The Total Emasculation of the White Man by David Valentine Bernard

Published by Strebor Books on August 4, 2015

During the course of the novel, a character happens upon a book entitled The Total Emasculation of the White Man and can't decide whether the bombastic title is utterly brilliant or ridiculous. I'm going with utterly ridiculous as a descriptor not just of the title, but of the novel as a whole. While the book might be intended as making fun of racism and sexism, it wallows in both without managing to produce humor that would appeal to anyone older than 14.

Edward Binkowski wanted to be a writer but placated his mother by enrolling in the only medical school that would accept him. He fills notebooks with unfinished stories about a talking penis. When Edward meets a woman who claims to be his conscience, he wonders whether his ex-girlfriend has engineered an elaborate joke. Soon he's having penis hallucinations. Then his roommate, Cletus Jones, has an encounter with a hillbilly that leads to a sexual encounter with a senior citizen ... unless he imagined it.

A third man, who wakes up in a car suffering from amnesia, meets a woman in the road and finds a letter telling him that he is Felix Higginbottom, that he on a mission from God, and that the woman is Cassiopeia, an angel sent to assist him. For no particular reason, Higginbottom becomes obsessed by a racist tome that eventually infects other characters with its descriptions of white superiority. A fourth, math professor Arlo Rasmussen, is trying to take care of a baby. He has his own encounter with Cassiopeia after receiving his own letter from God.

David Valentine Bernard doesn't write the kind of prose that wins literary awards. It isn't awful, but it is awfully amateurish. Bernard is addicted to adverbs and is particularly fond of "confusedly." His sentence structure is too often awkward, he relies on clichés, and some of his sentences "confusedly" trail along with dashes and ellipses that reveal an inability to string thoughts together with care and coherence. Unfortunately, he likes to begin sentences with the word "unfortunately." However, he sometimes changes up by beginning sentences with the word "however." A little of that is fine but when a reader starts to notice the same transitional words being used over and over it becomes grating.

I imagine the story is meant to be hilarious. Much of it is childish. Bernard has a middle-school boy's fascination with prostitutes, vaginas, penis size, "huge breasts" that "flop out" of bikini tops, "full firm breasts" that seem ready to "spring from" halter tops, and with "gyrating" butts that might "explode from too much friction." Male characters are constantly having erections and are amazed by them. Eventually some of the idiots in the novel attain enlightenment, but that just makes them enlightened idiots. They hardly seem worth writing about.

Every now and then, Bernard writes an amusing scene, but the humor is far from original. To the extent that things happen to the characters, I suppose the novel has a plot, but it seems the result of haphazard narration rather than coherent planning. I'm surprised that a publisher found any merit in a novel that is best described as stupid.

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