Sean Penn's Dystopian Novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff: Just Jump in

Cover art for Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

As Marc Maron said in a podcast interview with Sean Penn, the actor’s new book called “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff” is something that you’ll want to read slowly. He referred to the language in the book, which includes a lot of uncommon descriptive words that not all people may recognize. If you have a dictionary app on your phone, you’ll definitely want to keep it handy when you take a literary trip through Penn’s peculiar debut novel.

You may also want to read it in segments since the book will leave you feeling baffled and reflective at times. From the stories of the main character to the organization of the book’s content, it’s not predictable in any way. It’s a mix of poetry, ranting and stories about a fictional character. Originally, “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff” was a much shorter audio book, which Penn narrated with the pseudonym Pappy Pariah and released in 2016.

He expanded it to include a broader perspective on modern social issues and a more detailed collection of stories. It’s a great book to read if you like cult classics, and you’ll discover the truths that are relevant to today’s society if you keep your mind focused on looking beyond the satirical roller coaster.

Sean Penn Paints A Dystopian Picture Sprinkled With Social Issues

In “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff,” Penn makes bold references to the current president. Penn stated his real concern for the country in the podcast interview with Marc Maron, and he said that he started feeling that way during the 2016 presidential race. Penn also makes clear references in the book to other well-known people who aren’t involved in politics. For example, he makes a reference to a character named Fletcher who is based on El Chapo.

You may remember seeing tabloid stories about Penn’s controversial meeting with the infamous drug lord in the past. The main character in the book is named Bob Honey, and he’s a textbook oddball who is a divorced part-time government assassin. Although Bob Honey can’t have a completely normal life because of his assassin job, he tries to reach out to people and socialize from time to time even though his antisocial personality eventually dominates.

$29.00 >> https://t.co/ARFiK2NY7k << Oscar Winner Sean Penn signed book -Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff : NYC pic.twitter.com/01Uk0tawFU

— bookmyths (@bookmyths) May 20, 2018

Sean Penn shares the dystopian tale of Bob Honey and his adventures using powerful prose that can feel heavy at times. If you read too quickly, you may miss some of the conspiracy references. For example, one sentence says that the media essentially pre-convicts cops of “racial rancor by Ruger in a country rife with rule of law.” Some of these tongue-twisting sentences are also loaded with hints. In this particular sentence, Penn refers to a fictional shooting of five police officers.

When Bob Honey sees the effects of the incident, he decides that the media is to blame. As you read some of Bob Honey’s statements in the book, you’ll notice that they seem both passionate and angry. Penn comes from a frustrated stance with his writings, and he vents that through Bob Honey in the character’s distorted world. You can see Penn’s political opinions about several different issues in Bob Honey’s responses to the issues around him.

It’s easy to spot the social issues Penn likely cares about. In the book’s epilogue, Penn references the civil conflict in Yemen, the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Russian hacking, net neutrality, and MeToo. Penn mentions these real-life events with a touch of criticism and anger towards the absurdity underlying these solvable issues. He even mentions Scientology as a solution for some people to distract themselves and find peace at night. He mentions these upsetting events and mentions Scientology as an understandable escape from the absurdity of real life. However he doesn’t let the questionable religion off the hook either, accusing the religion corrupting humanity. Read an except from Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff here:

“Some seize on scientology, padlock wives inside a cupboard so when is it time to say ‘We all knew about Ron Hubbard!’ And while we feuded, failed, and fought, we watched Sagan’s precious dot turned tawdry on its axis raising humanity’s moral taxes.”

Disaster Cleanup And Humanitarianism

If you’re familiar with Sean Penn as a person and not just as an actor, you may notice some similarities between him and Bob Honey. They’re both baby boomers, they’re both passionate about humanitarianism and they’re both unhappy with the current political climate. A Vogue article explained Sean Penn’s personal desire to help people in distress. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, he and Sanela Diana Jenkins formed an organization that provided relief to victims. In “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff,” Bob Honey not only goes to Iraq to survey the damage after the war ends but also drops what he’s doing to go help with relief efforts after a devastating hurricane in the United States.

When you notice the similarities, you can see how Penn made the sincere part of the character reflect the values and ideas that are important to him personally, and social responsibility is one of those. Penn’s insight into the aftermath of the fictitious hurricane came from his real-world experience of helping after Hurricane Katrina. In a CBS interview, Sean Penn and the interviewing reporter recounted some events that followed the catastrophic storm. The reporter covered the relief activities as well, and she remembered talking to Penn there. Sean Penn organized rescue efforts and arranged for boats to go help people who were trapped in floodwaters. In the interview, he said that they rescued about 40 people during the first day alone and that many other people who owned boats helped. Humanitarian themes that run in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff are likely related to Penn’s own experiences.

Credit: CBS

#MeToo And Women’s Rights

If you’re up for the challenge of reading the entire book carefully, you’ll see that Bob Honey’s ideas are sometimes prophetic and sometimes wise. The subtle commentary of the book, of course, is thinly veiled under carefully crafted language, metaphor, and satire. While he often creates parallel social movements with fictitious names or details, he does call out #MeToo by name.

In most parts of the book, it seems that Bob Honey’s character agrees with left-sided political values, based on his frustration for the obvious social and political problems that plague Bob Honey’s America. However, he slams the #MeToo movement when he asks what’s with the movement and calls it the “infantilizing term of the day.” In a series of questions, he asks if it’s a platform for accusation impunity and then asks what happened to due process.

“Where did all the laughs go? Are you out there Louis C.K.? Once crucial conversations kept us on our toes; was it really in our interest to trample Charlie Rose? And what’s with this “Me Too?” This infantilizing term of the day… Is this a toddlers’ crusade? Reducing rape, slut-shaming, and suffrage to reckless child’s play? A platform for accusation impunity? Due process has lost its sheen?”

Though Sean Penn has received mixed reviews about his undertaking of the #MeToo movement in this book, I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss it entirely. Given Penn’s own history of public accusations, and subsequent law suits, his criticism of the movement that grew out of online outrage and hashtags deals with the swift hand of internet justice and a lack of public deliberation. When Aziz Ansari was exposed for acting poorly and inappropriately on a date, published on Babe.com, mainstream media asked if this was a story worthy to exist side-by-side with Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Louis CK revelations.

Though Ansari’s actions were less than admirable, the coverage of the story amongst other scathing MeToo revelations inevitably smudged the comedian’s career in a significant way. Penn’s criticism of the movement is not adversarial against the core of the movement. Penn stands by female empowerment and protections against work-place harassment; he is more concerned with the lack of due process in the mass “internet jury” who decides the fate of these powerful men.

Violence in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff

In most parts of Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, the protagonist supports ideas that tie into other modern social movements. For example, he stands up as a bold hero who challenges bullying at the end of the book in the epilogue. There’s a part where he addresses the current president and challenges him to a Twitter duel. This part of the book is clearly taking a jab at President Trump’s enjoyment of tweeting his disdain for specific people, which many Americans see as bullying. In the book, Penn simply calls the person in charge of the country the landlord.

The epilogue shows a clear reflection of the 2016 presidential campaign and the ensuing inauguration. In reference to inauguration Day, Bob Honey says a million women dwarfed the landlord’s “penis-edency” that day, which is a reference to the women’s march that took place in the United States on the same day as the presidential inauguration- an undeniable politically-charged reference. If you have any doubts about who the landlord is supposed to be when you start reading Bob’s rants, you’ll put those to rest when you reach the part where he refers to the landlord’s hair as “cotton candy.” He also mentions alternative facts, Russia, the NRA and just about every other term that Americans are now familiar with after the 2016 election cycle.

Sean Penn's own life may be mirrored in Bob Honey Who Just do Stuff — Sean Penn’s own life may be mirrored in Bob Honey Who Just do Stuff

As a humanitarian, Penn has strong views about bullying and violence. In an interview with Trevor Noah, Penn shared his views about the Parkland shooting. He said that he watched the reactions of the kids after the shooting happened, and he admired their courage to stand up for change just days after their harrowing experience. Penn touched on how bullying is often a common issue among school shooters, and he made it clear that he did not design Bob Honey’s character with the idea of promoting violence.

In the epilogue, Penn writes a poem in italics and makes clear allusions to violence we see in the international community- another surprising break from fiction and Penn’s re-commitment to his ultimate humanitarian motives. Penn seems inherently concerned with corruption and political violence as we can see in the first lines of this unconventional poem; “Communes of corruption, in no mood for nuanced things just tit for tat instructions as the pompous pendulum swings. Cyber ways a-wagin’ by hands that seem so clean while Yemen’s children die in a terror best unseen,” (Penn, page 153).

A few lines later, Penn references the largest mass shooting in recent history, “at the Mandalay in Vegas, so much terror death and shock little men made big by legal bomb fire stock.” Penn’s use of metaphor and satire may be the best way to write alongside the real-world violence he references at the end. The absurd violence throughout the novel, juxtaposed to easily referenced mass violence in the epilogue, is appropriate.

Penn’s own outrage over senseless violence is not an outlier attitude. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, Penn says that he was most inspired by the Parkland survivors speaking out against violence and advocated, un-apologetically, in front of conservative lawmakers for stricter gun laws. Penn’s frustration for citizens opting out of the civic process and only expressing outrage online is an obvious theme in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff.

Environmental Responsibility

Although Bob Honey is a contract assassin, he’s not someone who simply chooses a life of crime to hurt others. Bob’s targets are usually elderly people who use too many resources. When they reach a certain point of overuse and the government marks them for it, Bob must go kill them with his mallet. It’s easy to think that Bob Honey is just a killer if you take the book at face value, and this isn’t the message behind the character’s actions. As Penn says, Bob Honey Who Just do Stuff is stuffed with metaphors.

The elderly people are symbolic of real companies or industries that use too many natural resources, which Penn has expressed his concerns about in the past. Killing the people who use too many resources is a necessary part of survival for the rest of society in “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff,” and Bob is simply a government tool to make that happen. His disenchanted and antisocial views show a realistic response to his status as a slave to corruption, and it seems that Penn tries to show how many people become that way when they get comfortable or complacent in their roles.

Internet Rights And Security

Another recent social issue that “Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff” touches on is protecting digital privacy. Today, most Americans have been affected by data breaches, social media hacking or other forms of information security breaches. When Americans learned that Facebook data was harvested and sold, the outrage led to court actions. A USA Today story that detailed Bob Honey’s character described him as someone who despises social media and advertising.

This is another point in the book where you can see Penn’s disdain for abusive corporate greed, and you see again that Bob Honey is both wise and prophetic in his views. In a society where people know that they have to use some of their personal information online but also know that it will be sold to the highest-bidding marketer, readers can easily relate to Bob Honey’s disgust with advertisers and social media platforms.

Credit: Comedy Central

Is Mental Health Crisis an issue in Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff?

Bob Honey notices a marching group of demonstrators at one point in the book after he showers off at the beach. He points out their “Yellow Lives Matter” banner and describes the marchers as young people with yellow hair. He also notes that they’re not as “deplorable” as the violent followers of the landlord with the cotton candy hair. After watching the marchers pass, Bob’s analysis of them is that their actions are indicative of the country’s mental health crisis rather than a cultural crisis. In adding this unusual tale to his novel, Penn points out the real issue of a lack of mental health resources in America today.

The rest of the book is mostly fiction with satirical and sometimes bitter commentary. For example, Bob’s references to his ex-wife who bought a musical ice cream truck to drive around and unintentionally torment him with reflects some of Penn’s feelings about his own divorce. You won’t have a hard time realizing that he despises the current president and much of what he stands for with his emasculating descriptive words. His frustration culminates at the end of the book with a rant/poem in the epilogue, and the rant touches on several of the social issues mentioned previously as well.

If you enjoy debating or reading about social issues, this book is certainly an intriguing written adventure that gives you some obvious perspectives and some that you’ll have to dig for to find. As Sean Penn said in his CBS interview, some people will love the book while others will loathe it. He also said that the same is true about him, and he’s fine with that. His activism and concern for society led him to leave acting and write Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff. However, he said in his interview with Trevor Noah that he may write a more cheerful and non-dystopian novel in the future if things change for the better in American society.

Read about Sean Penn’s reaction to mixed reviews of Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/05/sean-penn-some-of-my-best-laughs-have-come-out-of-the-worst-reviews

Find the book on Simon and Schuster and Amazon.

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