To read Jonathan Katz’s satirical novel CLEAVE THE SPARROW is akin to being repeatedly struck on the funny bone: every laugh is accompanied by a wistful groan at the pickle the world finds itself in. The story is set in a world sometime in the mid-21st century, and it’s a crazy world at that. Sex tapes of Queen Elizabeth can be found on YouTube, would-be presidential candidates kill themselves in televised debates in pursuit of a poll bump, and First Ladies wear skin-tight leather to official functions. Meanwhile, protagonist Tom can write of an episode he witnessed aged seven of his father killing a man invited to perform at his birthday party (who ended up “performing” a vulgar act on his mother on top of a clothes dryer) thus: “My hero lay in pieces, and my dad was surely headed for the electric chair. It was one of my three worst birthdays.”
In other words, everything is out of joint—even the universe. It’s not hard to see the real-life parallel; the reality of today’s America is indeed so unlike anything the country has ever experienced that, at times, even the more preposterous passages here assume the status of art imitating life. “Desmond Thorp,” a former president with a penchant for inciting rioters at the Capitol, and references to another president (an AI-powered robot, or “politibot”) taking it upon themselves to bomb Canada in the near future had me guffawing for all the wrong reasons.
The story involves esoteric cults dispensing hallucinogenics to prominent politicians, aliens, the heat death of the universe, an Oedipus complex, digital humans (“God screwed up the prototype, so we’re fixing it in beta”), and terrorist groups that effortlessly infiltrate the Hill. With so many of the usual laws of storytelling suspended, the plot is frequently on no more than nodding terms with causality, and events are frequently accompanied by flimsy pretexts. Katz further papers over the cracks by making Tom an unreliable narrator, throwing in the odd metatextual hint (and, later, rather more than that) that what we’re seeing may not be what’s actually going on.
This doesn’t ruin things, though. The imaginative arc is impressively long, the tonal shifts keep the readers on their toes, and the wicked stabs of humor are a splendidly wry counterpoint to the upending of behavioral norms on show more or less everywhere in this sprawling work. It’s just that the ideas fly so thick and fast, and the book covers so much ground, that one feels at times that the story is too irresolute to really hit home. With so much going on, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees, plot-wise. That said, readers willing to go out on a limb will not be short of thrills and spills.
Though a surfeit of ideas can make for choppy reading, the wicked satire of Jonathan Katz’s CLEAVE THE SPARROW is biting and memorable.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader