The New New Journalism

That this anonymous novel’s price is that of the vexed year it covers is one of the many small details lovingly girding the body of this metafictional text. Another is the name of the purported author, a pseudonym for a small-press writer whose impressive work has been seriously underappreciated, even while maintaining a those-in-the-know impressiveness for those, well, in the know.

In fact, it was because an ABR editor approached me to review a work by this specific author under their real name that caused me to agree to write this review. Only when Tinyman for President arrived in the mail did I discover the nom de guerre; after corresponding with the editor, I was told the author would prefer I review the work “as a novel by ‘Q. Synopsis’ rather than mentioning that ‘Synopsis’ is one of his pseudonyms” (though he added, “if Davis feels comfortable doing it this way”). Since I’ve long ago given up any sense of comfort, I agreed, although the preceding sentence suggests this is not the first Kierkegaardian identity our intrepid author has deployed.

That I started writing this several days before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a mere week and change after the insurrection at the Capitol that provides a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction for Tinyman, it’s also true that the book manages to carry more than enough insightful surprises. These hold water during a period where everything about the United States is leaky. Or maybe air filled, as the Tinyman cover shows an untethered balloon with American flag design (foreground) about to be popped, optical illusion style, on the tip of the Capitol dome (background). There’s no middle ground anywhere.

Q’s frame — diametrically opposed to the QAnon cult and its role-paying-game paranoia — is one part New Journalism (see the back cover comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson) and three parts questioning of a “what the actual f*&% is going on?” mode. Put those in a blender with a bit of barely credible comic-book backstory, and you have a satire not for the ages but for this age. This now. This muddle. Let me explain.

In the novel, Tinyman is the most pathetic type of self-involved superhuman, in a world that has more than its fair share:

Not a maniac, but endowed with superpowers with which a true maniac could cause severe mayhem…Tinyman was not tiny. In socks and sandals, he stood about 5’8 3/4”, 98 pounds. Though he was obliged to fight crime, he had a nonconfrontational disposition and social anxiety, insecurity, hypersomnia, and his supersenses were prone to hallucinations…. Also, unlike his many glamorous supercolleagues, his entertainment properties were slim, and amounted to a three-issue comic book run, long out of print.

Q. runs with the joke, as Tinyman takes on various public- and self-deprecating aspects that collect against the dominant narrative of omnipresent superhero stories. In a world without The Tick, The Boys, etc., this might be enough of an animating spark, but it’s precisely the sense of imminent deflation (cue soon-to-be-popped cover balloon) that make Tinyman work so strangely compelling.

It’s not the plot, which is deliberately simple — Tinyman and his team try to get him both elected and not elected as President, and he persists nonetheless; there’s a Watchmen (1987) like chill over the proceedings, as heroes are forbidden from using their powers, and the ambiguous toggle of Tinyman’s un/electability proves an acerbic commentary that exists both narratively and as a seeming act of meta-narrative omniscience.

In any event, Tinyman doesn’t want to be President (or does he?), and the while the enterprise benefits from the Bartelby-like ambiguities of the titular here, the novel’s crypto-protagonist is his hapless campaign manager Johnny Werd, who works for Tinyman precisely because Werd doesn’t really believe Tinyman can win (and despite their mutual disdain for Trump...