Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn—and you won’t care—in Sean Penn’s second novel
Aux Features Book Review
Heaven help us, Hell spare us, Hollywood save us, Sean Penn has penned another novel, a sequel to last year’s Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. The actor’s flimsy fiction debut told the tale of the titular septic tank salesman who moonlights as an elderly death panel contract killer. Penn overstuffed that book’s 170 pages with thinly veiled commentaries on the war on terror, the federal government’s non-response to Hurricane Katrina, and a certain president—a “violently immature seventy-year-old boy-man with money and French vanilla cotton candy hair” nicknamed the Landlord. There were also alliterations aplenty, gratuitous Wallacian footnotes, and a particularly appalling epilogue in verse that refers to the #MeToo movement as “this infantilizing term of the day… this toddlers’ crusade.”
For any literary-disaster schadenfreuders who might have missed it, critics were quick to dish out more filthy pans than a rush-hour Waffle House. One article deemed Bob Honey the “worst novel in human history”; another called it “repellent and stupid on so many levels.” Others (read: Penn’s pals) compared the actor’s prose to Kerouac, Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, and other talented men who sometimes slap-dashed together dumb, if not arguably dumber, books. Bob Honey isn’t the worst novel ever written—it’s not even the worst novel written by a Hollywood star—but it is, to quote the great Jeff Spicoli, bogus. Last year the author responded to his critics on Conan in true Pennsian fashion: “I’m 57, my pool’s heated—you can say anything you like.” So let me offer this: I’m 39, my backyard’s way too small to fit a pool, and Bob Honey Sings Jimmy Crack Corn is a project that feels as unnecessary as the further adventures of Sam Dawson.
Done with murdering innocent seniors, Honey—and Penn—doubles down on his rivalry with the man he calls that “flim-flamming finger-fucker,” the Landlord. He postmarks a threatening letter promising a swift and violent demise, signing off with a sassy “Tweet me, bitch. I dare you.” It’s a line that also appears in the first Bob Honey, a sign that Penn doesn’t have much of anything new to do or say that he didn’t explore before. Once again, there’s an abundance of affected, adolescent alliterations mined from the most marginal mysterium of his moth-eaten Merriam-Webster’s, like:
- “It can be a pickle to sort a predisposition from a premonition, a fickle folly from a formidable phrase, or a pursuer from the pursued.”
- “The pencil piñata of a person bleeds the confetti of plagiarized pop paeans.”
- “Sycophants of social media suck the conventional cock of censors’ sensibilities volunteering complicity in common thought—they’re bought!”
As in the previous novel, Phil Ochs lyrics trickle in, sublime, incongruous raindrops shoehorned into a murky narrative. There are additional weak attempts at #MeToo takedowns. More sadism, more drugs, more Pynchon-light conspiracy theories, more puerile descriptions of female anatomy, more racism masquerading as bold humor. Penn piles on yet two more references to Ennio Morricone’s “Gabriel’s Oboe,” one of the great classical compositions of the late 20th century. Is it a personal favorite? The tinny sound that throbs between his celluloid ears? Who knows? Who cares! By book’s end, the Landlord is dead, Bob is president, and you will have a headache.
Roll the credits, which, after the traditional shout-outs of thanks and praise, smear the Bob Honey haters. “To the critics of Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, the few who understood it, and the many who never read it,” Penn writes in the acknowledgments. “Without you, I may have shelved my typewriter for good.” If that’s the case, I take it all back. For the love of literature, read this book, or else Penn might write another.
36 Comments
Take that, you stupid corn.
Is he going to do a book tour with readings? Because that would be very funny.
I imagine most would end with him wading into the “crowd” to fight somebody.
If not the crowd jumping on stage to fight Penn.
True. Probably something along these lines…
Those sentences make me unreasonably angry.
That’s not unreasonable anger you’re experiencing, it is righteous anger. It’s not the sentences themselves, but the fact that they’re in a published book, when much, much, much better books will only ever live on some poor schmuck’s desktop just because she isn’t a famous asshole.
Fair!
“Typewriter”???
That’s what he calls the secretary who has to transcribe whatever random crap he rambles into his iphone’s voice memos.
Oh, I am sure he uses an actual typewriter, some vintage model that he’s inordinately pleased with. He probably deliberately got one with a couple of shoddy keys, for extra authenticity, and he always pours himself a scotch into a Civil War era tin-cup before he starts writing. That is, after he’s extensively jerked off over the whole set-up.
So incredibly cringey. The second-hand embarrassment is strong.
As someone who always hated Kerouac and Thompson it’s been fun seeing people reassess them as gobbledegook-spewing assholes.
Yes! Didn’t Kerouac refuse to revise anything? Or was it just On the Road? Like, his first draft was so pure and perfect. What an ass. Everyone knows the magic happens in revision. God, he was awful.
Just because people agree with you doesn’t make you right.
Seriously, two authors that need a whole lot less credibility. However, the book Nobody’s Wife by Joan Haverty Kerouac is amazing and really breaks the veneer of cool around Jack and paints him as an arrogant douchebag drunk that is very controlling of women.
breaks the veneer of cool around Jack and paints him as an arrogant douchebag drunk Well now. It can be two things – Kerouac could be an arrogant douchebag drunk AND a good writer.I mean, I don’t think he was that good a writer. But if he was, he could also have been an arrogant douchebag drunk.
You woulda loved Bukowski.
I tried reading ‘On the Road’. It was like being repeatedly smacked in the face with the writer’s semi.
I’ll be honest, I stopped reading when seeing 170 pages described as “overstuffed.” Penn must REALLY have nothing to say.
As a writer, these vanity books irritate the piss out of me. It’s not so much that Sean Penn decided he could fart out a book. It’s that a major publishing company thought it would be a good idea to enable this stream of consciousness twaddle. There are plenty of good writers out there – either self-published or with small presses – that would be much more deserving of this and the push a big company would give them. (Yes, I understand that the money a company earns from celebrity authors can go to subsidize other writers. However, it doesn’t look like this made enough money to justify a sequel. The publisher changed from a Simon & Shuster imprint to Rare Bird Books.)And then AV Club enables this by reviewing it. Look, it’s fun to dunk on crap. I like reading the F reviews and World of Flops as much as anyone. But there are only so many reviews AV Club is going to put out in a year and you just used one on this garbage. Maybe try some more indy press stuff? Small Press authors literally have to beg random book bloggers to review their work. They’d appreciate it far more than Penn.
I’m with you. I would have rather had a once sentance review that said “Penn is irrelevant and this book is shite” followed up by a review of something unknown and noteworthy.
This site actually had an interesting assessment of the “moonlighting-actor” dilemma, in the form of a David Duchovny album review:
https://www.avclub.com/we-all-know-why-this-review-of-david-duchovny-s-album-e-1822645430
As a writer, these vanity books irritate the piss out of me. At least this one will be easy to ignore. At least compared to those children’s books “by” Madonna of years back. Those things were abysmally written (maybe it was her after all) and they all told special lessons – read them all, you’ll learn all the lessons! – and they were backed by a multi million dollar publicity push for Madonna the Children’s Book Writer.And seriously for years you could not escape them, in bookstores and libraries. Fortunately, nowadays you mostly see them – heh- in library bookstores….
I’m not sure how the AV Club enabled it, since no one in their right mind would ever buy it after reading this article. In fact, maybe some people that would have bought it, won’t now.
Thank you. People are always I WOULDNT KNOW ABOUT THIS ASSHOLE UNLESS I READ IT ON AVCLUB. Well. Yeah. That’s the point. Avoid the asshole,
Yeah. This entertainment blog should focus more on people no one knows about and the books they write. I get it. But this isn’t what the AVClub is for. They hardly review books anymore.
ikr, who on earth would ever come here to read about new authors and their excellent new books? much better to focus on a total literary nobody famous for something else. makes so much sense! your shaming people for wanting this is righteous! BEHOLD! your virtue signaling has elevated your social status like virtue signaling always does among all who bear witness!!!!! have a cookie, sport.
What?
“Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?”
“I think so, Brain. But if Bob Honey sings Jimmy Cracked Corn And No One Cares, then why does he keep doing it?”
Sounds like he’s trying to be a more pretensions version of Tom Robbins, if that’s at all possible.
I wouldn’t have thought it possible to be more pretentious than Tom Robbins, no. But the world is a wondrous place.
Tom Robbins is hellishly pretentious, but at least occasionally fun to read. Penn seems to have bypassed that last part.
I look forward to the same reviewer, in 2 or 3 years time, writing an article on whether we (not he) has been too hard on Sean Penn and how these books could be the greatest literature written in the 21st century. After all, that’s how these “news cycles” seem to go these days.
Don’t hold your breath.
HE WROTE A SEQUEL!!!!? *faints*