The fresh hell described by Robert Olen Butler’s new novel is crammed with random celebrities.
It is plagued by modern problems like four-hour erections and crashing hard drives. Patrolled by Satan’s minions (among them, two of the Bee Gees) dressed in powder-blue jumpsuits, it’s filled with bookstores that optimistically open with new owners at every sunrise — only to go out of business by the end of each day. If the books they can’t sell in hell are maddeningly uneven, ever bouncing between passable wit and sophomoric giggles, Butler’s slapdash Hell deserves shelf space there.
Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, treats his newest novelistic conceit as an occasion to toss every possible ingredient into a fanciful hellscape and then let these elements run wild. Confident that some of his denizens of hell are well chosen (the inventor of the restroom hand dryer is there, as are book critics who read too fast and miss a lot), Butler piles on more and more. He shows no sign of knowing when to stop.
Did this book need J. Edgar Hoover in lipstick? It did not. Hemingway in a white poplin dress? No again. Ike Turner forced to listen to Richard Nixon’s version of Proud Mary? Now that’s a little better. And it’s just Satanic enough to be worth a laugh and to keep readers trudging through the often barren landscape of Butler’s imaginary underworld.
The main character in Hell is Hatcher McCord, who was a famous network anchorman while he was alive. After death Hatcher still retains a certain authority and cachet. Even though hell’s television sometimes features nonstop reruns of The O’Reilly Factor, Hatcher has been recruited to do a series of interviews with famous, damned luminaries, asking each one how he or she wound up in hell.
One prospective interviewee is Satan himself, who seems to like Hatcher enough to mock him and at one point even demands a hug. “I’ve got father issues,” Satan tells Hatcher, continuing, “Oh boo hoo.”
On this book’s scale of witticisms, that counts as one of Butler’s better touches.
Hatcher, who was married three times on earth, is now mired in a weirdly dysfunctional union with Anne Boleyn, the beheaded ex-wife of Henry VIII. In hell Anne wears jeans and a T-shirt with a changing message (“Hell is losing your head,” it says at one point) and is able to do anything she likes with her severed head. She can put it on a bookshelf or, in one of the novel’s more painfully bawdy scenes, attach it to Hatcher and have it threaten to bite. However hard or bizarrely they try, Hatcher and Anne can’t make a satisfying sexual connection and continue to be stuck together yet hellishly disappointed.
Somehow, in the course of Butler’s fever dream of a plot, Hell also includes Dante’s Beatrice, now a film noir dame contending with Humphrey Bogart, who pines for Lauren Bacall; a chorus of singing cockroaches enamored of the phrase “poopy butt”; Michael Jackson, doing a woefully inadequate job of singing Wagner and consigned to “Everland, the densely populated molester estate on the edge of the city”; Bobby Fischer, playing chess with a computer from Hadassah; Jerry Seinfeld, whose jokes all bomb; and Celine Dion, who just won’t quit singing that damn Titanic song.
There is also an Automat at which Hatcher finds Judas Iscariot with his 30 pieces of silver (in hell they’re nickels) and a cheap motel room in which Bill Clinton waits for some young woman, any young woman, to arrive. Also wandering around: Martin Scorsese, madly frustrated because he doesn’t have a camera, and this is “so clearly his kind of town.” Both former US presidents Bush also put in cameo appearances, as does Dick Cheney, who has a chance to compare notes with Beelzebub, Satan’s henchman. Their shared question: How stupid is your boss? “I’ve spent an awful long time already down a drill hole full of boiling oil,” Cheney replies succinctly.
On and on it goes, ever aimlessly. And by the time Hell is over, there’s only one thing that Butler has really made clear. It’s that he likes this world, with its infinite possibilities and surprises around ever corner. He even likes the grisly dismemberings and reconstitutions whereby hell’s denizens can be torn apart over and over again, a cycle that this book plays for mindless laughs.
Hatcher McCord winds up liking hell too. For one thing, almost everyone this newsman ever knew in both his private and professional lives has wound up in the same place, so going to hell must be some kind of occupational hazard. For another, it’s cozy. And hell turns out to be a great equalizer. Hitler and his great admirer Leni Riefenstahl (“He had me at ‘Fellow Germans,’” she recalls) are on the same footing with celebrity bloggers.
As for those bloggers, here’s what hell has in store for them: They are eternally saddled with the same cellulite and heavy bling that they used to mock. Now and then Butler’s hell is a nice place to visit after all.
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