About Lord Atlas

Lord Atlas is a romp through the American zeitgeist: billionaires on superyachts, libertarian religion, militia men playing soldier, prison inmates playing football for charity, a former Navy SEAL who picks up Leviathan expecting whales, a scientist who longs to see the Green Flash, a yellow Lab named Diego, and a satirist’s daughter who discovers that the joke she wrote thirty years ago has somehow become the national nightmare.

Think Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and Tom Robbins meeting the contemporary American satire of Dennard Dayle—a joyride through American absurdity that ends in tragedy, where money becomes theology, politics becomes theater, and everybody seems to have forgotten the difference between freedom and getting whatever the hell you want.

The people in Lord Atlas are relentlessly themselves: Carson with his dry patience, books, a dog, and contempt for bullshit; Suzanne with her appetite for provocation; Garrick with the magnificent self-seriousness of a man who mistakes satire for scripture.

Suzanne Dreyfus grew up in Brooklyn with a father who loved Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Martin Buber, and the ancient Jewish pleasure of making fun of pompous men. Then she went to MIT and fell in love with one.

Garrick Cripps was handsome, brilliant, narcissistic, and besotted with Ayn Rand. Suzanne was an astrophysicist who could calculate the behavior of objects at the edge of the observable universe and still make the poor romantic decision of sleeping with Garrick.

For his birthday, she decided to have some fun. She wrote The Liberation Manifesto, a satire of Ayn Rand, libertarianism, capitalism, heroic men, and Garrick himself. She gave her imaginary philosophy a patron saint: Lord Atlas.

Suzanne thought the joke was obvious. Garrick thought she was a genius.

Thirty years later, Garrick is a billionaire dividing his time between a beautiful house overlooking Morro Bay and a superyacht in the Atlantic. The Liberation Manifesto has acquired wealthy believers, political friends, Wall Street libertarians, private soldiers, and something resembling a theology. Garrick’s old college friend William has even renamed himself Eurynomos, after a demon of the underworld.

You cannot make this shit up.

Suzanne did it for love.

Now she wants to undo it.

Years earlier, after Garrick leaves her a note telling her not to love him but to love the revolution, Suzanne goes home, pours a Campari, puts on Bach, burns the note over a candle, and pisses on what remains.

This is approximately how Suzanne handles disappointment.

Carson McCready has problems of his own.

Carson is a retired Navy SEAL who would like the remainder of his life to consist of his yellow Lab Diego, a Mexican lunch, cold beer, occasional visits with his fifteen-year-old son Michael, and books he never had enough time to read when people were shooting at him.

Carson’s retirement reading is not going much better. He grew up by the ocean and saw the Green Flash as a kid. He opens Leviathan expecting whales and finds Thomas Hobbes, which is how a former SEAL who wants less trouble begins thinking about why human beings agree not to kill one another.

Carson has already done enough killing. And he's got the Navy breathing down his neck over a platoon he once ran, after one of his men cut a Somali civilian's face wide open.

Unfortunately, that man was also the grandson of a Kentucky bourbon baron and fraternity brother of the senator who now wants everyone to agree that no real harm was done. War and all that, you know.

At Dog Beach in San Diego, a pit bull comes after Diego. Carson could destroy the dog’s owner when the man attacks him. Instead, he tries to buy the guy a beer. The man kicks Carson in the nuts.

Carson, lying in the sand, asks whether he would prefer a buttery Chardonnay. This is approximately how Carson’s retirement is going.

A woman Carson has never met has secretly arranged for him to get a job running a telemarketing crew at the San Diego County Jail. Carson needs the money. The crew consists of gang members, skinheads, assorted convicted felons, and, improbably, two men named Terrell Smith — one who resembles Malcolm X; and the other a white skinhead.

Carson does what he has spent his adult life doing. He makes a team.

Soon the inmates are raising scholarship money for kids who look a lot like they did before they ended up in prison. Somebody has the terrible idea of staging a charity football game against a semiprofessional team.

Carson thinks this sounds terrific. So do the inmates. The whole ridiculous thing begins to work.

But Garrick has other plans. He wants to frame Carson’s prison crew as a hidden Islamic terrorist cell, humiliate the federal government, and prove that private power can do the job better.

Suzanne knows because she is still inside the conspiracy.

She also knows Carson is no ordinary washed-up veteran. Garrick doesn’t. Meanwhile Carson is worried about Michael, who lives in Arizona and has fallen under the influence of a militia type named Dirk. Dirk owns plenty of weapons and talks like a man who has seen combat.

Carson smells bullshit. He gives Dirk a little test. He mentions the peanut butter shot, the notoriously painful injection military recruits remember because it feels as though someone has shoved a glob of peanut butter into your ass.

Dirk grins. Sure, he remembers peanut butter shots. Great drinks. Used to get drunk on them. Carson has his answer. His son is taking life lessons from an idiot.

Suzanne is having her own troubles. She has started interfering with Garrick’s plans, which is all very amusing until a man on a motorcycle kicks her off her bicycle in La Jolla as a warning.

The joke has begun kicking back.

And then, briefly, Carson gets what he wanted. Michael comes to San Diego. Father and son drive down the Coast Highway in a convertible listening to the Beach Boys. Michael joins Carson at the charity football game. Carson’s inmates are there. Families are there. Kids who may someday go to college because a bunch of convicted felons decided to help them are there.

Then Garrick’s revolution arrives. Hundreds of people die. Michael is one of them. Having killed Carson’s son, Garrick decides that death alone is insufficient. Aboard his superyacht, surrounded by billionaires, political operators, former government officials, mercenaries, and true believers, Michael becomes the sacrificed son in the new mythology of Lord Atlas.

At which point Carson McCready—reader of Hobbes, lover of Melville, owner of a yellow Lab, reluctant philosopher, grieving father, and former Navy SEAL—has had about enough.

Lord Atlas is a novel about a joke that becomes a religion, a love affair that becomes a revolution, a prison telemarketing crew that accidentally discovers brotherhood, and a man who wants nothing from history but keeps finding history parked in his driveway.

It has dogs, sex, billionaires, militia men, astrophysicists, inmates, cyberattacks, football, stolen valor, revenge, political lunatics, terrible ideas, and people trying, sometimes desperately, to love one another.

Some of it is absurd. Some of it is tragic. Frequently it is both at once.

America in Lord Atlas can produce Garrick Cripps and Carson McCready at the same time. It can turn a private joke into a political religion, and it can turn a prison telemarketing crew into a community raising money for kids. The same excess that produces lunacy also produces invention and reinvention. It produces generosity, swagger, delusion, and courage. And because people can act on those possibilities at enormous scale, the absurdity can become tragedy almost without changing its clothes.