Tinyman for President, by Q. Synopsis

Description

A campaign-trail documentary about how Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to a benign, popular, if diffident, superhero. Paperback book design was awarded Best of Category (book design), 63rd ADAI Design Exhibition (Art Directors of Iowa). Printed in the United States by Bookmobile.

Links

• 1999 Newspoetry hypertext prototype
• Review by Davis Schneiderman in American Book Review

Includes:

• Tinyman for President

Reviews

“Back during the turbulent 60s, faced with the threat of nuclear holocaust, racial and cultural unrest, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War, American artists Stanley Kubrick (in Dr. Strangelove) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) responded by inventing absurdist satiric fantasies so outrageous and compelling that they exposed the nightmarish logic underlying our nation’s collective peril—and kept us laughing even as they cut most deeply. Q. Synopsis’s hilariously disturbing and deeply informed novel about the 2020 American Presidential election, Tinyman for President, is that same kind of ambitious satire—albeit one whose off-the-grid creative impulses have the ability to channel moral outrage into the literary equivalent of Never Mind the Bollocks. Wake up, Americans, and… 
Make America Tiny Again!"
— Larry McCaffery, 
editor of Storming the Reality Studio, 
Expelled from Eden, 
and Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

The New New Journalism
Davis Schneiderman (bio)
Tinyman for President
Q. Synopsis
I-BeaM Books
150 Pages; Print, $20.20

That this anonymous novel’s price is that of the vexed year it covers is one of the many small details lovingly girding the body of this metafictional text. Another is the name of the purported author, a pseudonym for a small-press writer whose impressive work has been seriously underappreciated, even while maintaining a those-in-the-know impressiveness for those, well, in the know.

In fact, it was because an ABR editor approached me to review a work by this specific author under their real name that caused me to agree to write this review. Only when Tinyman for President arrived in the mail did I discover the nom de guerre; after corresponding with the editor, I was told the author would prefer I review the work “as a novel by ‘Q. Synopsis’ rather than mentioning that ‘Synopsis’ is one of his pseudonyms” (though he added, “if Davis feels comfortable doing it this way”). Since I’ve long ago given up any sense of comfort, I agreed, although the preceding sentence suggests this is not the first Kierkegaardian identity our intrepid author has deployed.

That I started writing this several days before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a mere week and change after the insurrection at the Capitol that provides a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction for Tinyman, it’s also true that the book manages to carry more than enough insightful surprises. These hold water during a period where everything about the United States is leaky. Or maybe air filled, as the Tinyman cover shows an untethered balloon with American flag design (foreground) about to be popped, optical illusion style, on the tip of the Capitol dome (background). There’s no middle ground anywhere.

Q’s frame — diametrically opposed to the QAnon cult and its role-paying-game paranoia — is one part New Journalism (see the back cover comparisons to Hunter S. Thompson) and three parts questioning of a “what the actual f*&% is going on?” mode. Put those in a blender with a bit of barely credible comic-book backstory, and you have a satire not for the ages but for this age. This now. This muddle. Let me explain.
In the novel, Tinyman is the most pathetic type of self-involved superhuman, in a world that has more than its fair share:

Not a maniac, but endowed with superpowers with which a true maniac could cause severe mayhem…Tinyman was not tiny. In socks and sandals, he stood about 5’8 3/4”, 98 pounds. Though he was obliged to fight crime, he had a nonconfrontational disposition and social anxiety, insecurity, hypersomnia, and his supersenses were prone to hallucinations…. Also, unlike his many glamorous supercolleagues, his entertainment properties were slim, and amounted to a three-issue comic book run, long out of print.

Q. runs with the joke, as Tinyman takes on various public- and self-deprecating aspects that collect against the dominant narrative of omnipresent superhero stories. In a world without The Tick, The Boys, etc., this might be enough of an animating spark, but it’s precisely the sense of imminent deflation (cue soon-to-be-popped cover balloon) that make Tinyman work so strangely compelling.

It’s not the plot, which is deliberately simple — Tinyman and his team try to get him both elected and not elected as President, and he persists nonetheless; there’s a Watchmen (1987) like chill over the proceedings, as heroes are forbidden from using their powers, and the ambiguous toggle of Tinyman’s un/electability proves an acerbic commentary that exists both narratively and as a seeming act of meta-narrative omniscience.

In any event, Tinyman doesn’t want to be President (or does he?), and the while the enterprise benefits from the Bartelby-like ambiguities of the titular here, the novel’s crypto-protagonist is his hapless campaign manager Johnny Werd, who works for Tinyman precisely because Werd doesn’t really believe Tinyman can win (and despite their mutual disdain for Trump).

Their lazy campaign is like Trump 2.0 if it came from the left, and we never find out if Tinyman will take the prize. In a way, the plot is extraneous enough to be almost entirely beside the point. And plot aside, Werd’s how-not-to-run- a-campaign schtick is often enjoyably resonant: “In trying to assemble the policy platform on the Tinyman campaign wiki, Werd was cutting and pasting large portions of Warren’s and Sander’s online text,” followed by a thoughtful excurses on how most political facts are repeatedly plagiarized in the sinister act of “becoming” facts. While Werd is filled with familiar self-loathing, the narrative voice delivers some of the best bons mot as it ambiguously separates itself from Werd. Q. make’s excellent use of free indirect discourse, and it’s the blurry line between character and narrator that allows Tinyman to transcend its comic-book-paper-thin story. Such insight is a marker of Q.’s former work (presented most notably in a biological pathogen-based post-apocalyptic novel I’ve thought of numerous times since the advent of COVID). There are numerous passages that jump off the page — easily untangling from the story and floating free over the dark discursive state that currently dominates our lives. The way this often works is worth explicating. In this typical example, Werd muses upon something with his sardonic commentary:

Joe Biden was connected, somehow, to Ukraine and hackers and the deep state and he invented the novel coronavirus along with Hunter Biden as part of the plan to take your guns away so you’d be defenseless against the black helicopters. These lies swirled endlessly on Facebook like a clogged toilet.

Following this is more abstract commentary upon the example: “What’s in a fact? Is a fact loud? Fancy? Does it give away hats? Does a fact have lobbyists? Yes, if often does. But lies have lobbyists as well.” 

It is impossible, though, to recreate the impact of these insights in a review, because there are so many examples, and they are often wildly surprising and uproariously prescient. Q.’s power has also been their ability to write adjacent realities that reflect our own back to us in glorious distortion. Before Trump, this was competent and entertaining postmodernism. During/post Trump, the sentences have a way of puncturing our tenuous hold on reality. 

I desperately want to share by way of final example the book’s last paragraph, but I don’t want to ruin its impact. Instead, the last narrative page (after the paragraph) closes with a single word, centered mid page: “THP!” It’s as if Bloom County’s Bill the Cat had a reasonable chance of controlling the nuclear football. 

I’d like to say that’s a deranged fantasy, but, of course, Tinyman for President isn’t actually fiction. That’s simply what makes it so stunningly effective.

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