I do not think one can blame the barbaric culture of the New World for … The Ink Truck. The novel has the look of something typed in dull moments around a newspaper office: the first chapters of the great comic novel that Joe at the next desk is going to finish one of these days. The Ink Truck is about a newspaper strike, and one feels that Mr Kennedy was unfortunate to have had the free time given to him to finish his 'comic masterpiece'. In the fashionable mould of Catch-22 or Kurt Vonnegut Jr, his novel departs from anything resembling real life before it even starts. The crazy, surrealistic antics serve no apparent purpose either, and are not as funny as they should be. Still, the novel is readable and just now and again it manages to break through the desperate hilarity to make a serious point. Mr Kennedy is, after all, a serious and successful American journalist … and he has something to say about the way American society crushes idealism.