It’s been said again and again but rarely so plainly illustrated: American life is now too berserk for fiction to keep up. Tim O’Brien’s wild, rollercoaster satire America Fantastica is as wacky as its title suggests; but it can’t compete with the daily trainwreck that calls itself the land of the free and the home of the brave. O’Brien tracks with furious contempt the spread of a highly contagious illness: mythomania and delusional conspiracy theories infecting the body politic and poisoning a defenceless citizenry in the dark pre-Covid days of 2019. The name ‘Trump’ is never mentioned in the novel, but the ‘avalanche of oratorical whoppers’ issuing from the White House is the obvious source of O’Brien’s raging dismay.

The hero (or anti-hero, depending on your tolerance of moral slipperiness) is Boyd Halverson, a compulsive liar struggling mightily to kick the habit, who robs the community bank in a small town in northern California in order to make some changes in his life and shrug off a debilitating bout of lethargy. ‘He had grown sick and tired of synthetics, rayon in particular.’ Boyd absconds with $81,000 and the lone bank teller, Angie Bing. Like all self-respecting criminals, he heads for Mexico – with Angie in tow, semi-willingly kidnapped.

Described as diminutive and ‘cute’, Angie is cloyingly ‘spiritual’ yet ruthlessly opportunistic. She steals the show with her relentless motor-mouth perkiness. A ‘yapping dwarf’ is what one bystander calls her, but she’s the perfect foil for Boyd, who mostly drinks and mumbles monosyllables. Back stateside, they embark on an obscure cross-country hunt for Boyd’s former father-in-law. Hot on their trail is Randy Zapf, Angie’s murderous, dim-witted boyfriend. Jilted and jealous, he intends to do something excruciating to Boyd using needle-nosed pliers.

The cast expands apace, each new entrant zanier than the last. There’s the perpetually priapic Henry Speck, who’s in love with his own ‘excellent pecs’; Enni/Peggy, who’s either a 20-year-old Finnish lap-dancer or a 17-year-old from Eau Claire, Wisconsin (either way she’s a ‘wholly animate flesh-and-blood’ sexual fantasy); two crafty ex-cons called Cyrus and Carl, one of whom wields a garden hoe as a weapon; a vicious, racist cop called Toby van der Kellen, who spouts inane election fraud lies; and Wanda Jane Epstein, dispatcher for the two-man Fulda police force, and her best friend Hedda Todhauser, who’ll do anything to bring down Douglas Cutterby, the abysmally corrupt owner of the bank Boyd robbed. It’s all a glorious romp, fast-paced and fun, with an occasional flash of savage violence.

O’Brien is not some young gun trying to make his name by shouting louder than the rest. A 77-year-old Vietnam veteran with a long and distinguished writing career, he’s the author of two books – Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990) – that are among the best we have about the Vietnam war. With America Fantastica, he’s clearly venting his rage about Trumpworld. His two most sympathetic characters hold hands as they watch the country ‘go to hell on cable news’.

O’Brien has the good sense to channel rage into comedy. Even as the epidemic of lies and delusions morphs into the pandemic we all remember and bewail, it becomes clear that Covid will be, in this funhouse fictional universe, an engine of justice. Bad guys succumb, but those last hours on the ventilator turn out to be pleasant, the victim floating ‘merrily on the tides of the disease’. And for the good guys? Wedding vows echo along cold prison corridors.