I know this won the Booker Prize, but it didn’t really work for me; I don’t find capital punishment or spree shootings terribly funny, and I’ve been close enough to media frenzies in real life to know what they look like from the inside and get irritated by inaccuracy. I could see that the author was trying to extract humour from the American Condition, rather like Saul Bellow in Henderson the Rain King, where I had a similar humour failure.