Actor Sean Penn’s debut novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff – an expanded version of a 2016 audiobook he wrote under the pen name of “sociopath” Pappy Pariah and narrated – will be published in April, featuring references to Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement.The book details the story of Bob Honey, a “man of many trades – sewage specialist, purveyor of pyrotechnics, contract killer for a mysterious government agency that pays in small bills”. Pursued by an investigative journalist, Honey decides to take action wrest back control of his life from the branch of US intelligence that covertly employs him.
In one new scene, Honey writes a letter to the US president, named Mr Landlord. “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.”
Penn is an outspoken critic of Trump, whom he called “an enemy of mankind” in an opinion piece for Time magazine in January, and of the Republican party.
Other allusions to contemporary politics in the novel include a reference to a “yellow lives matter” march for Aryan people at a Republican National Convention; Mr Landlord’s Democratic opposite number in the US election campaign, who is referred to as “the absolutely worst possible candidate to represent the party”; and a meeting with a drug lord who has just escaped prison, reminiscent of Penn’s infamous 2015 interview with El Chapo, then one of the world’s most wanted men.
The book also features a poem in which Honey calls the #MeToo movement “an infantilising term of the day”. “Is this a toddlers’ crusade? Reducing rape, slut-shaming and suffrage to reckless child’s play? A platform for accusation impunity? Due process has lost its sheen?” the poem reads.
Penn, who claimed he originally met Pariah at a writers’ conference in Florida in 1979 when promoting the audiobook of the original Bob Honey story, did not reveal he was the author until months later, when he said he wanted to expand on it and publish it as a novel.
“It was soon after I finished narrating the short audio of Bob Honey that I began to feel I had only scratched the surface of this story I wanted to tell,” he said when the book was announced. “Expanding that original idea into a fully realised novel has been an exciting challenge.”
The novel has been praised ahead of its release by comedian Sarah Silverman and Salman Rushdie, who wrote: “It seems wrong to say that so dystopian a novel is great fun to read, but it’s true. I suspect that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S Thompson would love this book.”