These are dark times for black comedy, especially if a humorist takes on American politics. A mere novel, it would seem, can never match the Real World. The problem clearly occurred to Kurt Baumeister, because he took his nasty jibes to another world. The title of his bleak yet bubbly Pax Americana smacks of satire, but also sketches a power structure that doesn’t quite match up with our own. Obama never happened, in Americana; rather, 2009 saw the Third Inaugural of W. Bush, who soon took his Iraq war across the Middle East, all while various FOX-Newsy dreams came true. Baumeister’s US has a secret police, known as “Internal Defense,” and ultra-rich Evangelicals, something like Joel Osteen, who work in close collusion with the US government. But Nirvana for the One Percent has come under threat, as the novel opens. A left-winger has taken the White House, rules are getting rewritten, and worse yet, a new computer program named Symmetra seems to remove the human need for God. The chemistry whiz who cooked up the stuff is of course beautiful (with a mythic name, Diana) and the Internal D duo sent after her (seeking information, too, on other Threats to the Republic) are a buddy-movie odd couple: one so Christian he won’t use obscenities and the other a connoisseur of both dirty words and what they represent. There are whack-a-mole captures and rabbit-hole getaways, and both hunters and prey are forced to see that they’re merely the pawns of faux-Christian fat-cats tucked away in bunkers like “Bayousalem.” Could Diana or her work tear down the whole crooked charade? Could one of pursuers turn from the Dark Side? As the novel works out its answers, it relies a bit much on dialogue, sometimes getting redundant when it strives to be snappy, and it falters a couple of times in its attempts to deepen character. By and large, however, Baumeister succeeds in delivering the deep chill he intends: that of a world in which “evil and… good… were just as passé as faith.”

***

Pax Americana
by Kurt Baumester
Stalking Horse Press; 375 p.

John Domini’s latest book is MOVIEOLA!, linked stories, on Dzanc. In early 2019, Dzanc will publish his fourth novel, The Color Inside a Melon.

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