Banango Lit

By: Rachel Hyman



All Her Father’s Guns is a novel by James Warner. It was published by Vox Novus in 2011. Disclosure: I was sent a complementary copy of this book.

As the 2012 primaries and eventual presidential race get under way, as the hope and change touchstones of Obama’s 2008 campaign ring hollow, as we find ourselves faced with new movements like the Tea Party and Occupy—a political satire seems especially apposite.

Irony is an essential element of satire, to be sure, but the latter seems to differentiate itself from the arch irony that pervades a lot of corners these days (are you listening, David Foster Wallace?). Satire has different ends, a different affect. Maybe the stakes are higher with the political subject matter.

All Her Father’s Guns takes place in 2002, between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War, reminding us that these last few years aren’t the sole provenance of political turmoil. It bounces between two characters. The first is Cal Lyte, a gun-toting, audacious venture capitalist who’s plotting to sabotage his ex-wife’s campaign for Congress in Arizona. The second is Reid Seyton, a British transplant, boyfriend of Cal’s daughter Lyllyan, and not-so-consummate academic in the UC Berkley Department of Theory.

All Her Father’s Guns habituates us to ridiculousness. As crazy as Cal is—he wants a gun in the hands of every American, including kindergartners, and lives in a libertarian gated community for trigger-happy paranoids—his ex-wife Tabytha is even worse, making Cal look like a bleeding-heart liberal. As Cal says,

I’ve never favored sending in the troops, not after what I saw in Thailand. I mean, we’d never have had to fight the Civil War if we’d all just smuggled guns to the slaves, like John Brown tried to do.

Tabytha naturally planned on going down in history for helping “liberate the Middle East from the Arabs.”

Alright, so maybe they’re both pretty ridiculous. With craziness being the rule, of course Cal falls in love with Viorela, Reid’s colleague and a Lacanian therapist who says things like “What is truly oppressive is one’s own superego, which Libertarians project onto the government to conceal from themselves their own self-repression.” And it’s hardly surprising when we find out that Cal’s company is under IRS investigation for seemingly selling missiles to China in a botched scheme. By the time we get towards the end of the book, the kidnapping is par for the course. Absurdity like this saturates the entire novel.

What’s really enjoyable though, are the scenes of academia—and Reid’s tumble from it, as he can’t compete with his colleagues in the Department of Theory who study things like continuity errors in Casabalanca and teach courses like Hermeneutics from Mallarmé to Tarantino. Most readers of this blog, myself included, don’t need satire to get acquainted with the wacky and wild world of academia. While Cal tries to keep his ventures afloat and keep Tabytha from running for Congress, Reid attempts to find life after academia, keep his relationship with Lyllyan afloat, and figure out the ending to the bedtime story that his now-dead father told him in childhood. I do wish that Reid’s sections were longer, and I felt that Cal’s could drag on for too long.

For all of its mockery of politics and academia, All Her Father’s Guns is, in large part a story about family, not so much dysfunctional families as families with gaping holes in them. Reid looks up to Cal as a father figure, despite residing at the opposite end of the political spectrum. And teaching him to use a gun, Cal sees Reid as a son, given his frayed relations with his daughter Lyllyan. I felt that Lyllyan was a little underdeveloped as a character, as the novel was primarily concerned with Cal and Reid.

This focus on the family (heh), on people, is where All Her Father’s Guns really shines. The novel isn’t just a vehicle for some wry political commentary. For all of its zany gun talk, the core story—having, losing, finding anew—isn’t so out there. It’s clever, but not just for the sake of being clever. Regardless of your own political stance, you’ll find that All Her Father’s Guns is smart and surprisingly touching.