Prince Fracassus, heir a fictional Republic named Urbs-Ludus, is a thinly veiled Donald Trump and this short novel parodies the US president’s rise to power. It takes you from his birth to election night. Unsurprisingly, Jacobson paints him as a hateful person without a single redeeming feature. He’s a spoiled, whining bully who abuses his power and leaves a trail of destruction in his wake.
The most interesting passages are the ones dealing with his childhood and various failed attempts to educate him:
“Words! Until now he had whimpered, exclaimed, ejaculated, and whatever he had wanted had come to him on a golden platter amid praise and plaudits. So why, he wondered – or would have wondered had he possessed the words to wonder with – the necessity for change? The enormity of the shock, for any child, of having to go from pointing to naming cannot be exaggerated. But for Fracassus, for whom to wish was to be given, it was as catastrophic as birth. To have to find a word to supply a need is to admit the difference between the world and you. Fracassus knew of no such difference. The world had been his, to eat, to tear, to kick. He hadn’t had to name it. The world was him. Fracassus.”
Inevitably, Fracassus finds his outlet in Twitter: “...Twitter didn’t entail any of the tedious conversational niceties he feared. Twitter was an assertion of the tweeter’s will, full stop. It imposed no obligation to listen or respond.”
While Jacobson makes some good points, the book ultimately fails because its subject is already way beyond satire. There’s nothing you can say or do about Trump that makes him any less dangerous or any easier to comprehend. Also, this could have been a funny book but somehow isn’t. Maybe the very real menace is just too close and too raw to work as comedy. Let’s hope that we all last long enough to be able to look back on these times and laugh.
No comments:
Post a Comment