Rebecca's Reviews > War of the Encyclopaedists

In this postmodern satire, two Seattle hipsters must face reality when one of them leaves to fight in the Iraq War. Halifax Corderoy and Mickey Montauk mark the summer of 2004 by hosting one their infamous themed parties as “The Encyclopaedists.” It’s the end of an era for these drug-loving pals: Mickey, a National Guardsman, has been called to duty in Iraq, and Hal heads to graduate school in Boston. From now on they keep in touch by updating their pretentious Encyclopaedists Wikipedia article: “an armour of formal diction and analytical calm.” While Hal applies literary criticism to Star Wars and tries to make amends to his ex-girlfriend, Mani, Mickey is in life-and-death situations, looking for car bombs and overseeing local elections. A search for his translator’s murderer descends into farce, and things get complicated when Hal’s flatmate, Tricia, turns up as an independent journalist.

Like in A Visit from the Goon Squad, the text is interspersed with diagrams, documents, and screenshots. Children of the 1980s-90s, especially, will recognise the many wry period references. The graduate school segments recall The Art of Fielding while the Iraq sections are similar to The Yellow Birds. Robinson and Kovite (an Iraq War veteran) alternate their settings in a fairly seamless whole. Despite the buddy setup, they also write strong female characters. The novel never quite lives up to its literary allusions (Hamlet, and a last paragraph* worthy of The Great Gatsby), but still captures the recent past with humor, nostalgia and critical detachment.


*It starts: “Fools, all of us. Glorious fools born into a vacuum of need, told we could be anything, flailing in a sea of possibility, thinking it a curse, having to design our lives from scratch, forever skeptical of what we create, forever revising, no idea of who we are or what we will make of ourselves...”

Related reading: Glass by Alex Christofi, for the Wikipedia obsession.


Really enjoyed this Kirkus interview with the authors, and this article about their unpublished “drawer novel,” Slaughter at Suez, “a pulp adventure mystery novel set in 1862, Egypt.”