"America's Report Card" offers a brilliant vision of contemporary
American life that is frightening, darkly hilarious, and tinged
with satire. John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who
forge an improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world
overshadowed by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind -- a world
in which hulking government bureaucracies and vast corporations
join forces to numb the populace into apathy with various
standardization and surveillance programs. But McNally sees hope in
the daily experiences of his characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by
going about their own very particular lives, people circumvent the
official program and begin to actively claim lives of freedom and
dignity. "America's Report Card" is an arresting and humane
portrait of life taking place in the margins, outside the stunted
imagination of government and media.
As in his critically acclaimed novel "The Book of Ralph,"
McNally dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan -- a lonely,
confused, purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so
little about high school that on her final standardized test, she
writes an essay heaping scorn on the test administrators even as
she asks her faceless reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a
fairy-tale graduate student life, with just enough money and clout
to keep him in books, vodka, a threadbare apartment, and a
beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the bohemian dream starts
to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring standardized tests and
finds himself surrounded by people who are either plodding blindly
along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories. When Charlie and
Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumbleupon their own
bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from their
habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of
their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed
course.
The official version of American life today may get the broad
strokes and primary colors right, but "America's Report Card"
reveals how the government and the media overlook the corners and
shadows where our individual realities unfold all too often in
chaotic, precarious, and bewildering ways. This wholly original,
wildly entertaining novel mirrors our part in the dark but
frequently redemptive comedy that is life.
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