The Roar of Raging Nothing: The Uncanny Resemblance Between Sean Penn and Amanda McKittrick Ros

The difficulty of writing a novel means there are a lot of rotten novels out there, published or not. But sometimes writing is bad in a grand, towering way; sometimes the badness of a novel is so overwhelming that it warrants recording and remembering. Such is the case with Sean Penn and Amanda McKittrick Ros, whose bad novels have a great deal in common.

At a glance, the two authors have little to do with each other. Ros was an Irish teacher born in 1860 who lived a mostly quiet life and died in 1939; Penn is an American actor born in 1960 who has lived a flamboyant, well-recorded life since the early 1980s. Ros self-published her first book, Irene Iddesleigh, a slight novel of Victorian-style romantic fiction, while Penn’s first novel, Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, which strains to be political satire, was published by an imprint of Simon & Schuster with wide availability. Although these writers are a century apart and completely different on the surface, their work bears astonishing similarities, from the way each author assembles sentences to the bombastic, preposterous ego hovering without sufficient disguise behind the work.

Both books are bad, but “bad” does not suffice. A little word of three letters does not plumb the depth of these books’ failures. The critic wrote that “is a thing that called “akin to the product of a postmodern literature bot. It doesn’t seem quite possible that a human person wrote this mess.” Ros’s prose is so bad that little societies formed around her in the early 20th century, reading her work aloud as a contest to see how long one could keep from laughing. Penn’s prose is so bad that pictures of his sentences have been shared around social media for ridicule.