controlled randomness. Hard to predict, harder to pigeon-hole, this is not whatever you might have expected in a novel. Cautiously recommended.