WP: John McNally dedicates his new novel to Ann Coulter

[FreeStateDemocrat]

The War at Home
A disaffected high school student fights back against the government and its national aptitude test.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Sunday, July 23, 2006; Page BW07

AMERICA'S REPORT CARD
By John McNally

Free Press. 266 pp. $24

John McNally dedicates his new novel to Ann Coulter, whom he calls "America's Iago." If he's lucky, this might provoke the conservative pundit to lay off the 9/11 widows for a moment and give McNally a little free advertising in one of her tirades. Or maybe Sean Hannity will denounce his book for suggesting (several times) that President Bush is a terrorist.

To which McNally would probably yell, "Bring it on!"

America's Report Card is a gangly comic novel that starts by making fun of conservative education reform ("No Child's Behind Left Untouched") and ends by accusing President Bush of genocide. McNally is a clown wearing brass knuckles, and with this sometimes clever, sometimes goofy story, he may finally incite on the fiction bestseller list the kind of brawl that's been raging away between liberals and conservatives on the nonfiction side. After all, for all their alleged liberalism, angry speeches to the choir, poetry readings and group letters, America's literati have not produced much polemical fiction during the war on terror. Part of this may be because it takes longer to write a novel than to assemble the reasons that Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot , but we've already seen a number of less barbed novels that involve the events of 9/11. Maybe novelists fear their work will quickly sound dated if it's tied to today's political questions instead of to more timeless issues of love and grief or government incompetence in general. (cont'd)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/20/AR2006072001031.html

Anybody read it?