Sean Penn's novel will show you the light
How one celebrity's hubris brought us 'The Room' of literature
Mere seconds into my library copy of Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff I am greeted by my first red flag—someone has dog-eared their place on the very first page, and then never unmarked it. It seems Penn’s debut novel inspires levels of commitment even more tenuous than those of the man’s own marriages.
Even more promising were the endorsements on the dust jacket. Salman Rushdie, the most relevant opinion referenced, manages to not say anything directly about his feelings about the book, but does seem to dog-whistle that the whole thing’s a blatant rip on Pynchon. Art Linson confusingly attests that the book made him hug his dog. Bill Maher is cited at all. My favourite endorsement is that of Sarah Silverman, who begins her review:
Before I started reading, I glanced over the table of contents. The first chapter is called ‘Seeking Homeostasis in Inherent Hypocrisy.’ I rolled my eyes and said aloud to no one, ‘fuuuck you.’
Generally-speaking, if the endorsements on a novel are mostly a hodge-podge of random B-list Hollywood celebrities, almost none of whom are writers of fiction, it’s usually a bad sign.
I had been eagerly anticipating the chance to read Penn’s book and it did not disappoint in the slightest, by which I mean it is basically completely unreadable. Penn’s prose style is perhaps the single worst I have ever read; his writing is obtuse, often redundant, always circuitous, and he has this terrible habit of using constant alliteration. I imagine Penn believes this makes him sound like James Joyce, but the reality is much closer to approximating Amanda McKittrick Ros. Opening to just about any page in Penn’s novel, one is treated to a deluge of pain, like opening the Hellraiser puzzle box:
Bob passes a feature film fourplex and formerly divine deco drive-in. He realizes that not only in road-roaming reality has romance been relinquished to ruins, but the cinemas themselves have been caged and quartered into quixotic concrete calamities of corporatized culture capitulation.
Oh, sniff succulent sausage, Sean, you simpering sophomoric simpleton; this pretentious prosaic posturing is particularly unimpressive. Any halfwit hack can haphazard hollow hymnals, assembled of asinine alliteration to approximate actual authorial aptitude. You can’t even construct coherent clauses with competent consonance while keeping up your clowning capering, caroming like a careless cretin; could you contemplate a cavalcade of cromulent critics cajoling you instead of caustically cawing at your crimes against culture? And yet Penn has, through every fault of his own, provided us with something truly special: a book so bad that it is deserving of The-Room-like cultish devotion. This book is fucking hilarious.
It is transparently obvious what Penn was setting out to do. He was trying to write, in spite of the book’s meagre length, one of The Big Ones—specifically that cadre of books that literary 4Channers call “The Meme Trilogy”: Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. This is the writing of an embarrassingly shallow-headed individual who believes that alliteration makes James Joyce, funny names makes Thomas Pynchon, and footnotes makes Dave Wallace. Indeed, this book has all three, and none of it serves any purpose. There are characters with names like Helen Mayo¹ and Spurley Cultier,² and they all³ aimlessly⁴ amble in their adventures,⁵ seeking some sort of sober statement† in a static shibboleth.‡ It’s clear that Penn wrote the whole thing with a checklist by his side, setting out like an adolescent boy might by believing that the secret to writing the Great American Novel is to simply rip off every previous attempt (…and one Irish one).
Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff is a novel about a middle-aged man named Sean Penn Bob Honey (who just does stuff) who assassinates “old people, the infirm, and others who drain this consumption-driven society of its resources,” while having a romance with a barely post-pubescent girl, and mourning the divorce of his fat idiot ex-wife who has had plastic surgery done (unrelated note: Sean Penn was recently-divorced at the time of this book’s publishing). There’s almost too much to say about the book’s actual content. Whether it’s hearing about Sean Penn’s middle-aged author-insert constantly fucking a teenager (Penn rails against millennials by suggesting that addiction to social media would lead to the girl having an immediate orgasm), Penn’s constant and groan-inducing post-Adbusters screeds about advertising (“BRANDING IS BEING”), Penn’s incredibly cringey rants about Trump and Clinton (after referring to Trump as the “penis-edent” and accusing him of attempting to “posthumously assassinate the Founding Fathers,” and in spite of blaming the Russians for the election one page earlier, Penn goes on to say: “Was she the worst possible candidate or are you the most arrogant, ill, and unqualified electorate in the history of the Western world?” [I’ll take “she was the worst possible candidate,” Penn], snobbishly suggesting that the American riffraff are “unqualified” for democracy), Penn’s unrepentant liberalism (Penn on Obama: “hard in this world to be an elegant man, Bob thought, but when his game’s on, that Chi-Town-Kenyan-Kansan can-can-can”), Penn’s delusional messiah complex (“in opinions of morality, religion, politics, and science would he increasingly consider the possibility… EVERYBODY… ELSE… IS… WRONG”), Penn’s (a wife-beater) contempt for #MeToo (“and what’s with this ‘Me Too’? / This infantilizing term of the day… / Is this a toddlers’ crusade? / Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play? / A platform for accusation impunity? / Due process has lost its sheen?”), or Penn’s bizarre racist digressions (referring to a young Black woman as a “juvie Jemima;” referring repeatedly to Indigenous New Guineans as “grass-skirted cadres of cannibals;” Bob’s trip to an Indian Reservation whereupon he is “assaulted by animism;” or simply the line “pride, he believed, a pleasure better suited to Orientals”); each would merit a lengthy response all on their own, but can ultimately be summed up in four words: Fuck Off, Sean Penn.
Perhaps it’s unfair to make such an intentional fallacy as to assume Bob Honey represents Sean Penn, simply because they seem to share the same age, interests, and views. Bob Honey is most certainly NOT Sean Penn. I shouldn’t suggest that. What would give one the idea that Penn would write his own thoughts under some kind of self stand-in? Aside from that he initially published this novel under the name “Pappy Pariah” and denied that it was him. Yes—aside from that, from the fact that Honey himself is implied to be the narrator on page 1, the fact that Honey looks into his reflection in a cup of coffee and winds up seeing “Pappy Pariah” reflected back at him, and of course Penn’s comments on Colbert where he unequivocally suggests several times that Bob Honey is Sean Penn, including suggesting that this book started out as an attempt at a memoir, yes beyond all that I don’t know how one would arrive at the conclusion that Honey is a stand-in for Penn.
Sean Penn’s Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff is a symphony of profound self-regard and equal incompetence. Following its release, Penn staunchly announced his intention to continue writing as his single-minded central career goal, and as this book was a best-seller, and even generated a sequel (Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn), perhaps we can look forward to even more of this garbage in the near-future, with such titles one can imagine as Bob Honey Who Do A Little More, Bob Honey Who Don’t Do Fuck All, and Bob Honey Endorses Sean Penn For President 2028 (also known as Bob Honey’s Dreams Of His Father’s). Perhaps Penn will continue to wow us with his testaments to the fact that 2016 made every liberal in the nation short-circuit completely and go fucking cuckoo bananas (at least, that is to say, more than Sean Penn already was). This book was so exciting because it’s something we so rarely get to see at this level. Terrible, incompetent books are published every day, but few of them are this incompetent, and fewer still of those have pretensions of capital-L Literary glory, and fewer still at this scale. This is the kind of spectacular failure that could have only come along as the vanity project of a delusional Hollywood egotist given undeserved access via his personal influence to a major publisher as a vehicle for his narcissism: a clearly editor-less trough of pure, self-indulgent dogshit. And it is a true gem.
[This post was lazily re-written out of a book review first published by me in 2018]