Goodbye Mexico

Phil Jennings has scored another winner with Goodbye Mexico, a sequel to Nam-A-Rama. Both are wonderful satires that will keep you laughing at the antics of the lead characters.

So, here we have a story that makes Alice's adventures seem like a day in the stacks at your favorite graduate library. Phillip Jennings brings us a further adventure of Jack Armstrong, this time in Mexico not long after America's mis-adventures in Vietnam ended with a makeshift helipad on the rooftop of 22 Gia Long Street in Saigon. Jack Armstrong is feeling pretty good about himself being appointed as the Chief of Station without knowing much Spanish. He rationalizes that his talents were finally recognized and the powers above him decided he could learn all he needs to know on the job. Soon, his pal Gearheardt shows up. If you have read Nam-A-Rama (and if you haven't, you should), you know the relationship these two have and what happens to Armstrong when Gearheardt involves him in his plans. Armstrong genuinely considers Gearheardt his best friend, a genius, a maniac, a patriot, and someone who is always working unseen and unknowable angles. It isn't that we go through the looking glass as much as we enter a house of mirrors and try to run through all of them at once. There is little point in my trying to summarize the plot for you because it involves so many possibilities that I would not only be spoiling your fun, but shortchanging the story because I failed to chart out all the possibilities as I was reading it. Without such detailed reference materials I am sure I would make a false turn and then where would we all be? However, it involves a possible assassination, a possible overthrow of Mexico or maybe Cuba or both, Chapultepec Castle, an innovation in the CIA called the Blame-o-matic(tm) that was dreamt up by an enigmatic three foot tall goat roasting man known as the Pygmy, a top quality international intelligence agency known as the ISP, the Vatican, a burro riding bible thumping replacement as chief of station who has a problem with the revealing attire of Armstrong's secretary, Juanita Sanchez, several paid assassins of varying ocular acuity, bombs, guns, a nudist named Marta who has to room with Jack Armstrong, a brothel named Las Palomas, something to do with Palenque, Club Tristeza, the Model 156 Doomsday De-nutter, a huge cast of prostitutes (not all to be found working in the brothels) and, as they say, much much more. It is hilariously funny, and the more you like absurdity, the more you will enjoy the satire of this book. Phillip Jennings has written another brilliant novel that is as good as and might be better than the first. Gearheardt is a marvelous character and his relationship to Jack Armstrong is one you will always remember. All the characters in the story are wonderfully drawn and fulfill their roles in the plots superbly. Brilliant.

If you like your books with little discernable plot but interesting characters, then Jennings' books, this one and his first, Nam-A-Rama, are for you. Beginning with Gearhardt and Jack Armstrong in VietNam and later in Mexico, Jennings takes his two "heroes" through wild-and-wooly adventures, with everyone from Ho Chi Minh to various "Wild Bill" Donovan wanna-be's. Read the two books in the order they were written. I thought Nam-a-Rama a slightly better book, but maybe that's because I'm more interested in Viet Nam than in Mexico. Intellegence gathered from a completely disreputable source in B-stan suggests that Jennings is writing at least one, and possibly two, more books in the series. The next installment has Gearhardt and Jack's mother eloping in some kind of Harold and Maude over-under action, Can't wait.

There was a time in this country when subversive or suggestive books would be tossed atop a smoldering stack of half-melted Elvis records and burned in the church parking lot. Though it tended to dampen first printing sales, this Joan of Arc Phenomenon--as cultural historians would come to call it--gave the writer of said charred book the wonderful gift of longevity. Generations of readers would find it on the 'Banned Books' table while strolling through Barnes & Noble or read about it and other incinerated materials in Esquire magazine. The obvious result would be a long life, guaranteed by the match-happy Puritans who tried to keep it out of innocents' hands all those years ago. Well, perhaps it's time to resurrect book burning. I say this because I have it on good authority Goodbye Mexico--which the author himself says struggled to see daylight--was held-up in publication because it was felt his first and highly-praised book undersold. This led to a war of biblical proportions over how to present the second book, just as good if not better than the first, to save it from a similar fate. That one such book could languish is unthinkable, but two? More than I can handle. So I'm calling on readers of all stripes to fill their preachers' heads with stories of Goodbye Mexico's positive portrayal of prostitutes, its naked agents, its anti-government tendencies and--perhaps most impressive of all--its man-on-burro action. Perhaps then, if the streets run black with charred bits of Goodbye Mexico, this book will get its due. The traditionalists among us should please see the exhaustive review below, with which I agree wholeheartedly--except for being stunningly off-target on the main character's name (it's Jack Armstrong, not Jack Morrison) and a slighty-creepy over-zealousness that would, if I were the author, convince me to keep my windows locked at night. Goodbye Mexico might be perhaps the best book I've read in quite some time. Which, of course, makes it ripe for burning.

Nam A Rama struck me for its therapeutic power, not in the current psycho-babblish way but more like the way those ancient Greek guys handled tragedy, loss, violence and the all `round mendacity and stupidity of the human race. Goodbye Mexico has all of those same elements, including the slapstick humor (although fans will have to be patient to the end). But it affects me more as a man's book than a philosophical one. A man's manual. On how to be crazy, confused, mendacious at times, even cruel, but never without honor and what the British elite used to call noblesse oblige. Of course Gearheardt is back - with a vengeance. And Jack Morrison also returns as his foil. But arguably the most outstanding character this go around is Marta. I love Marta. I am in love with Marta. I love her in the Platonic sense. I also love her lustfully, artfully, physically. I lie awake at night thinking about Marta. About how wonderfully we could be together. How we could remake the world together. Man is lost without woman. Without Beauty. Without the Beauty that woman represents. Without mystery and contradiction and tension. All of which is embodied in woman. Man is stupid, ignorant and lazy. Woman is complex, artful in her essence, hard working. Man is free to roam and scavenge and generally screw off. Woman is trapped in her own fate. Man philosophizes. Woman acts to preserve herself. But what about the two together? Goodbye Mexico will make Joyce Carrol Oates very happy. It will provide ample material for one of her graduate seminars in literary/psychosexual deconstruction. But Jennings has already done all the deconstructing of man and woman that is necessary and has found power in that elusive elemental relationship. Woman is honest. And the most honest of woman is the [...]e. She tells you right up front what the deal is. So Jennings proposes this: why not prostitution as the best model for business and politics? Anyone who has dabbled in either or both can attest to the fact that you are inevitably going to get the weenie at some point when you least expect it. So why can't we just be up front about it from the beginning? And why not use prostitutes to change the world? Jesus did... With all that said, I have it on good authority (a clandestine website that was very quickly expunged by the Department of Homeland Security) that Goodbye Mexico is not a work of fiction at all. It is the latest CIA FMP (field manual/provisional). And this is a trial balloon to see how public opinion will react to a new, more innovative approach to intelligence gathering. As a post-9/11 man, I say give it a try! That goes for women too, whatever you are.