“Too Much Reality”: Martyn Wendell Jones reviews my novel

at the University Bookman:

Eve Tushnet’s self-published debut novel Amends is at full gallop out of the gate:

J. Malachi MacCool was born in Berkeley, California, in the last decade of the Cold War, to parents who deserved better. He had a dilapidated body and a face like the last days of the Raj: jowly, discredited, eager for the final defeat.[…] His favorite term of praise was “civilizational,” and he lived by the creed, “Alcoholism is what raises man above the utilitarians.” The J stood for Jaymi.

What follows this introduction to our first character, a self-destructive conservative intellectual, is 326 pages of snappy satire that is full of intelligence, wry humor, and actual—as opposed to feigned—insight into a variety of contemporary cultural peculiarities.

The book begins at a collective nadir in the lives of a number of principal characters who don’t seem destined to experience zeniths. In addition to Jaymi there is Emebet, homeless Ethiopian immigrant and mystical Christian believer who begins her narrative journey by waking up under a urinal full of dripping ice; Sharptooth, a two-years-clean former heroin addict who “identifies” as a wolf; Medea, a playwright “accused of being a lesbian because it was the only way she could get away with writing what she did;” Dylan, a rowdy 17-year-old Junior Hockey star; and Colton, a gay black man with the body of an Adonis who works for a sinister collections agency.

These six people are asked to join the cast of “Amends,” a new MTV reality show set in a communal rehab facility where cast-members come on for a month of televised treatment.

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