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.
The novel’s narrative follows the parallel tracks of two characters: Jainey O’Sullivan, a teenage girl in Chicago who just took her final America’s Report Card test, on which she wrote a heartfelt, if off-topic, essay; and Charlie Wolf a recent recipient of a Masters degree in film studies who, unemployed and adrift, finds himself working for the corporation responsible for scoring the tests in Iowa City. Both Jainey and Charlie are outsiders who are going with the humdrum flow of 21st-century American life; neither of them is destined to amount to much, but through the course of the novel’s first section they gradually are drawn together toward a shocking climax.
McNally takes his time as he lets us get to know these two characters. Jainey is the rebellious, underachieving daughter of two massive underachievers. Her father is in prison, and her mother mostly just hangs out downstairs and yells a lot. Jainey’s older brother, Ned, is creepily indistinct; he lives in the unfinished attic, listening to bad heavy metal, reading the Bible and developing warped theological epiphanies. Jainey, reeling from the death of a beloved teacher, wanders around Chicago, fooling around with an ex-boyfriend and becoming convinced that someone from the government is out to get her.
Charlie, too, is on a weird track to loserdom. His job at National Testing Center is bizarre at best, and his coworkers are a collection of misfits and spooky wackos. His beautiful Russian girlfriend, his only claim on happiness, is acting kind of strange, and Charlie feels his future slipping away. Just as everything starts to fall apart for him, Charlie is asked to score an exam with a heartfelt, if off-topic, essay written by a teenage girl who is convinced that someone is out to get her. Charlie, in an admirable triumph over inertia, decides to do whatever he has to do in order to save this poor, sad girl.
McNally’s take on the political turmoil in America’s 2004 is bleak, nearly apocalyptic. America’s Report Card is just one tentacle of a government that’s moving in a million sinister directions under the surface, and in these violent, mean-spirited times it’s almost impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys. There may not be, in fact, any good guys at all. McNally’s characters — those who are not insane, government operatives or conspiracy theorists — move about in studious oblivion until they become aware of the massive, globe-altering gears turning beneath their feet, gears that will gleefully crush them if they make a wrong move. McNally, though, handles this ominous material with a light touch. His story is an homage to Chekhov, and McNally infuses the novel with the Russian writer’s flair for absurdity and humor in the service of cultural commentary.
McNally’s first novel, The Book of Ralph, is a tribute to youth and innocence, a book so steeped in a specific time and place that its setting and characters are palpable. America’s Report Card is a more diffuse book, less concerned with details. As such, it fills its role as a novel of maturation and disillusionment—a painful but necessary step toward, one hopes, enlightenment and triumph
America's Report Card
By John McNally
Free Press 2006
Originally published at WhatzUp.com. Reproduced here with permission.
