America's Report Card offers a brilliant vision of contemporary
American life that is frightening, darkly hilarious, and tinged with
satire. John McNally tells the story of two unlucky people who forge an
improbable yet possibly life-saving connection in a world overshadowed
by the Patriot Act and No Child Left Behind -- a world in which hulking
government bureaucracies and vast corporations join forces to numb the
populace into apathy with various standardization and surveillance
programs. But McNally sees hope in the daily experiences of his
characters: sometimes, haphazardly, by going about their own very
particular lives, people circumvent the official program and begin to
actively claim lives of freedom and dignity. America's Report Card is
an arresting and humane portrait of life taking place in the margins,
outside the stunted imagination of government and media.
As in his critically acclaimed novel The Book of Ralph, McNally
dazzles with characters like Jainey O'Sullivan -- a lonely, confused,
purple-and-green-haired sometime truant, Jainey cares so little about
high school that on her final standardized test, she writes an essay
heaping scorn on the test administrators even as she asks her faceless
reader for help. Charlie Wolf leads a fairy-tale graduate student life,
with just enough money and clout to keep him in books, vodka, a
threadbare apartment, and a beautiful, intellectual girlfriend. But the
bohemian dream starts to crumble when Charlie takes a job scoring
standardized tests and finds himself surrounded by people who are either
plodding blindly along or caught up in wild conspiracy theories. When
Charlie and Jainey stumble upon one another, they also stumble upon
their own bravery and compassion. They try to protect each other from
their habitual bad luck and the shadowy threats lurking at the edges of
their lives, and what ensues doesn't follow any prescribed course.
The official version of American life today may get the broad strokes
and primary colors right, but America's Report Card reveals how the
government and the media overlook the corners and shadows where our
individual realities unfold all too often in chaotic, precarious, and
bewildering ways. This wholly original, wildly entertaining novel
mirrors our part in the dark but frequently redemptive comedy that is
life.
