The Stench of Honolulu

The legendary Deep Thoughts and New Yorker humorist is back with his very first novel—a hilarious, absurd, far-flung adventure tale. Are you a fan of books in which famous tourist destinations are repurposed as unlivable hellholes for no particular reason? Read on! Jack Handey’s exotic tale is full of laugh-out-loud twists and unforgettable characters whose names escape me right now. A reliably unreliable narrator and his friend, who is some other guy, need to get out of town. They have a taste for adventure, so they pay a visit to a relic of bygone days—a travel agent—and discover an old treasure map. She might have been a witch, by the way. Our heroes soon embark on a quest for the Golden Monkey, which takes them into the mysterious and stinky foreign land of Honolulu. There, they meet untold dangers, confront strange natives, kill and eat Turtle People, kill some other things and people, eat another thing, and discover the ruins of ancient civilizations. As our narrator says, The ruins were impressive. But like so many civilizations, they forgot the rule that might have saved them: Don’t let vines grow all over you.
Jack Handey is the funniest writer in America. And his funny is a very particular, sublime, kind of funny—it builds and builds and is related to his supreme control of language. It is witty, minimal, subversive, and also strangely sweet. Read this book, and you will feel better, period.
—George Saunders, #1 New York Times –bestselling author