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America's Report Card
Reviewed by Evan Gillespie
 In the future, expect more novels about the summer of 2004. Like it or not, those few months leading up to the presidential election were a turning point for our country (and for the entire world, for that matter), and it makes sense that writers would be drawn to an examination of America at that critical time. John McNally’s America’s Report Card is not the first novel set in the tumultuous pre-election months — and it certainly won’t be the last. It is an example of the contemporary political fable: a semi-fantasy that, at first glance, seems a tad outlandish but which, upon closer inspection, is probably not all that far removed from reality.
Reality might, in fact, be even more outlandish than the fantasy, if we were privy to all that’s going on behind our country’s political scenes. McNally’s vision of the 2004-and-beyond American landscape sets up a little internal culture war of its own; the novel is sad and funny, hopeful and cynical, jaded and naive. Just like America.
The title of America’s Report Card derives from a standardized test that, in the America of the novel, is administered to public school students every year in order to gauge their academic progress. The test is “a massive, ongoing project that costs millions, if not billions, of dollars. What’s at stake is the nation’s future.” The test administrators are deadly serious men in black suits who arrive at schools in white vans, looking like nothing but dangerous government agents. Once the students have completed them, the tests are transported to secret evaluation centers around the country, where they are scored and the results filed for possible future reference.
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