Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Standardized tests + war on terrorism = fodder for satire? And both in the same book?
Say this for John McNally: He ventures where other writers might fear to tread. "America's Report Card" (Free Press, 264 pages, $24), McNally's second novel, is a whacked-out, often inspired satire that romps far and wide over the bizarre landscape of this conflicted country today.
This is no easy assignment, since what is actually happening in the United States often seems as though it must be satire, starting with a president who shocks a foreign leader with an inappropriate embrace to a vice president who accidentally shoots a hunting companion to a war that was initiated over a weapons threat that did not exist.
"America's Report Card" opens quietly, before building toward its crescendo of outrages, craziness, conspiracy and violence. Charlie Wolf has finished his graduate studies at the University of Iowa and, with no particular job prospects, decides to take a temporary summer gig as a grader of standardized tests, along with his comely Russian girlfriend, Petra Petrovich.
And it soon turns out that these are not just any standardized tests being scrutinized in a nondescript building in Iowa City. These are "America's Report Card," "the government's most important assessment of primary and secondary education," crucial determinant of federal education aid and other programs.
This is the grand banana of all tests. Never mind that scorers are paid $8.75 an hour, with no benefits or guarantees or that Wolf's compatriots in the scoring corps include well-known local nut cases, hangers-on and oddballs. Mind-numbing consistency, they all soon learn, is the watchword of test scoring, consistency no matter how answers must be skewed, something that author McNally learned in his own stint as a test scorer. The job was, he says, his "most surreal."
The novel shifts to a suburb of Chicago, where high school senior Jainey O'Sullivan, a once-promising student now adrift in ennui, is filling out an essay question on her national test when she is inspired to write a personal plea: "I don't know who reads these things and I can't imagine what kind of sad life you must have but let me tell you a bit about myself. ... Someone killed my art teacher, and I'm afraid they're after me now. I can't help thinking something terrible's about to happen."
Of course, O'Sullivan's test turns up in the pile being graded by Wolf, who, it turns out, is indeed living "a sad life." Petrovich has left him and fled town with another test scorer, so Wolf immediately requests a transfer to the test repository at the National Testing Center in Chicago, where he soon spends his off hours as Jainey's protector, first from afar, then up close (sharing a motel room).
Things get progressively stranger. Jainey's late art teacher had been working in secret on a scarecrow sculpture that at first appears to be the figure of Osama bin Laden but, with beard and nose and wig removed, turns out to be George W. Bush. The test repository, where Wolf works as the sole security guard in Deep Storage, includes not only the entire country's test results but also a government forecast of each individual's future personality and proclivities.
The plot to "America's Report Card" continues to amp up, with McNally unleashing often hilarious zingers at every inviting target, from No Child Left Behind (renamed "No Child's Behind Left Untouched") to broadcaster Larry King described as being reminiscent "of a corpse that had been exhumed from a long-forgotten cemetery and then brought back to life with a billion watts of electricity."
But all is not satire fun and games, including this haunting passage: "Every time Jainey walked past a TV, someone was either being beheaded or about to be beheaded. And if they weren't being beheaded, they were being blown up. Instead of the world stretching itself back into the shape it was before 9/11 , it had begun to balloon out to the point of nearly bursting."
It is only in the novel's conclusion when McNally's amazingly sure grip on his outrageous material slips, as he tumbles into plot developments too predictable and too melodramatic. Otherwise, "America's Report Card" is a gutsy, highly entertaining and thought-provoking satire for these troubled times.
John McNally discusses "America's Report Card" at 7 tonight at the University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E.; 206-634-3400.
To see more of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, for online features, or to subscribe, go to http://seattlep-I.com.
© 1998-2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All Rights Reserved.
