Monkeybicycle Front to Back - Part 2: The Advisor by Jay Wexler

Crap crap... even though I finished reading Monkeybicycle 6 over a week ago and have read two books since ("The Torturer's Wife by Thomas Glave and Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper - both fantastic), I have yet to write any followup posts in my Monkeybicycle series... so here I am, finally, with number 2.... I promise the others will not be so long in coming).

In Jay Wexler's "The Advisor," a bookish volunteer for a presidential primary campaign gets in a bit too deep with his wackadoodle candidate, who discovers the narrator's academic aptitude and soon has him researching and providing opinions on the most esoteric and archaic of philsophies.

Wexler builds character subtly, through telling details and actions. Ostensibly, candidate Tom Robertson is the unhinged party in this scenario, but our narrator reveals plenty of his own quirks, like his predilection for bonsai care and his tendecy to defend and seek validation from a candidate who proves to be an incompetent wingnut. There are shades of political commentary here as well -- Robertson, a pseudo-intellectual totally out of touch with the electorate, reminds me of the Bush-era democratic party's irrelevance. And I feel it's no coincidence that in his climactic act of nutjobbery, Robertson drops and destroys a television, symbol for all things noxious about contemporary politics.

This story was funny. I enjoyed it, but must admit that while I understood the value of having Robertson drop the television on our narrator's bonsai (the bonsai = his own irrelevance), I still wanted to see the television crush Robertson's little white kitty cat. I guess I'm a sadist like that.