Have you met Will Tripp? He’s the pugnacious dwarf lawyer who starred in Harry Stein’s Will Tripp: Pissed Off Attorney at Law. That was probably the funniest book of 2014, certainly the most amusing novel I read that year.
Will, whose credo is ‘Shut up, and get on with it’, was busy paying his way through law school by means of his athletic prowess, sort of. He specialized in being tossed back and forth by the inebriated patrons of a local bar until some do-gooding crusader took time away from battling against secondhand smoke and carbon emissions to intervene to Save the Dwarfs and got the sport of dwarf tossing declared illegal. Will had to find new employment, inspecting sewers. It was while padding down the local cloaca maxima that Will’s settled dislike of politically-correct busybodies hardened into a gem-like and hilarious contempt.
The focus of Will Tripp’s debut was his battle against the cry-bullies and virtue-signally denizens of the academy, a breed whose moral stench is far worse than the inhabitants Will encountered investigating the underground chambers that paid his law school tuition.
Is there any more repugnant locus of vengeful, braindead politically-correct insanity than the institutions of American higher education? I am not sure we have instruments delicate enough to measure such infinitesimal quantities, but (leaving the so-called mainstream media to one side) if there is a contender, it must be Hollywood, ‘the very cradle of suffocating right-think’.
In this new adventure, Will Tripp Goes Hollywood , Will and his team go to Hollywood to do two things: 1) save a hapless actor whose career was ruined because he was accused of hate speech for admitting, en passant, that he thought America was a great country, and 2) punish the people responsible for his downfall.
I won’t say more about the plot, only that you will want to have this book with you over the summer. Fight back against the liberal weenies who decorate their lawns with Black Lives Matter signs, utterly ignorant about what that totalitarian movement actually stands for. You owe it to yourself to celebrate by indulging in that essential adjunct of existential independence: humor.
Humor is the bane of the totalitarian impulse wherever it may be found, which is why the scolds and harridans of social media and the academy so abominate it. One of Will Tripp’s inner circle is Marjorie Spivak. She is of dubious legal competence but, being wheelchair-bound, she can be a great asset with a jury. ‘Even when the facts of the case looked bad,’ Stein explains, ‘Spivak, bravely struggling from her chair and lurching toward the jury, instantly sent the sympathy factor soaring — and that was before they heard her stutter!’
I don’t think you are supposed to write things like that these days, but Stein does, deliciously. I particularly liked Will Tripp’s encounter, early on in the book, with a reporter from the New York Times. After he is ushered into Tripp’s office, Will invites him to take a seat.
‘“Thank you,” he said, starting towards the chair.
“Not there.” Will pointed. “There.”
“On the floor?”
“If you would.” Then, earnestly, “It’s a Little Person thing.”’
Will Tripp Goes Hollywood is full of such day-brighteners. Simply buying the book is an act of #Resistance. Reading it in public would probably strike Merrick Garland as an act of ‘domestic terrorism’ or ‘insurrection’. Careful, or he will sic Gen. Milley on you.
It’s probably an open question whether Amazon and the other self-infatuated emporia that try to regulate our reading will long allow the Will Tripp novels to occupy their virtual shelves. Buy it now before it is too late!
