Book Bimbo, signing in with a review of Rebecca Novack’s upcoming novel.
Imagine that Luigi Mangione is a 32-year-old lesbian sex worker, hired by a shady group of code-named, neo-Nazi agents to assassinate a right-wing cult figure reminiscent of an unholy fusion of Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump.
Got it? Great. That’s the central plot to Murder Bimbo.
As you can guess, this novel’s got plenty to say about today’s cultural landscape. Our central character, the eponymous Murder Bimbo, is on the run after taking out Meat Neck, a rising star of the alt-right. Time’s running out before the feds catch up with her, so she uses her precious last few hours to try and get control of the narrative, begging the host of a feminist investigative podcast to take her story and turn her into a folk antihero.
Once she’s typed her tale out to Justice for Bimbos, she opens a new email, this time to update her ex – and now the story’s playing out a bit differently.
Over the novel’s three acts, the main plot is told and re-told – the first two sections in epistolary format via series of emails, and then addressed directly to the reader. Each time the story is revisited, Murder Bimbo adapts narrative, motivation, and identity to fit her audiences.
It’s a fast-paced and entertaining story of political hijinks with plenty of cutting points to make about perspectives across the political spectrum, but the fractured and constantly reshaping narrative can be challenging for the reader. Murder Bimbo is the most unreliable of narrators, meaning the reader can’t get a sense of who they’re really dealing with, and so many plot-relevant questions are left unanswered by the end.
The structure is a clever method of exploring the slippery nature of “truth”, particularly in our current circle of politics/news hell, but ultimately too much is left unclarified to leave the reader satisfied by the epilogue.
Emily Jessica Turner 