 First edition cover | |
| Author | Donald Antrim |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Viking Adult |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) |
| Pages | 192 pp (first edition, hc) |
| ISBN | 978-0-670-85139-3 |
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World is a 1993 novel by American author Donald Antrim. It is Antrim's first published novel. The novel depicts the grisly, and occasionally surreal misadventures of a downsized schoolteacher, Pete Robinson, in a vaguely post-apocalyptic America. [1] [2] [3]
As the novel opens, Pete Robinson is supervising the drawing and quartering of the town's mayor by four automobiles. We learn that Pete Robinson is an expert in the history of torture, with special emphasis on the Inquisition, and that he was formerly an elementary schoolteacher before the local school system was entirely defunded. Pete's ambition to run for mayor after resurrecting the local educational system under his own administration—and the thwarting of this ambition—are major elements of the novel's plot. Other elements of the plot include Pete's thwarted attempts to bury pieces of the former Mayor's body in Egyptological rituals, and his wife Meredith's growing detachment as she becomes more involved in ichthyomorphic trances in which she transforms herself into a coelacanth, or ancient fish. [4]
The novel has no chapter breaks, and has been called a "picaresque of comic surrealism." However Jeffrey Eugenides writes:
"'Dystopic' describes neither the madness nor the method here. The heart of Antrim's enterprise, the thing that allows him to make credible his wild surmises, is his keen insight into social and marital relations and his masterful linguistic skills. Antrim sketches his characters—Rotarians, tennis buffs, suburban moms, wayward teens—with indelible lines. They speak a perfectly rendered American argot. They go about their lives doing all the things comfortably domesticized Americans do. They attend potluck suppers, ogle one another's spouses, chauffeur children to appointments, borrow plumber's snakes, all in pursuit of happiness in a place where happiness can no longer exist." [4]
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of a feature film, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
The Virgin Suicides is the debut novel by American author Jeffrey Eugenides, published in 1993. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five doomed sisters, the Lisbon girls. The novel is written in first person plural from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths. The novel's first chapter appeared in The Paris Review in 1990, and won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. The novel was adapted into a 1999 movie by director Sofia Coppola, starring Kirsten Dunst.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1993.
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John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr. was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended some traditional constraints of narrative fiction.
Donald Antrim is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999, The New Yorker named him as among the 20 best writers under the age of 40. In 2013, he was named a MacArthur Fellow.
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