Elect Mr Robinson - Softcover

Antrim, Donald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749397950 ISBN 13: 9780749397951

Publisher: Random House UK, 1998

Synopsis

In what appears to be a typical Southern California setting, there is an undercurrent of anarchy among its citizenry, shrouded by swimming pools and shrubbeery. Third grade teacher Pete Robinson senses the weirdness is worse than his own basement torture chamber. Antrim's first novel is a masterpiece of dark, bone dry humor.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Pete Robinson never meant to suggest the drawing -and-quartering of Mayor Kunkel, although he did mention that Toyotas and Subarus might make excellent substitutes for horses. But, after all, the fact that Mayor Jim Kunkel had first fired Stinger missiles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool, massacring innocent picnickers, did require some kind of response. In this lovely seaside community, Turtle Pond Park is stocked with claymore mines and most houses are fronted by moats swimming with water moccasins or pits filled with wooden spikes.

Amid all this bedlam, Pete Robinson, former third-grade teacher and amateur medievalist with a 1:32 scale model Inquisition-era interrogation chamber in his basement, has an epiphany: he should run for mayor. Here, in Donald Antrim's first novel, are the elements that have made him one of the most critically acclaimed writers of our day: the unerringly astute and skewed observations, the precise and brilliant language, and the uncanny ability to create wildly funny narrative out of the margins of our culture.

From the Inside Flap:

In his first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson For a Better World, Donald Antrim demonstrates all of the skill that critics have hailed in his subsequent work: the pitch-perfect ear, the cunning imagination, and the uncanny control of a narrative at once familiar and incandescently strange.
In Pete Robinson's seaside suburban town, things have, well, fallen into disrepair. The voters have de-funded schools, the mayor has been drawn and quartered by an angry mob of townsmen, and Turtle Pond Park is stocked with claymore mines. Pete Robinson, third grade teacher with a 1:32 scale model of an Inquisition dungeon in his basement, wants to open a new school, and in his effort to do so he stumbles upon another idea: he needs to run for mayor. Uniquely hilarious, this novel is a horrifyingly insightful tale of a world not so very different from the one in which we live.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0749397950
• ISBN 13: 9780749397951
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192