The Donnie Diaries: RETIRED

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By TJ Brown

James Mueller is not interested in making you comfortable. That much is clear from the very first pages of The Donnie Diaries: RETIRED, the latest installment in a series that has been described as part Hunter S. Thompson, part Joseph Heller, and part Dr. Strangelove, which is accurate and also somehow still undersells it.

What Mueller has built across this series is something genuinely unusual in the current landscape of political commentary. It is not a hot take. It is not a polemic dressed up as literature. It is a full-blown satirical universe with its own recurring voices, its own internal logic, and its own darkly comic cosmology, and RETIRED continues that universe with the same freewheeling energy and the same unflinching eye.

The journey through America's political and cultural landscape that Mueller takes you on here is hilarious and outrageous and poignant and provocative, sometimes all within the same paragraph. The mysterious Dr. Phineas T. Redwell, whose mad dispatches from the front lines of American meltdown carry much of the book's philosophical weight, is the kind of literary creation that only works when the author behind him is genuinely angry about something real. Mueller is. And that genuine fury is what keeps the satire from tipping into mere snark.

What sets this series apart from the enormous pile of Trump-era political commentary is the literary seriousness underneath the clown makeup. Mueller came to this work after a career in fine art, higher education, and healthcare administration, and those intersecting worlds show up in how the prose thinks. The cultural autopsy he performs here is disciplined even when it is deliberately unhinged, precise even when it is outrageous.

For readers who have been laughing to keep from screaming and are looking for a book that meets them exactly there, this series was written specifically for you. Fasten your seat belts, as Mueller himself warns. He means it.