The LA Times described the book as having “cat’s cradle of a plot,” which I think is a great description. A little taxidermy shop in Leamington Spa in 1875, as it turned out. I knew little about aardvarks or taxidermy before the novel began, but quickly realized that the novel would follow Alexander Paine Wilson, a GOP millennial congressman whose entire re-election campaign would be brought down by the arrival of a gigantic taxidermied aardvark on his doorstep-and that I would follow the selfsame aardvark back in time, to the year when it was stuffed. The surrealist poet André Breton perhaps would have called it a “waking sentence,” the sentence that “taps on the window.” Three years later, in the run-up to the 2016 election, I had a feeling that I would be writing a political novel, and thought the absurdity of “enter the aardvark” might offer some interesting investigation into the absurdity of our modern political climate. I’ll often write from titles, and this phrase appeared in my mind eight years ago. The novel began with three words: enter the aardvark. Could you tell us a little about the germination of this book, and how it came to be? It leaps back and forth between present day Washington, D.C., and 19th-century England, and is launched into action by the mysterious gift of a taxidermied aardvark. Foreign Policy & International RelationsĮnter the Aardvark is a witty, wildly imaginative work of political satire.
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