Fiction: Whatever else about the Michael Jackson trial, yet another tragic high-school shooting and the right-to-life circus surrounding poor Terri Schiavo's death, they suggest it can't be altogether easy for an American satirist to lampoon a nation that can so consummately parody itself.
That said, American Desert, by acclaimed novelist Percival Everett, author of Erasure and Glyph, begins promisingly, if gruesomely, as its anti-hero, California English professor Ted Street, a failure in his academic career and marriage, fails also at suicide after he is accidentally beheaded in a car crash en route to the ocean to drown himself.
Head stitched back on by the undertaker, Ted climbs out of his coffin three days later at the funeral service, and accompanies his wife, Cindy, and their young son and daughter home. Needless to say, the local TV stations are not far behind, and a news anchor, Barbie Beker, possessed of "a hundred teeth, whiter than any teeth Ted had ever seen", is the first of Everett's satirical targets.
Such a resurrection, or "reanimation", as Everett dubs it, requires a giant leap of faith on the part of Ted and his family, not to mention the reader, though Everett helps his case by not having Ted come back to life entirely as you or I know it. That is, his sense of hearing and smell are sharpened, but he has no pulse or heartbeat, and is impervious to hunger, pain and, as the plot thickens, to bullets also.
Certainly the plot thickens, as Ted is first taken into custody by a desert commune of cannon-toting Jesus freaks who consider him a devil, then by the US army, which is working on a secret project to create combat soldiers capable of reanimation, and lastly by another desert band of UFO/religious crazies who hail Ted as the messiah.
Ted is a likeable character, a better, braver bloke the second time around, while Cindy is also well-drawn, and their marriage is convincingly portrayed. But much of the remainder, including a sub-plot with Ted's children, simply fails to grip, the narrative itself too often bereft of vital signs.
That Ted is also now clairvoyant, privy to the secrets of others, is a clever improvement on an omniscient narrator, but Everett does not help his counter- argument for secular sanity by giving both religious cult leaders, plus a Pentagon operative, three brutal, abusive fathers - as if that explained everything.
There is humour, to be sure, as when Cindy, death cert in hand, visits her insurance agent to collect on Ted's life insurance policy, and Ted's final gesture is an inspired moment. But sending up TV presenters and the more patently lunatic religious fringe seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel, like Waco revisited 12 years after the sorry facts. One wonders if something far more savage and Swiftian might result were Everett to train his sights on the neo-cons, oilmen and torture-meisters who, abetted by the Christian right, have laid claim to an American desert in Mesopotamia where beheadings are truly a fact of life.
Anthony Glavin is a novelist and short-story writer
Percival Everett will read, with Rick Moody, at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature on Friday, Apr 22, in the Town Hall Theatre at 6.30pm. Tickets: €7/€5
American Desert By Percival Everett Faber & Faber, 291pp. £ 10.99