I'm always suspicious when people offer variations on "I couldn't put this book down," but in small doses it's often true. I picked up Lunatics late one night, after spending several hours finishing another book I'd been trying to get through for days. I expected to read a couple pages, just enough to get a flavor of it and have a head start for the following day. But each chapter led so easily into the next, and I was having so much fun, that I read eighty pages before I was finally too tired to go on. The next evening I tore through the remaining 240 pages in a few hours. Really, it's no surprise: Lunatics is a wild, frivolous novel, a rollicking adults-only ramble that practically demands to be sped through.
Philip Horkman is a nice guy: sensitive, thoughtful, reasonable, mild-mannered, maybe a little passive-aggressive. The type who says "pardon my language" before using the phrase "kick the bucket." Jeffrey Peckerman is a jerk: blunt, aggressive, bigoted, thoughtless, foul-mouthed. The type who says things I can't quote in this review without thoroughly censoring them. One day, Philip, who referees kids' soccer, rules Jeffrey's daughter was offside, making her tying goal in the championship game ineligible. There's a shouting match, but it all might have ended there, except that the next day Jeffrey's wife asks him to pick up some wine for her book club, and he stops at a business called The Wine Shop. But The Wine Shop is actually a pet shop (don't ask), and Philip is the owner. Their second meeting ends with a kidnapped lemur, which soon steals an insulin pump, and the effort to restore each to its rightful owner results in a high-speed car chase. Then the NYPD mistakes the insulin pump for a bomb... and that's where things ~really~ get complicated.
Lunatics is a comic novel, a collaboration between humorists Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel. Like Barry's previous novels, Big Trouble and Risky Business, it takes ordinary characters and puts them, via a series of implausible but not utterly impossible coincidences, in dangerous, world-shaking situations. Without revealing too much about the course of the story: Jeffrey and Philip end up doing some major traveling, and inadvertently bringing about beneficial chaos wherever they find themselves. After a while, this starts to feel repetitive, too programmatic, and the madcap absurdism wears a little thin. By the final sequence, reality has been left so far behind that it's hard to be involved enough even to appreciate the craziness of it all. But, for those who relate to this kind of humor, there are enough hilarious asides to make the overall experience a consistent pleasure.
That humor is broad, explicit, sometimes crude and a little sophomoric; if refined, subtle wit is your thing, look elsewhere. There are exaggerated observational details familiar to readers of Barry's columns ("I've used enough [whitening] strips to wallpaper my living room, and my teeth are still more or less the color of the margins of the Declaration of Independence"), satires of media hysteria (the coincidental calamities in which Philip and Jeffrey find themselves are interpreted as a cunning terrorist plot), and a certain amount of what an elementary school teacher would call bathroom humor. But a lot of the fun comes from the ongoing conflict between the two narrators, who thoroughly hate each other and have such different worldviews that they can't agree on anything, not even how best to flee the police. The book is made up of short chapters switching between their perspectives; the contrast between Jeffrey's profane rants about how everyone else is a moron and Philip's scrupulous attempts to be polite and helpful is entertaining, and the brevity of the chapters makes for a fast, easy read, as comic novels should be, especially those that depend on following ridiculous turns of plot.
The temptation when reviewing any form of comedy is to quote some of the best jokes, but I'll resist that, and instead mention some of the elements that lend the book its particular peculiar flavor: a nudist cruise, a pair of hungry bears, an awful lot of bananas, two scheming lawyers, the unspeakable fate of a rare baseball card, and Donald Trump. I would say that this kind of humor is an acquired taste, except that I've never yet met a type of humor that wasn't. If this sounds like your cup of tea, then Lunatics comes highly recommended. For myself, I laughed out loud so often that I started to get a headache. Which is pretty much what I look for in a comic novel.
