Enter the Aardvark

I tried but I just couldn't like this one. The meandering story ultimately added up to nothing, the characters either uninteresting or completely repulsive to follow. All of this would have been tolerable if it weren't for the fact that it felt overwritten and too clever for itself - long sentences that feel like they build to punchlines that never come or plot lines that intersect only because the story demand it of them.

I like the idea of the grounding device of the aardvark passed on through history, but it chopped back and forth too frequently to ever let me develop a reading flow.

Copy of the book provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Alexander Paine Wilson is a pompous, hypocritical, super closeted dick. Coincidentally he's the Republican incumbent in the first congressional district in Virginia against the pantsuit wearing Nancy Beavers. He's a Ronald Reagan superfan, low key bigot, unconscious misogynist and a conspicuous consumer who knows exactly how much his Kohler vibrant Brushed Bronze WaterTile Ambient Rain Shower or ten-layered, California King–sized Kluft Palais Royale mattress costs - because of course.

And so it's not for nothing how delightful it is to see everything go monstrously wrong with the arrival on one stuffed aardvark whose provenance can be traced back to a richly moustachioed zoological naturalist, Sir Richard Ostlet of the Victorian Era. He has sent the recently captured aardvark to his taxidermist acquaintance, and sometimes secret lover, Titus Downing who makes up the other half of the book.

And of course it's almost painfully quaint to think an aardvark owned by some very fine people could render one so low given the cavalcade of crime on persistent display in the news from withholding military aid, insider trading, armed insurrection and jaw-dropping levels of credulity. But still, it feels like Jessica Anthony is having fun, revelling in words, poking in quaint digressions and, to top it all off, writing in the second person no less - so she gets my hearty vote.