“Why should truth matter?” asks a character in America Fantastica, Tim O’Brien’s first novel in more than two decades. It’s the question at the heart of American politics today—and the question that O’Brien has spent his entire career trying to answer.
America Fantastica opens in 2019, when a “lying infection” has taken hold of the nation. Our narrator Boyd Halverson, a compulsive liar and disgraced journalist, now makes a living flooding the internet with “fresh untrue truth content.” Pushed to the brink of despair, he robs a bank, kidnaps the teller (a motormouthed woman named Angie Bing), and lights out across America’s highways with his hostage, bound for Mexico. The getaway morphs into a quest for revenge on the man who tanked Boyd’s journalism career, and soon enough, these unlikely bandits are dodging uproarious brushes with danger. “I think it's funny, but I also think it's kind of nasty—like the times we live in,” O’Brien tells Esquire.
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