Bad Writing Masterclass: Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

I’ve joked about it several times, might as well go all the way.

In 2018 Sean Penn joined the trend of actors and musicians writing terrible novels by putting out Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, and the world of literary criticism had a very fun two or three weeks. This is surprising, since the book is apparently really good! Look at all of these endorsements by famous authors and press outlets:

"An incredibly interesting work." --Jane Smiley
"A straight up masterwork." --Sarah Silverman
"Blisteringly funny." --Corey Seymour
"A transcendent apocalyptic satire." --Michael Silverblatt
"Crackling with life." --Paul Theroux
"Great fun." --Salman Rushdie
"A provocative debut." --Kirkus Reviews

Well, I’m ignoring all of those people for the rest of my life.

What’s the book about?

From legendary actor and activist Sean Penn comes a scorching, "charmingly weird" (Booklist, starred review) novel about Bob Honey--a modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin.

Bob Honey has a hard time connecting with other people, especially since his divorce. He's tired of being marketed to every moment, sick of a world where even an orgasm isn't real until it is turned into a tweet. A paragon of old-fashioned American entrepreneurship, Bob sells septic tanks to Jehovah's Witnesses and arranges pyrotechnic displays for foreign dictators. He's also a contract killer for an off-the-books program run by a branch of United States intelligence that targets the elderly, the infirm, and others who drain society of its resources.

One of my favourite hobbies is hanging around writing forums to see people posting their terrible novels for critique. That’s maybe a little mean of me, but in my defence it’s also really fun.

I can usually handle the bad fantasy and sci-fi and the poorly written thrillers, because you can tell the writers are earnestly trying their hardest and enjoying themselves. But then you have the wannabe literati, who roll into the forum full of smug self-confidence, convinced that they’re the next Charles Bukowski or Hunter S. Thompson (they all love those two writers specifically) and that the online peons will fall over themselves to praise it. These people are highly entertaining, partially because it’s satisfying seeing them get ripped to shreds but also because their books tend to be completely fucking bannanas. Like, they post a synopsis and you want to reach through the screen and shake them and say “Even if every other writer spontaneously drops dead and your novel is literally the only thing coming into their inbox, no editor is ever ever ever going to publish this nonsensical bullshit.”

Unless you’re a famous actor.

Bob Honey starts with two quotes by Edgar Lee Masters and Ingmar Bergman, then a third quote by Jack Kerouac on the “Part One” page, and also an MS Paint drawing of a hammer for some reason. You can tell this is a serious work of literary merit because of all the quotes. The book itself then opens with a prelude, which is a transcription of a 911 call. Check out this totally naturalistic dialogue:

“Yes. My name is Helen Mayo. I live at 1531 Sweet Dog Lane. I don’t know if I have an emergency, but I do have a new neighbor and I’m sorry if I just think he’s [loud dog barking renders caller unintelligible]—Nicky, please!—I’m sorry that’s just my little doggy—if I just think he’s behaving strangely, and perhaps, the police would like to take a look, or maybe go and . . . you know, sniff it out. Sniff, chat, whatever it is that you do.” [more dog barking]

Dialogue in novels usually isn’t actually realistic at all, for very good reason—if it was it would be very frustrating to read—but if you’re presenting the reader with something that’s supposed to be a literal transcription of a phone call then it should sound the way people speak on the phone. If you stop and think about it, that doesn’t actually make a lot of sense—surely the dialogue in a novel would sound the same regardless of how it’s being delivered—but readers will subconsciously expect it and will notice if the phone call dialogue sounds too much like novel dialogue.

(Similarly, newspapers and magazines have particular writing styles, which fake excerpts should adhere to).

More police blotter extracts follow, detailing the suspicious neighbour wrapping wire around his house and putting out a placard that says “International Airports Boast Morbid Mannequins at Duty Free.” No idea what that means, but he alliteration is a nice warning for the rest of the book’s writing style.

And then, uh…actually that’s as far as the Kindle store sample goes. it’s not even all the way through the prologue. I’m not sure if it covers more than the equivalent of two printed pages. This is by far the shortest Kindle sample I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know why that is but I find it interesting that it stops before the reader encounters Sean Penn’s actual prose.

Anyway I acquired a full copy of the book and the police blotter extracts continue, with the mysterious neighbour who’s probably Bob Honey doing random stuff (you can’t accuse Penn of false advertising, although apparently you can accuse him of a lot of other things).

Neighbors complain of excessive lawn mower noise—0300 hrs. When patrol arrived at scene, all was quiet. Scent of fresh cut grass permeating the air.

What

What is this

Why is the book doing this, what’s the point? Why isn’t the story happening?

“Well, this hairdo of his, it’s something like a Nazi, or a woodshop teacher. And as you know, I’m not the only one on this street who has registered my concerns about this man. Despite numerous complaints or reports or what have you, I’m just baffled that you all have never actually engaged this gentleman. That you people haven’t made any official law enforcement contacts. Forgive me if I . . . that with all his strange behavior and haircuts and all that . . . you know what I mean . . . I’m not saying he looks Arab, mind you. He’s a white man. Anyone could see that, but I still think that the police should, well, you know . . . yes, sniff him out, just sniff that man out!”

Man, I’m really tired. Is anyone else really tired? I just feel really tired all of a sudden.

The police blotter ends and it’s on to chapter one. Sorry I mean “Station One”, which is called “Seeking Homeostasis in Inherent Hypocrisy”.

No, really.

Cactus Fields, a Low-Cost Home for Assisted Senior Living, looms like a large khaki-colored brick isolated against a backdrop of distant ambient light. Its draped windows and solitary silhouette sit in a seemingly endless desert tableau. Here it seems that the desert itself has been deserted.

Fucking hell.

No, no, gotta give it a fair shot. This is a serious critique post, we’re not just dunking on books here.

So Bob Honey (presumably, the chapter is in a weird detached passive voice) shows up at this retirement complex and murders three elderly people, and it’s all written like this:

Behind the windows of the beige stucco building that sits behind a dilapidated, sporadically visited parking lot where brown weeds burst through fissures in the pavement, eight senior residents have been awakened by the power cut. They huddle side by side in plastic chairs. Portraiture of sagging faces falling in and out of indelicate light and shadow. Theirs, a blotchy batch of colorless dermal masks. That last life spark extracted from their oblivion, a reckoning of their uselessness in a world where branding is being. Bound by brutal boredom.

Your first impression, if you have any taste whatsoever, is that this is completely awful. But you might have trouble pinning down what’s so awful about it.

There’s a few reasons: the aformentioned use of passive voice to the point where some of this doesn’t even constitute proper sentences, the repitition (“behind” is used twice in a single sentence), the confusing and nonsensical action (how did a power cut wake them from their sleep? Why are they all sitting in plastic chairs?), but there’s actually a bigger problem, which is the poor pacing.

This is something a lot of people tend to ignore when writing, focusing all of their attention on the words used and not enough on how those words are arranged. Good writing has a flow to it; sentence length rises and falls, commas break things up into manageable chunks, even the number of syllables varies in order to keep the sentences fresh. These are things many people both write and read without being consciously aware of it, but when it’s not present you’ll notice.

For example, everything I just quoted above. Try reading that out loud. The first sentence is too long, the second one is too short and the words march forward in a multisyllabic sprawl, with no rhythm or variance. It even looks wrong if you unfocus your eyes and just pay attention to the shapes of the letters on the page.

I’m sure that Sean Penn, avant garde maverick, would sneer in response to this and insist that writing doesn’t have rules, man. And it’s true that pretty much every rule of writing can legitimately be broken. But you have to actually be good at it.

Bob Honey shoots three of the residents, which is confusing because apparently they were all sitting near each other? How did the other five react to this?

A dull white Pontiac ignites its engine, rolls over the fissures of weed onto the interstate and under its driver’s breath, “It wasn’t me.”

…The Pontiac said “It wasn’t me?” I get what this is trying to say, but it literally reads like the car is talking. Maybe Sean Penn really is a genius!

Then we’re onto chap—I mean Station Two, “Recollections of a Teenage Carny”.

It is the autumn of the age of reason.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Here’s our introduction—finally—to Bob Honey, he who just do stuff.

Meet Bob Honey, resident of 1528 Sweet Dog Lane, a man who most often speaks of himself in the third person. A former fixed-wing shuttle operator, barge fireworks display purveyor, and one who made a killing in the septic tank–pumping industry by focusing on an exclusive clientele of Jehovah’s Witnesses. After a brief monopoly on mail-order merkins and managerial stints at the Airborne Ordnance Maintenance Company and the Western Test Range, Bob regretted never attaining a real-estate license, and thereby never using his imagined tagline: “Buy a Honey of a property.”

This feels like something a particularly “lol random”-addled 4Chan user would post.

We’re told that Bob wakes up every morning imagining that he’s nest to his ex-wide, and then there’s a giant page-long slab of text running down all of his ex-wife’s many failings, among them that she’s “so cynical she doesn’t understand the meaning of her favourite songs”. Which is deep, man.

It is impossible for Bob, waking up all these mornings to her speechless misandry and fraudulently feminist superhero dreams. Impossible for him to not consider ligature strangulation. Droplets of gasoline ignited one by one, the stink of her burning flesh and affirmations of anguished screams. Ah, but when these considerations tickle the tumult of actionability, only then does he relinquish their delicious danger, and find himself buoyantly liberated to move away from the definitively empty bed.

You probably noticed the aliteration in there (affirmations of anguished, delicious danger). This crops up frequently throughout the novel, as we’ll see shortly, and apparently it’s also in Morrisey’s book List of The Lost, and I’ve seen it on those writing forums I mentioned earlier. I’m really not sure what’s up with this; are these people all copying someone famous I haven’t read, or is there just this misconception floating around that alliteration is how you do good writing?

Yes, Bob is God’s squared-away individual. He knows how to get up in the morning . . . and just do stuff.

Someone please kill me

Then there’s yet more discussion of how Bob Honey’s wife is an evil harpy (“Hence, his life remains incessantly infused with her identity-infidelity, and her abhorrent ascensions to those constant salacious sessions of sexual solitaire she’d seen as self-regard”), which I think officially qualifies Bob as a Wife Guy.

And then it’s onto a quick summary of Bob’s life, because plot is for lowly stories whereas this is le noveul.

A son of the San Joaquin Valley during the 1960s and early ’70s, Bob rode a red Schwinn Stingray. Provided by the pale-blue-collar American neighborhood where Bob grew up was a window-shopper’s gliding glance, while wheeling by the revealing open garages where muscle cars in multitudes marked time.

Okay, I’ll give Sean Penn this: “pale-blue-collar” is a decent turn of phrase. I like that.

Everything else in these two sentences is total gibberish. I literally do not understand what any of this is even trying to say. Maybe the next sentence will be more coherent.

Raised on blocks above oil pans, they were a sure indication of adolescents in Indochina.

What this is trying to get across is that the cars belong to the teenage sons of the home owners, who are off fighting in Vietnam. This is actually kind of an evocative image: a bunch of boyish go-faster cars sitting idle in garages, possibly never to be driven again if their owners don’t make it back alive. It feels like the sort of thing that was probably taken from Penn’s own experience and it has a ring of truth to it. This is, potentially, really good storytelling.

But Penn is obsessed with the idea of sounding clever, so this nice image gets communicated via a ham-fisted attempt at prose poetry. As far as I can tell most of the book is written this way. Check out what comes immediately afterwards:

Riding past his heroes’ homes, he often wondered if those recruited big brothers of his boyhood chums would live to claim their cars, or if they would return maimed, mindless, boxed, bannered, buried, or betrayed as the evening news portrayed. Bob’s boyhood essence set him up for a separation from time, synergy, and social mores, leading him to acts of indelicacy, wounding words, and woeful whimsy that he himself would come to dread.

I wasn’t kidding about the alliteration.

This is a very obvious baby’s-first-litfic flag, where the writer thinks that to be sophisticated they have to avoid ever stating anything in a straightforward way. Good poetic or highly ornamented language should communicate what the author is trying to get across at least as well as plain language would, otherwise it’s just showing off.

At its siren song, young Bob would sometimes cycle swiftly to chase down the ice cream truck (not unlike his ex-wife’s), buy the Strawberry Shortcake Popsicle, then join the back of the pack of prepubescent punks, or more often ride alone through the neighborhood.

This sentence drops the literary pretensions, apart from the ever-present alliteration, but it reveals more fundamental problems in Penn’s writing. If you actually dissect this closely, you’ll find that it’s not actually saying anything at all. What it boils down to is “When Bob was a child he got ice cream from an ice cream van, then sometimes he hung out with other kids but sometimes he didn’t.” This is as interesting and revelatory as saying “Bob liked to eat food.”

There’s a general rule of thumb—which like all rules of thumb can be broken if the result is interesting enough—that you only bother to highlight things in a story that are unusual or revealing. No one cares about your protagonist waking up in the morning, eating breakfast or buying coffee. We care if they wake up next to someone they just started an affair with, or if the breakfast they’re eating is their last meal, or if they’re buying coffee on the space station they just arrived at.

I’m exaggerating for effect—it doesn’t need to be that dramatic—but you get the point. Bad writing is stuffed with this sort of filler material where the author narrates the characters going through utterly mundane bullshit, usually because the writer just doesn’t know how to tell a story (or they’re writing literary fiction and they want to highlight the Zaniness Of Our Modern Times by drawing the reader’s attention to parking ticket machines or something, but that’s another issue).

The next few sentences really demonstrate what I’m talking about, as they describe Bob throwing home-made molotov cocktails off a bridge. That’s interesting and noteworthy.

If you hit the paved riverbank close enough to the water’s edge, the shattering bottle liberated a magnificent dispersal of high-octane accelerant upon the river’s surface-drift.

You could have just said “surface” instead of “river-drift” but this is still kind of

There and then, even little boys could create an impossible blaze,

Okay we get it, let’s get onto the next

confound common sense,

What does that even

set a river alight,

BRO I GET IT HE’S THROWING BOMBS AT THE RIVER

and amaze.

I’m developing a tic in my left eye. It came on just now. That’s odd.

Out at the I-5 junction was an old mobile home park where Bobby-Eleven-Year-Old learned to smoke ovals on the porch of the tipsy trailer where the teenaged black chick lived with the Cowboy.

“Bobby-Eleven-Year-Old”? What?

Though small for his age, B-11 was thought a suburban danger-boy and had trouble making friends in his own age group.

“B-11”? “B-11”? Oh my god Sean Penn not every single fucking sentence has to be a witty bonne mot, put your pants back on and stop waving your dick in my face.

We haven’t actually gotten any dialogue apart from the police blotter, let’s see how Penn handles it:

He and his juvie Jemima had “realignin’ to do to keep that damn trailer level on its gravel pad.” As Cowboy’d finally appear, it was an appearance sweaty and ready to take the dutiful neighborhood boy on his septic tank–pumping runs. He’d teach “that little chump the tricks’a d’trade.”

Try to actually say “tricks’a d’trade” out loud, I dare you.

(We’re going to sail right past “juvie Jemima” because addressing it will cause my skull to explode).

If you’re familiar with over-pretentious writing then there’s one key element you’ve probably been missing, but don’t worry, Sean Penn has you covered: yes, there are footnotes. I’m not going to bother quoting them; I’ll save that magical discovery for you.

So this Cowboy guy we’ve been introduced to a few sentences ago gets busted for having sex with someone underage, and then B-11 is like “gonna start having sex with juvie Jemima aw yeah” but then…whatever the fuck this means happens.

But the booty of his desire had run from reputation, fleeing town, and fleeing with her, his Summer of ’42 dreams died like destiny’s deadwood.

She left town, in other words. He wanted to have sex with her, but she left. See, it sounds kind of mundane and uninteresting when you word it like that.

I think I’m just going to wrap this up here because, like, fuck off, but if you feel you need more Bob Honey in your life then check out this very entertaining Amazon review, which I suspect may have been written by Sean Penn himself.