Customer Reviews

Holy Water: A Novel

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If you've been looking for Kurt Vonnegut's successor, look no further. James P. Othmer has picked up the master satirist's torch and taken off running with it. The moment you meet Henry Tuhoe, Vice President of Underarm Research, you know you've entered a world that is at once wildly absurd and frighteningly credible. If ever there was a novel for these troubled and bizarre times, this is it. What The Futurist predicted, Holy Water confirms: Mr. Othmer is on the brink of a major career. So it goes.

Holy Water opens on a polluted river that's literally on fire. Earlier, our corporate-schmuck hero rides past rows of gravestones on his morning commute, imagining that he lies beneath every one of them.
Lousy job, lousy marriage, lack of purpose, spiritual emptiness -- Henry Tuhoe might as well be dead.
Images of mortality abound in James P. Othmer's angry but funny anti-corporate satire. The "dark portal" of a highway tunnel seems like "some kind of urban genocide machine." Henry's wife has insisted that he get a vasectomy, and as he reaches down to reassure himself about his recently shaved testicles, "he feels as if he's holding not a surgically altered reproductive organ but two tiny bombs planted by terrorists of the self, waiting to blow his life apart."
As if on cue, corporate restructuring detonates Henry's life -- blowing him all the way to a fictional Asian nation where he's supposed to set up a call center for a bottled-water company. Caught between an insane pro-growth monarch and peasant rebels who espouse pacifism but wield machetes, Henry gets his eyes opened to the fact that the magic little kingdom of Galado is actually "a corrupt, filthy, environmentally bankrupt f---ing kleptocracy" in which most people don't have access to clean drinking water and hundreds of children die every day of diarrhea.
Othmer -- who has written a memoir and earlier novel about the fraudulence of advertising -- draws characters broadly to score satirical points: the smarmy boss, the desperate suburban-dad beer experts, the Aussie wheeler-dealer, the sociopathic dwarf-dictator, the empowered wife who just joined a coven. But they all have hearts and supply snappy dialogue.
When Holy Water changes tone from satiric to idealistic, however -- with Henry and his new Galadonian girlfriend working out a national improvement program combining growth with sustainability -- the narrative can get preachy. Still, the native telephone operators' assumptions about Americans' underhanded intentions are LOL and spot-on.
In the struggle between cultural preservation and modernity, Henry awakens from his aimlessness and tries to oppose the corporate invaders. He tries. Really, he tries. And his ruminations -- his nights out with the boys, his self-recriminations in the aftermath of a busted marriage, his doomed attempts at social reform -- are wise and amusing. But all the while, Galado's culture is in danger of "being raped by a gang of logos."

A writer-friend turned me on to Othmer's first book, The Futurist, which I loved, but Holy Water is even better. It's funny and it's strange, but most of all, it's true. This is when satire really clicks: you're laughing even as you're weeping. Buy this one. (From a book collector's point-of-view, Othmer is one of those writers whose first editions you're going to want. His stock is going to keep going up. Trust me.)

Absolutely the best fiction read I have had in years! I enjoed it so much that I ordered Othmer's other two books to complete my "Summer of Othmer".

othmer follows his excellent debut, the futurist, with even more excellence in holy water. the name gary shteyngart comes up a lot when people talk about othmer, and i can see why-- these two can skewer the modern man with equal poise, pathos, and humor. the name vonnegut comes up a lot, too, but othmer has much more range than vonnegut, so i don't like that comparison so much. what i like most about othmer's protagonist, henry tuhoe is that he's flawed in a quintessentially modern way, but he yearns to be a better person. the jacket describes it as a blackly satirical piece of fiction, but i think holy water deserves more credit than that, because it's got heart.