books

Are You Ready for Sean Penn’s New Novel?

Sean Penn. Photo: Greg Doherty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Image

Sean Penn’s debut novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, has been around for a while now. Well, kind of. It wasn’t always a novel, and it wasn’t always written by Sean Penn. In 2016, the actor started promoting an audiobook he claimed had been written by a mysterious figure named Pappy Pariah, a man Penn said he met at a bar in Key West, Florida in 1979. He eventually dropped this ruse, and next week, the “darkly funny novel about Bob Honey — a modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin,” will be published under Penn’s name.

Honey is, according to the book’s description on Amazon, “sick of a world where even an orgasm isn’t real until it is turned into a tweet.” He also “sells septic tanks to Jehovah’s Witnesses and arranges pyrotechnic displays for foreign dictators,” and is a contract killer.

He gets political, too. In one scene, Honey composes a letter to the president, Mr. Landlord (could be anybody!). Per Deadline, he writes:

Many wonderful American people in pain and rage elected you. Many Russians did, too. Your position is an asterisk accepted as literally as your alternative facts. Though the office will remain real, you never were nor will be. A million women so dwarfed your penis-edency on the streets of Washington and around the world on the day of your piddly inauguration … You are not simply a president of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention. We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin … Tweet me bitch, I dare you.

The book also reportedly includes a poem about the #MeToo movement which Honey refers to as “an infantilising term of the day.”

Though it sounds a little bit like a bad acid trip, Penn’s novel has already been praised by comedian Sarah Silverman, who called it “a goddamned novel for the ages,” and a “straight-up masterwork,” and author Salman Rushdie who wrote, “I suspect that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson would love this book.

Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff comes out on March 27. Are you ready?

Tweet me bitch!

Are You Ready for Sean Penn’s New Novel?