Booklist Reviews
Old-school nightly news anchor Ted got caught on video calling an assistant, a young woman from Poland, a "Russian whore." A minor miscommunication over hairspray provoked his out-of-character attack—which went viral, naturally—but it was the proverbial last straw. Ted's wife, Claire, just asked for a divorce; he's experiencing a disconcerting pain; and his only child, Franny, works for a cartoonishly corrupt "news" outlet called Scheisse and doesn't speak to him. When Franny agrees to her bad-boy boss' proposal that she profile Ted in his tailspin, Ted must ultimately accept that his decades as a reporter don't make up for his slip—or even correspond to what people want from the news anymore—and examine the ways he failed Claire and Franny. ?Kenney's (Truth in Advertising, 2013) timely satire succeeds with significant nuance. Ted did a bad thing and can't seem to stop fumbling, but it won't be hard for readers to find sympathy for the devil. Most winning, though, are Kenney's incisive considerations of parenthood, familial love, and what actually matters when all is seemingly lost. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Talk to Me
It's a phenomenon that has become all too familiar in the age of YouTube: An embarrassing video of a celebrity goes viral, obliterating a reputation with the speed and thoroughgoing devastation of an F5 tornado. In Talk to Me, his sly second novel, John Kenney (author of Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2014) dives into the muck of one such scandal, exploring its human toll while raising troubling questions about what it means to produce and consume news today.
The anchor of a highly rated network news show for two decades, Ted Grayson looks like he's on top of his game. But when his ire at a young immigrant woman leads to a meltdown that's captured on video, he's launched on a downward spiral that threatens his career and causes him to question everything he thought he knew about being a journalist. Compounding Ted's crisis is an impending divorce and the fact that his daughter, Franny, works as a reporter at the bottom-feeding website scheisse.com, run by a young German billionaire whose motto is "NO RULES. JUST CLICKS," and who's only too happy to capitalize on Ted's sudden fall.
Kenney takes the reader inside the maelstrom of the 24/7 news cycle, as an increasingly bewildered Ted watches his world collapse around him, helpless to counteract the forces fueling his destruction. In Ted, Kenney has created a sympathetic and fully realized protagonist who's haunted by the price he's paid for a success that now seems hollow, by the decay of his marriage to a woman he still loves and by an estrangement from his daughter that's deep enough to allow her to become complicit in his downfall.
For all the fast-paced and knowing entertainment it provides, Talk to Me may also serve as a useful antidote to rushed judgment when the next celebrity scandal erupts.
This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
It's a case of death by internet when the fortunes of a beloved network news anchor take a nose dive after a shameful mistake on the set. Kenney (Truth in Advertising, 2013) opens his modern morality tale with a literal fall—a man jumping from a plane with no plans to open his parachute. As he plummets, he imagines the coverage: "Ted Grayson, the longtime anchor of the evening news, died today in an embarrassing skydiving accident on eastern Long Island. Sources say the disgraced former newsman may have taken his own life. He was fifty-nine." A few weeks earlier, Ted exploded at the young Polish hairstylist on the set, mistaking her smile of excitement for one of ridicule, shouting obscenities and repeatedly calling her a "Russian whore." Video of the incident, which the victim has on her phone, takes just a few days to make it from Facebook to the international news. Among those disturbed by Ted's bizarre, uncharacteristic meltdown are his estranged wife, Claire, who i s already filing for divorce, and his even more alienated daughter, Frances. She, too, is a journalist of sorts, working at a site called "scheisse," where "hundreds of nearly identical-looking people in their twenties and thirties, from fine universities, posted...an endless feed of insipid online drivel, a kind of visual and verbal vomit, under the guise of journalism." When her boss asks for a piece on her dad, Frances' poison pen is ready to go. Kenney is able to portray all three of these selfish, damaged family members with depth and sympathy. While it would have been easy to make us hate them all, he achieves the opposite and saves a sweetly ironic twist for a redemptive ending. A powerful and moving rendition of a story we've been waiting to hear: what it's like to be the bad guy in this ripped-from-the-headlines situation. Copyright Kirkus 2018 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
LJ Express Reviews
Ted Grayson is the last of a dying breed, a respected, wealthy, somber, white news anchor. He is slow to recognize the impermanence of his position even aftera video surfaces of him verbally abusing a young female coworker. With calls for his resignation and a
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Kenney's bittersweet, darkly funny latest (after