Discouraging at Best

Foreword "...Left Behind in the Abstrusified Zone Designated as the United States of America" by Kevin Dole 2 THERE ARE NO HAPPY families in Discouraging at Best. Nor healthy families, nor sane ones. Leo Tolstoy's famous maxim about the misery of every unhappy family being unique is proven true once more, but Discouraging at Best is a book that can only be done justice by replacing the word “unhappy” with the phrase “batshit loony." Whether black or white, rich or poor, each featured clan boils with the kind of dysfunction that goes nuclear when left unchecked. The Havenots rent themselves out as “disciplinarians” to their neighbors. The Pretorious clan brawls all night until their house is carpeted with blood and broken glass. These families are not so much dissected as allowed to tear themselves apart on the page. The reader gets to see inside and it isn't pretty. One of these families lives inside the White House. The patriarch is the President of the United States. He is a dim man obsessed with s*x and imagined supernatural forces. His administration is comprised of racist crooks. Aside from an addictive substance called “aqua aqua,” it's not exactly unfamiliar. This is why Discouraging at Best is so funny. It may never firmly establish itself as a loose novel or a tight collection of long stories but this ambiguity in no way impedes its hilarity. You'll cringe at times, your mouth will hang open, but you'll laugh a lot if you can accept it on its own terms. This is a stream of conscious satire that constantly changes shape. Some segments steam forward with the intensity turned up to eleven while others float lazily around the banal before abruptly landing on the shocking. Both ways keep the pages turning and, no matter how much you think ahead as you turn them (and there is a great deal to think about) you'll rarely see what's coming next. No matter what the form, it's usually political, if often slyly so. John Edward Lawson displays a deep suspicion of power that is only natural to one who has spent much of his adult life in close approximation to his nation's capital, but not in the overblown, obnoxious, and, above all, obvious manner that readers have come to expect from works about life in these United States. Instead he takes a note from Dr. James Dobson and keeps his focus of the family, where the heart is. Dr. Lawson's prognosis? Re-read the title of this book. And where does that leave us? Re-read the title of this essay—it's a quote from inside the book. Discouraging at Best is a book I'm glad to have. It reminds me a bit too much about the world in which we live, but at least it helps me laugh about it. —Kevin Dole 2 August, 2006