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A Novel
Free Press
July 2006
On Sale: July 11, 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0743256263
EAN: 9780743256261
Hardcover
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Fiction
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.
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