Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why

April 13, 2020
Washington Post columnist Petri (A Field Guide to Awkward Silences) takes on the Trump presidency and related issues with this superb and stinging collection of new and previously published pieces. She skewers triumphal accounts of Trump’s inauguration (sarcastically writing that “Bono, and Bruce Springsteen, and Elton John, and the Rolling Stones, and Beyoncé, and all the top artists were there”), mocks conspiracy theories by recasting the “deep state” as a regional college (“Does Deep State have a football team? No, but it controls the outcomes of all football games”), and analyzes the Mueller Report with a pitch-perfect parody of a middle-school book report (“One way in which this book did not succeed was its lack of female characters”). Also included is Petri’s Post column “Trump’s Budget Makes Perfect Sense and Will Fix America, and I Will Tell You Why,” which the White House, mistaking it for sincere praise, publicized in its “1600 Daily” e-newsletter in 2017. But the best essays are those in which she is dead serious, including 2018 pieces on families separated at the Mexican border and Christine Blasey Ford’s decision to reveal her past with now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Acidic and spot-on, Petri’s work captures the surreal quality of Trump’s tenure as perhaps no other book has.

April 15, 2020
A collection of columns that provides sharp political humor in these serious times. As a columnist for the Washington Post, Petri shows that we've come a long way since Art Buchwald. Her barbed perspective owes more to the cinematic surrealism of David Lynch, conjuring a reality where what was once thought impossible has become improbably normal. As she explains in the introduction, "we have much less need of imagination than we did before. People once had to produce parodies and caricatures to imagine all the ways things could go wrong. But now--we need simply watch." Petri has watched and taken notes amid the new normal of the Trump administration. In one column, she takes up Trump's persona, lamenting, "I thought I had the best team ever assembled, but I had a big coat full of skunks, six rejected concepts for Batman villains, and a disembodied voice that yells rude things in the Quiet Car." Evoking Macbeth in a column titled "Nasty Women," Petri reveals the cabal of witches who are determined to keep Trump from prevailing. They "have an election to rig. They must make haste. The vagenda is quite full." Evoking Beckett's Godot, she puts Vladimir and Estragon on the periphery of Trump's inner circle, waiting in vain for the promised pivot toward the center, away from the radical extremes of his rhetoric. As is usually the case with collections of columns from a daily paper, the results are varied (more hits than misses), and the humor depends on one's political persuasion. Yet Petri's vision is consistently more prescient than dated, and she gives a powerful voice to the resistance of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. From her very first words--"Relax. Nothing Is Wrong"--she warns readers to be very, very afraid. An instructive demonstration of how alternative truths play themselves out.

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Starred review from May 15, 2020
The Washington Post humorist Petri (A Field Guide to Awkward Silences, 2015) scraps the straightforward analysis common to some Trump-era political writing, instead enthusiastically leaning into the bombast of the administration's circusesque performance. With this brilliant and wry collection of essays, lists, letters, plays, and more, Petri hilariously roasts the last five years in American culture. Her rewrite of Waiting for Godot features Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus waiting for Trump to pivot toward presidential behavior. Readers will also find a firsthand account of the Trump sons not talking to their father about business; a book report on The Mueller Report; and episode descriptions for a TV show about Space Force. Readers will learn how Paul Manafort managed to spend a million dollars on office decor; and how to sleep at night when families are being separated at the border. Petri moves seamlessly between political and social topics, keeping her content engaging and never making a dead horse of any particular issue. This book proves her Swiftian knack for satire, and an intellect beyond late-night comedy. A stress-reducing belly laugh, and assurance that creative writing's role in interpreting culture hasn't been lost in these uncertain times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)