Ken Wall’s Bathing With JFK is a sprawling political satire, legal comedy, and character-driven comic novel set in 1990s Texas. Its narrator, Austin Grant, is a bored Houston lawyer whose youthful fascination with John F. Kennedy has left him craving the kind of grand, consequential life he imagines JFK lived. Austin’s solution is to challenge entrenched state senator Buzz Laughlin, a conservative celebrity with deep pockets, a talent for spectacle, and a long memory. What follows is an unruly campaign filled with dirty tricks, disastrous appearances, false arrests, sexual complications, and enough alcohol to alarm a distillery. The book establishes Austin’s central contradiction early: he genuinely wants to live boldly and serve a purpose, but he’s spent years confusing appetite, attention, and performance with significance.

The novel is funniest when it turns campaigning into organized chaos. Austin’s team includes Martin, his brilliant and fiercely loyal lifelong friend; Sarah, the sharp-tongued strategist who rarely lets him escape his own foolishness; and Linc, whose enthusiasm produces its own memorable trouble. Their underfunded operation lurches from door-knocking humiliations to media ambushes while Buzz’s machine answers every setback with another attack, arrest, or strategically placed umbrella. Wall understands the theater of politics, particularly the gap between what candidates say, what consultants arrange, and what voters actually notice. The episodes are deliberately excessive, but they’re tied together by a perceptive idea: a campaign can reveal a person even while teaching that person how to conceal himself.

Austin’s voice drives this satirical comedy novel, and readers who enjoy shameless first-person narrators will find plenty to work with. He’s quick, observant, vulgar, self-dramatizing, and often much more perceptive about everyone else than he is about himself. His endless jokes create a breathless rhythm, though the book’s length and appetite for digression can make some comic routines feel extended beyond their strongest beat. Still, the humor gradually gains emotional weight through Austin’s relationships with Martin, Marie, and his father. Martin gives the story its warmest friendship, while Marie refuses to become a prize waiting at the end of Austin’s adventure. Her clear-eyed understanding of him keeps the romantic comedy elements grounded in consequence rather than wish fulfillment.

That consequence is what gives Bathing With JFK more staying power than its wildest scenes initially suggest. Austin enters the race hoping to become larger than life, wins through a mixture of luck, nerve, loyalty, and questionable tactics, then discovers that victory can arrive after the things that matter have already begun slipping away. The closing pages resist an easy redemption and land on a fittingly uneasy note, with Austin finally recognizing happiness and responsibility just a little too late. As a political fiction novel, legal satire, and boisterous story of male friendship and delayed adulthood, Bathing With JFK is profane, energetic, and unexpectedly melancholy. It’s ultimately about a man learning that living a big life and living a meaningful one aren’t automatically the same thing.

Pages: 479 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0H73MJLQS