"The Greatest Place on Earth": Personal Note: A Work of Absurdity?

"The Greatest Place on Earth" is an absurdist allegory: a respected psychology professor is recruited by "The Bureau" to investigate a town whose residents have collectively gone mad. The premise stays simple; the construction does not.

Weisman builds the book as a collage. Stylistic invention sits next to direct citations, outlandish humor next to compassion, random dispatches next to historical photographs and faux documents. The method is the argument, and the argument is what it felt like to live inside the United States during the first two years of the Trump administration. The form had to be plural to register a country that no longer agreed on what was happening to it.

JEF also distributes Weisman's short prison-metaphor Lifers: A Micro-Novel. Of the two, "The Greatest Place on Earth" is the louder, more dispersed book, the one that uses the full apparatus of the absurdist novel to do what straight reportage could not do to that period of American life.