Marketed as a cross between The Wizard of Oz, A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Road, and Ready Player One, Reed King’s FKA USA chronicles a misfit cast’s perilous and irreverent road-trip across the variegated geopolitical landscape formerly known as the United States of America. Published under the acknowledged “Reed King” pseudonym of a bestselling author and TV writer, the novel presents itself as an unabridged and annotated memoir composed by protagonist Truckee Wallace between 2086 and 2088 about events he experienced a year prior. With an irreverent tone lampooning social and political issues, the novel puts a lot of disparate ingredients into one romp of a tale. Its ultimate success for any given reader will largely depend on the type of humor they appreciate.
A resident of Crunchtown 407 (formerly Little Rock) of the corporate Crunch United Colonies, Truckee works in a factory producing artificial foodstuffs, living an uneventful and unambitious existence. Decades prior, the USA dissolved amid climate change, rising sea levels, food scarcity, territorial extremist politics and a continued rise of competing corporate dominance over private and public sectors. The common person ( gazes in hopeless dispassion at a bleak future, only escaping their humdrum present through VR net technology, the Yellow Brick Road.
The trajectory of Truckee’s life changes when he comes into unexpected possession of a cowardly talking goat named Barnaby. A product of medical experimentation to conquer death, Barnaby the goat represents a resource that could impact the world. Soon Truckee finds himself tasked by the Crunch United President to escort Barnaby the goat to allies in the Real Friends© of the North city of San Francisco.
With Crunch and other political factions on their trail, the pair are joined on their dangerous trek west through hostile territories by two companions: an android named Sam who wishes to be human, and Tiny Tim, a former convict who has been lobotomized by the Sovereign Nation of Texas. To reach their destination and discover the truth about Barnaby, the four travelers must navigate past monstrous humans deformed by chemicals and radioactivity, Elvis-worshippers, anti-biological agents of the Android Liberation Front, and more. Thankfully, they have a copy of the snarky and anonymously written The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA to help them.
In terms of its premise, the structure of FKA USA also requires summary in addition to the plot elements. A short quote from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA precede each chapter of the novel. A short editor’s introduction and a series of appendices of ‘historical’ background bookend the novel, and extensive academic footnotes pepper Truckee’s account throughout. The fiction of FKA USA thus forms via three different authorial voices created by the pseudonymous Reed King: 1) Protagonist Truckee Wallace in the main text of the novel, 2) the anonymous author of The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA (a book-within-a-book whose author’s identity is discovered by the novel’s end), and 3) King acting as “editor” of Truckee’s memoir to pen the intro, appendices, and extensive footnotes. As I explore below, I found this structure of FKA USA to be one of its strengths.
To call this plot and structure of FKA USA as ambitious might be an understatement. King combines a lot of disparate elements into his novel. As the marketing claims, it is formed through numerous inspirations or references to popular works. The parallel of the main characters to those in the Wonderful Wizard of Oz are most obvious, and other bits from Baum’s novel (or the MGM film) pop up. The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA also obviously recalls Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. However, liking any of the works that inspire FKA USA does not mean you’ll also immediately like this novel. Because it’s also vastly different from them all. Beyond featuring a journey through a dystopian setting, FKA USA bears no relation to the themes or style of The Road — unless Cormac McCarthy put in a lot of farting? I can’t recall.
And while it may try to capture the irreverent and humorous tone of Douglas Adams, the humor in FKA USA is decidedly more juvenile and cruder. The voices of both Truckee and the anonymous author of The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA bear similarities, with Truckee being slightly more immature compared to the more assured, experienced point-of-view of the guide’s writer. There may not be anything as unique to individuals as a particular sense of humor, and ultimately any enjoyment of FKA USA will ultimately come from the reader’s connection to its comedic spirit. I would liken the novel to the literary equivalent of frat humor in the spirit of The Hangover or American Pie.
While I find Douglas Adams hilarious, I usually find the more lowbrow humor unfunny, even idiotic. Unfortunately, I found FKA USA to be in this vein, so I didn’t appreciate it much. One quote (also featured on the novel’s dust jacket flap) gives you an idea of the pessimistic, off-color humor that defines its simple style:
“Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
No one, dick. It’s the end of the world.”
My lack of appreciation for the humor, and, thus, the novel itself, comes down to its being written from Truckee’s point of view. I’d rather not spend time with him, particularly when he’s trying to make jokes. Effectively a sex-crazed, none-too-bright teenager, Truckee voice became rapidly insufferable to read. One early example from his mind:
But almost every week [Human Resources] stunned a backwoods camper sneaking in to poop in our toilets or steal toilet paper from supply. I once cranked open the shower to find a woman, butt-naked, sloughing about four years of grit down the drain. The only woman I’ve ever seen naked in real life, and she was a sixty-five-year-old hillbilly with dirt in her crack.
Regardless of how any given reader responds to the humor of FKA USA, it does ultimately lend itself as an over-the-top satire of present-day America. Some have even dubbed the novel as “‘prescient,” which goes too far in exaggeration given the sheer absurdity of what Reed King puts into his world building and plot — even given the admitted political absurdity that U.S. Americans currently live.
However, King does broadly satirize themes of technology, culture, and politics in the United States to highlight their problems and how they could lead in general to the further fracturing of the nation and the marginalization of the common citizen. Personally, I would more appreciate speculative fiction that explored these themes in serious tone rather than adolescent comedy. It might be for this reason that I found myself enjoying the appendices and footnotes of FKA USA more than the narrative itself. The details that King puts into the world building are expansive and impressive. Footnotes can be annoying to read because they can break up the text, but I found myself welcoming the breaks from Truckee. They flesh out his cultural and historical references to provide more satirical humor in drier form and without the testosterone-driven coarseness.
Though the style of FKA USA didn’t click with me, its inventiveness and complexity can be broadly appreciated. Not only does Reed fully develop his main cast of characters with unique personality traits, secondary characters are provided the same levels of imagination, and each territory of the now-fractured nation is given its own absurd characteristics and backstory — even if they aren’t directly featured as a setting. Reed also includes a large amount of speculative details, including genetic engineering, advanced personal devices, and energy or agricultural technologies centered around living in a dystopic wasteland. Literally adding to the efforts to make this a better drawn-out future, the novel contains multiple maps that illustrate the geopolitical borders of the territories formerly known as the USA, as well as maps that outline each leg of the cast’s journey from Crunchtown 407 to San Francisco. For those that really love a good map (I’m looking at you, Paul Weimer), I haven’t seen many better ones.
After all that, you may still be wondering if FKA USA is something you would enjoy. Its plot setup, epic scope, and speculative themes are easily broadly interesting. But its style could make it more successful in niches. Thankfully, the publisher does have an excerpt available online for you to read. Sadly, it doesn’t feature the wonderful, scene-stealing character of Barnaby the goat, but it should give you a sense of whether you’d like to read more of this unique vision. I suspect that there will be sequels in the future, and even though it is not my cup of tea, I hope King keeps going unapologetically all-out in his ambition.
FKA USA was published by Flatiron Books in June 2019. It is available where all good books are sold.
