Run Robbie Run

Jon Pepper's political farce Run Robbie Run is a razor-sharp satire of an American political party at war with itself— and it's wickedly funny.

Set during an election year nomination process, the novel follows two spectacularly unfit candidates: Dewey Fenwick, an 87-year-old former president who can barely stay conscious, and his successor Robbie Crowe, a lazy, self-absorbed billionaire who stumbles into the nomination without earning a single vote.

Pepper's comic gifts are immediately on display.

The opening scene, in which campaign aides frantically try to rouse Dewey from a Golden Girls dream before television journalists arrive, is a masterclass in political absurdity. But the novel's real engine is Robbie — a man so thoroughly unprepared for the presidency that when asked about his vision for America, he offers a few lyrics from What a Wonderful World and tells his aide to write it down.

The satire cuts in all directions.

The party machine, corrupt billionaire puppet-masters, a fawning media, campus radicals planning "mostly peaceful" firebombings at the Chicago convention — no faction escapes unscathed. The fictional surveillance program "America's Just Rewards," essentially a social credit system dressed up in loyalty-points marketing, provides the novel's chilling undertow beneath all the comedy.

The supporting cast is superb: Dinda, the idealistic campaign intern who slowly realizes the party has no actual principles; Senator Hiram Fry, a straight-talking old warhorse who delivers the novel's most sobering warnings; Lady Janice, the former First Lady desperate to return to the White House; and Marty, Robbie's long-suffering aide whose deadpan exasperation carries the humor throughout.

Pepper writes with the confidence of someone who has watched Washington up close, and it shows.
Run Robbie Run is sharp, fast, and bracingly cynical — a comic novel that lands its punches because the absurdity never strays too far from reality.