LunaticsA Novel

A comic novel told from the perspective of two disparate, battling characters

For Lunatics, two wild and crazy guys (Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist Dave Barry and Saturday Night Live writer Alan Zweibel) got together to write a comic novel. Barry and Zweibel emailed each other chapters for Lunatics, each from the perspective of two disparate, battling characters: Zweibel plays and writes as Philip Horkman, a mild-mannered pet-store clerk who tries to do the right thing, whereas Barry’s alter ego is Jeffrey Peckerman, who’s written as the crudest, most politically incorrect suburban dad possibly ever to emerge from literature. It’s easy to see that Zweibel and Barry were having fun when they wrote and narrated the book, as Peckerman and Horkman lock horns and find themselves in an ever-escalating farcical adventure that leads them from a dance recital altercation to being accused of terrorism to finding themselves on a nudist cruise ship leading a Cuban revolution to a submarine, and so on. However, the fun experiment doesn’t always translate to a satisfying listen for readers. While the concept of “why not?” may play well on the improv stage, it seems slightly silly in novel form. Meanwhile, the character of Peckerman, written seemingly for shock value, mostly translates as plain obnoxious.

ure fo�eK�D�Gy does not come easily. Joanie, it turns out, was unfaithful and planning to leave Matt. As Joanie’s life support is turned off, Matt takes the girls on a multi-island search for his wife’s lover, and tries to reconcile what, in their family, might have prompted both her infidelity and his daughters’ sense of entitlement.
Of Scottie and Alex’s generation, he says, “Our offspring have all decided to give up [...] they’ll do coke and smoke pot and take creative writing classes and laugh at us.” That may be what’s at the core of The Descendants: Matt’s inability to see that he and his wife, with their obsessive pursuits of their own dreams at the expense of their daughters, is really a function of that exact same sense of entitlement. Hemmings’s writing is clear and assured; her descriptions of Hawaii beautiful, but it is her examination of the guts of generational and familial conflict that gives The Descendantssuch humanity.