Prophetic Satire: Old Enemies by Lee Oser

Old Enemies by Lee Oser
Senex Press, 2022; 262 pp., $13.99

Lee Oser’s newest novel, Old Enemies, is a fantastic little book. 

The novel’s protagonist, Moses Shea, is a genius. He speaks a handful of languages, seems to have memorized thousands of books, and can banter with just about anybody.

At the same time, it’s not hard to understand why Shea is unmarried, stuck in a job that’s beneath him, and eating tacos alone in Las Vegas at the novel’s outset: Shea is awkward, pompous, and a little too old-school. His banter rubs people the wrong way, and the only girl he ever loved dated him on a dare—and left him for his friend. 

Shea’s life changes when he bumps into an old college buddy, Nick Carty, who offers him a job. Carty’s firm Carthage wants to use both human capital and artificial intelligence to revolutionize the world of advertising. Carty wants Shea—a bastion of eclectic knowledge—to mentor his team of young programmers and help them corner and shape niche international markets. Shea takes the job, and he, his team of programmers, and Ann Fitz (a Carthage exec) move onto the campus of St. Malachy’s, a newly defunct Catholic college in Massachusetts, where Carthage has set up shop.

The book builds in absurdity. Not all of the college’s alumni are happy with the school’s demise at the hands of rioters, nor are they thrilled about Carthage moving into their space. Tension over the future of the school becomes a symbol of the tension that drives the novel as a whole: using Antifa rioters, the politicization of corporate America, and curmudgeonly old Catholics, Oser explores the complex relationship between old and new, memory and progress, faith and secularism, tradition and technology.

Yet as divisive as those subjects might sound, Old Enemies doesn’t read like a lopsided diatribe or rag full of cheap political shots. Nor is it simply a rehashing of the same controversial issues that have already divided and exhausted American Catholics. Instead, Oser is able to apply his unique perspective to a number of nuanced issues while defusing tension and forcing readers to confront legitimate questions about themselves and the world. Oser’s secret weapon? His absurd sense of humor. 

Old Enemies is the rare kind of book that can make you laugh out loud, sometimes more than once a page. This is partly because of Oser’s gift with similes—for example, one character’s laughter is compared to the barking of a pomeranian inside of a body suit—and partly because the characters he creates are so entertaining. Instead of assembling a cast of stereotypical hacks to make fun of, Oser pulls together a motley crew of edgy and original maniacs: Old Enemies features a Russian spy, aged basketball stars in trench coats, a homicidal security guard, and even an octopus with a penchant for calculated chaos. These characters manage to be wholly original even as they threaten to remind readers of someone they know—or, more worryingly, the worst parts of themselves. The cast of Old Enemies is what makes the novel an effective satire; the book is impossible to take too seriously, but also impossible to ignore. 

Together, Oser’s characters provide broadly appealing, thought-provoking entertainment. One great moment comes when the former president of St. Malachy’s uses an interpretive dance to calm protesters down during a riot on campus. This scene is emblematic of Oser’s style of satire, because as absurd as it seems, it’s also hauntingly close to real life: at the start of COVID lockdowns, a real NYU dean emailed students a real video, complete with an original dance performance set to REM’s “Losing My Religion,” in order to console students for the non-refundability of tuition.

Even when Oser’s satire is less tethered to the antics of real university administrators, it still manages to be both funny and pointed. In the world of Old Enemies, for example, there is a journalism wing in the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute; its patients are reporters who have faced psychiatric breakdowns after watching their favorite journalistic narratives crumble because of their complete disconnection from reality. 

In case it sounds like the novel just takes shots at certain intellectual strains in higher ed or journalism, the faux pas and pedantic references of the book's protagonist, Shea, prove that Oser is an equal-opportunity satirizer. Shea represents the alternative to everything Oser wants to mock, but Shea himself is such a ridiculous hero that Oser’s criticism becomes appropriately self-aware. Shea is a sort of comically tragic figure: a double-chinned, unemployed, loveless hero; a woman’s pet name for him is “fat little donkey.” His career is entirely dependent on the generosity of the very people and institutions he purports to loathe. Then, too, there are the ways that his own social blunders uncomfortably demonstrate that he might have something to learn from those people. As much as Shea exalts himself over others, consistently rebelling against their assumptions about the world, he also demonstrates the flaws in his own stalwart intransigence.

The result is a thoroughly entertaining and insightful novel, which consistently uses humor to force introspection. For example, the novel’s climax, which reads like a bizarre combination of Monty Python and John Wick, is as hilarious as it is astute. Bloody, bawdy, and wildly entertaining, it drives home the absurdity of the book and the ridiculous world that it inhabits—a world terrifyingly like our own. 

It’s true, however, that a lack of subtlety might be the novel’s greatest weakness. Satire, of course, should never be really subtle, but it shouldn’t explain its own jokes either. Sometimes Oser, eager to carry a joke across the finish line, belabors his own point. For instance, after we learn about the psychiatric wing for journalists, a reporter says, “Facts are the bane of this profession.” The point, already implied, would have been better left unsaid. Later, Oser threads the needle better: when campus police officer Sergeant Nachman is asked why she viciously harasses Catholic alumni of the college, she simply says, “I was raised Catholic.” No other explanation is needed, and the joke—like Oser’s argument—is stronger for it.

The power of satire, when done well, is it that it enables people to internalize legitimate criticisms without getting defensive. Wittiness and humor make the “medicine” of criticism easier to swallow. But that requires a difficult balancing act: if satire is so ridiculous that it becomes incomprehensible or unserious, the argument gets lost. Old Enemies, however, occasionally falls into the other extreme: explaining or belaboring certain jokes, the text takes the punch out of a few of its own punchlines and turns some sharp arguments into clumsy insults. In these instances, instead of winning people over with wit, some lines risk alienation through antagonism.

Even so, Old Enemies is a great read. It’s thought-provoking, entertaining, funny, and it rings true more often than not. The book is also well written; Oser, who has taught English literature for decades, uses line-level technique masterfully. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Old Enemies seriously addresses a number of important cultural, moral, and spiritual questions—while refusing to take itself, its characters, or the world it inhabits too seriously.