While light in tone and stylistically breezy, he marbles it with anger at America’s inability to lower the temperature surrounding the Second Amendment ... Mr. Israel, who writes with verve and curdled humor (think Carl Hiaasen), is nothing if not disrespectful, depicting a president named Piper as spineless and Speaker of the House Frank Piermont as, shall we say, transactional ... May Steve Israel’s biting, amusing satire chip away at the evil and hypocrisy that inflame and stymie the gun control conversation.
'A Modest Proposal' it’s not, but Big Guns and its rollicking carousel of political skulduggery provide plenty of opportunities for Israel to score points off the foibles of our political system — an admittedly broad and eminently hittable target ... Humor is notoriously subjective, but Beltway wit has always seemed to me curiously adolescent, long on corn and innuendo, short on sophistication. Big Guns is no exception ... If this is your kind of thing, you’re probably going to need an oxygen tank at some point; more refined readers may find themselves groaning. Israel’s writing in general is more energetic than skillful — his first novel was written 'in cars, planes, and the occasional boring meeting,' he says — but no one is likely to pick up Big Guns in search of shimmering literary prose. As it is, he is surprisingly deft at constructing a twisty plot capable of keeping the reader flipping the pages — a harder task than it seems ... The denouement is cleverly engineered but emotionally empty, and the book’s moral standpoint can be reduced to a shrug.
...[a] brilliant politcal satire ... He takes the same kind of snarky, tasty bite out of eastern Long Island’s overdevelopment that Carl Hiaasen does from the plunder of Florida ... Promise readers that the only way they will put this book down is when Charlton Heston’s ghost pries it from their cold dead hands.
Israel reportedly wrote his previous novel largely on a cellphone, which may have accounted for that book’s antic comedy. His new novel is a more polished affair, but also flatter. Too often the humor shoots blanks ... Where we crave something subversive and shocking, a satire commensurate to the American carnage, we get, instead, one-liners that feel Bob-Hope-fresh. And ridiculous as the characters in Big Guns are, they pale next to the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre or politicians like Marco Rubio and Rob Portman, who tweet their prayers at grieving parents while accepting millions from the gun lobby.
The American Freedom from Fear Act allows Israel to reveal not only the grotesquerie in the legislative process, but the frightening ease with which such a measure can get passed, given enough money, political IOU’s, and complicit media ... Israel recalls Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Buckley in their liberal bents and sense of the perniciously absurd. Will he be gunning for No. 45 in his No. 3?
...a wonderfully irreverent satire about the fractured and fractious American political and lobbying system ... This clever political farce exposes the extremism of the gun rights issue, both pro and con, with a smart plot, loud, noisy characters, and hilarious dialogue ... It’s a rollicking comedic trip.
