By Patrick Anderson,
whose e-mail address is mondaythrillers@aol.com
Monday, September 3, 2007

OUR AMERICAN KING

By David Lozell Martin

Simon & Schuster. 304 pp. $25

David Lozell Martin's strange, engrossing and quite radical novel is set in a future America that has been reduced to anarchy. The disaster that overtook the country, and apparently all the world, is called "the calamity" and does not seem to have been nuclear. There are hints that a disruption of the energy supply led to economic breakdown, social collapse and starvation. Bands of hungry people began looting and killing in the wealthy suburbs. Soon the very rich -- the top one-tenth of 1 percent -- bought up most of the nation's food, medicine, livestock and weapons, and retreated to Army bases, ranches in the Southwest, islands off the East Coast and other fortresses where they were protected by private armies while tens of millions starved to death. This novel is very much about the class warfare that our leaders tell us we must avoid, even in political debate. Heads roll in abundance here.

Martin lives in the Washington area, and much of his tale is set hereabouts. When we first meet John and Mary, a married couple of 40 or so, they are starving and literally up a tree near their Northern Virginia home. A people-eating pig is below, waiting for them to fall. They survive the pig, but most of their neighbors are dead. Many have been killed by gangs of young thugs armed with machetes. John, a professor of English, is obsessed with the idea of an American king who will put things right. The couple make the dangerous walk into the District, where they find the bodies of politicians who had failed the people hanging from the White House fence. Inside, a leader has emerged, a handsome and charismatic man who calls himself Tazza. John becomes his friend and political adviser. Mary becomes the mother of his son.

At John's urging, Tazza declares himself king. The people love him because his followers have found hidden supplies of food. That first summer, Tazza emerges as a kind of hippie prince. "All you need is love," he tells his followers. Poetry is read at night, marijuana and psychedelic drugs appear, tie-dyed shirts make a comeback, and free love is widespread. There is no visible irony in all this. Sex, drugs and poetry seem to be Martin's vision of the perfect state. (Well, okay, maybe they would be.) It cannot be coincidental that the novel appears on the 40th anniversary of San Francisco's Summer of Love.

Alas, paradise is lost when the Army sets out to retake Washington. They first drop leaflets warning there will be no dissent, no lawyers, no bail, and immediate execution for resistance. Tazza and his followers retreat to the National Arboretum, where they make their stand. In time, the government troops arrive, led by killing machines called RATS (Rumsfeld Antipersonnel Trucks). Thanks to Tazza's charisma, the government's soldiers, or at least some of them, refuse to shoot his hippie band. In one of the book's funnier episodes, the government hires bloodthirsty mercenaries from . . . Canada! The Canadian soldiers are described as pale and beer-bellied, but eager to slaughter the long-hated Americans -- they march into battle to the music of Celine Dion!

Tazza leads his army west. All is not well in the heartland. "Whenever they traveled more than a few days' journey from D.C., they found open graves and people hanging lynched from trees and bodies lying facedown with steaks cut from their buttocks." Years of warfare have transformed Tazza from a hippie prince into Genghis Khan. He tells city after city, "Surrender or die." He and his men slaughter thousands in fortified cities in the Southwest, where the rich have golfed while the rest of America starved. The novel extends over some 30 years, and Martin shows us what happens to Tazza and to America as a new nation emerges. Of the many post-disaster novels, my favorite is Russell Hoban's great "Riddley Walker," and I have fond memories of John Wyndham's "Day of the Triffids." The most celebrated recent addition to the genre is Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," which is more or less the opposite of "Our American King." McCarthy's relentlessly grim novel focuses on just a father and son moving through a ruined landscape. By contrast, "Our American King" is a circus, complete with hippies, groupies, brutal Canadians, cannibalism, the decapitation of countless plutocrats and near the end, reflections on the proper relationship between people and government. Unless you object to its politics, it's a blast.