§6 Sean Penn, Author
Earlier this week (05.04.2018), Sean Penn became the proud author of a novel. In the run up to its publication, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff received critical condemnation from all who had the apparent misfortune of being tasked with reviewing it. ‘All’, that is, apart from Salman Rushdie, Sarah Silverman, Bill Maher, Douglas Brinkley and Art Linson whose comments on the novel are used as part of its marketing blurb.

The novel was discussed on the BBC’s Front Row with Cathy Rentzenbrink who provided an example of Penn’s apparent propensity (ahem!) for alliterative diarrhoea:

“Whenever he felt these collisions of incubus and succubus, he punched his way out of the proletariat with the purposeful inputting of covert codes, thereby drawing distraction through Scottsdale deployments, dodging the ambush of innocents astray, evading the viscount vogue of Viagratic assaults on virtual vaginas, or worse, falling passively into prosaic pastimes.”

For reasons that are perhaps clear from this extract, rather than address the novel’s literary merits and inferiorities, Rentzenbrink and Stig Abel (Front Row presenter) discussed how the very fact that Penn has written a novel is a gesture that is part of broader phenomenon of actors (principally male actors, it was noted) turning their hand to this form and process.

The discussion rightly pointed out that for Penn, the creative process of writing a novel gave him a break from collaboration (an imperative of acting) and the imposition of a director’s vision etc. Front Row pointed out that the problem with this is that Penn’s novel amounts to an unedited “ideas-dump”, with no unifying theme or narrative thread beyond his own exuberant delight in working alone with no accountability to anyone other than himself. He agreed with Stephen Colbert that the novel is something of an ‘improvisation’, however many critics feel he has fallen short on realising the Beat and Gonzo-style he appears to be emulating.

It wouldn’t be right to comment or speculate further on the novel’s literary qualities without having read it myself, however, it is of note that the trend of actors to turn to writing novels (a phenomenon that despite being identified seemed to perplex Rentzenbrink and Abel’s discussion) can be seen as an instance of the broader tendency of actors to seek recognition beyond the remit of their craft. This was addressed in ANOW Seminar №2, where we discussed Johnny Depp’s great cultural deed of bringing further recognition to the life and work of the late Hunter S. Thompson. Indeed, Hunter S. Thompson’s name that comes up again in relation to this novel, with Salman Rushdie suggesting that Thomas Pynchon and Hunter S. Thompson ‘would love this book.’

The fact that a literary review of this novel cannot seem to escape the phenomenon to which it is a part would suggest that as a cultural artefact of contemporary celebrity Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff should, in one way or another, be treated seriously and certainly not dismissed on literary grounds.

/Pete Watt
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['Sean Penn', 'Writer', 'Books']