Enter the Aardvark, Jessica Anthony
Enter the Aardvark, Jessica Anthony
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
Club: $9.49

Enter the Aardvark

Author: Jessica Anthony

Narrator: Matt Amendt

Unabridged: 5 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/24/2020


Synopsis

A young congressman discovers a mysterious stuffed aardvark on his doorstep and sets out on a journey to find out what it means in this "weird, wonderful" novel about the secrets we keep from ourselves and their history-shaping consequences (Esquire).

It's early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.

This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, D.C., where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England--where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark, and Richard Ostlet, the naturalist who hunted her. Our present world, we begin to see, has been shaped in profound and disturbing ways by the secret that binds these men.

At once a ghost story, a love story, and a stunningly prescient political satire, Enter the Aardvark confronts the consequences of repressed male love meeting oppressive male power, and is a searing condemnation of our current American blindness. It is also that rarest of creatures: a work of art so utterly original and masterfully built that it seems to have spring fully formed from its visionary maker's head.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Roxane

What a strange book. There are two threads. There is an asshole republican congressman utterly lacking in self-awareness and a taxidermist and an aardvark. Some parts were a bit too... on the nose, a bit too easy. But still, this is some of the most original satire I’ve read.......more

Goodreads review by David

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 cons......more


Quotes

"Inventive and darkly funny...as Anthony connects characters from today with those from 19th-century England, she offers an original and unsettling lens through which to view male power as it has evolved over time."—TIME

"Like A. S. Byatt with a demented sense of humor...profound and slapsticky, hilarious and depressing at once, Enter the Aardvark is brutally suited to our moment of absurd political theater...Anthony's approach to Rep. Wilson falls somewhere between Nabokov's Pnin and Veep...With her huge taxidermy needle, Anthony stitches us into the breast of our nemesis. She wants to see what insights we gain from putting on their skin...It's a thrilling ride...I'd buy another ticket."—LOS ANGELES TIMES

"Weird, wonderful, and very much of the moment, Enter the Aardvark is a landmark political novel of the Trump era...With heart and humor, Anthony expertly skewers our current political climate."—ESQUIRE

"If you've been wondering, as I have, where the spirit of Nathanael West might be in these berserk and awful times, enter Jessica Anthony. With her highly inventive, ever attentive, and morally serious (as all great comedy must be) Enter the Aardvark, she estranges all over again our deplorable political moment, and thereby helps make it bearable."—JOSHUA FERRIS, author of The Dinner Party andThen We Came to the End

"[Enter the Aardvark] holds up a funhouse mirror to our own political media in the age of spin...reminiscent of Joyce's Dubliners and the later works of T. S. Eliot, the prose quickly transitions into something more modern, but equally ambitious...The book raises some standard commentary about our relationship to politics and the media...but Anthony's reflection of ourselves goes deeper. This is a world that serves, in some ways, as a salve to readers disgruntled by the last four years."—LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Enter the Aardvark is one wild ride: a condemnation, a haunting, a song of love, a madcap political thriller-and it is absolutely unputdownable. I have long been a massive fan of Jessica Anthony's writing and this novel cements her as one of our most thrilling and singular innovators on the page. Welcome, readers, to her world."—LAURA VAN DEN BERG, author of The Third Hotel

"It's a long time since I have enjoyed a novel so much. Fresh, witty and smart, it also has a heart. What more could you want? And who would have thought that you could become emotionally attached to a stuffed aardvark?"—KATE ATKINSON, author of Big Sky and LifeAfter Life

"This book is batshit insane and I love it. What do a closeted gay Republican congressman who's obsessed with Ronald Reagan have in common with a taxidermist in 19th-century England? Answer: an aardvark. And also much more, but I'll let you discover the rest for yourself."— LIT-HUB

"An ingenious political satire...The perfect tonic for testing times...Anthony's voice is all her own: deliciously astute, fresh and terminally funny."—THE GUARDIAN

"A blisteringly innovative and outrageous novel...If you're searching for a sharp, looking-glass view into the far end of contemporary politics, look no further. Jessica Anthony's novel has the pacing of a thriller with satirical verve of Nathanael West. Beyond a fabulist send-up of our current political chaos, it's an examination of the fall out of masculinity's rigid constraints, played out through sexual repression and relentless power dynamics."—THE OBSERVER