‘Cloaked in crazy’: Sean Penn’s debut novel ripped apart by critics

'It’s physically impossible to dunk on a novel that is already dunking on itself so hard'

Sean Penn's debut novel has become the first unintentional comedy gem of the year, according to critics.

Titled Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, the book follows a hitman working for an off-the-books branch of US intelligence that targets, as its publicity describes, "the elderly, the infirm, and others who drain this consumption-driven society of its resources".

It's also been noted that the novel contains a barely concealed caricature of Donald Trump. "You are not simply a president in need of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention," Bob exclaims. "We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin.”

It also manages to squeeze in an epilogue that calls the #MeToo movement "a toddler's crusade".

The New York Times' Jeff Giles seemed perplexed by its very existence, labelling it "a riddle wrapped in an enigma and cloaked in crazy". He noted its bizarre prose, picking out a particular sentence which reads: "There is pride to be had where the prejudicial is practiced with precision in the trenchant triage of tactile terminations.”

To him, it represents a kind of literary Stockholm Syndrome: "you admire the novel just because you’re surviving it."

The Guardian's Sian Cain, comparing Penn's work to Morrissey's disastrous List of the Lost, declared Bob Honey "repellent on one level, but stupid on so many others".

"Penn doesn’t just swing and miss with his ambitious vocabulary; he swings and cracks a hole in reality as we know it, leaving us all unsure of the concept of a good sentence, how a novel should be structured and generally what makes sense any more," she writes.

"It’s physically impossible to dunk on a novel that is already dunking on itself so hard," Claire Fallon of The Huffington Post wrote. "Bob Honey is an exercise in ass-showing, a 160-page self-own."

She also notes the book's "gleeful racism and misogyny that qualifies Penn's work as 'darkly comic", including a New Guinean contractor patrol on Baghdad that he refers to as a "grass-skirted cadre of cannibals".

Penn originally released Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff as a short audiobook in 2016, insisting that he was not responsible, but that it was the work of a man he'd met in Florida named Pappy Pariah.

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