Deadpan

# Review: Deadpan **Author:** Richard Walter **City:** Los Angeles **Stars:** 4/5 **Generated:** 2026-04-04 (GPT-4o) **Word Count:** 448

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Dwight Bridges wakes up as Richie Ritchie, a famous Jewish comedian. Richard Walter doesn't ease into the surrealism; he just plants it there and moves forward. The shift from small-town car salesman to a man living another man's life is the premise, and from there Walter builds a novel about identity, about the masks we wear, about what happens when you're forced to become someone else and then you don't want to go back.

The brilliance of Walter's setup is that Dwight's confusion is ours too. He doesn't know how to be Richie. He doesn't know the routines, the history, the code. So when he stumbles onstage and wins an audience with a routine he doesn't fully understand, it's genuine. The audience is laughing at something real—his actual bewilderment, his accidental honesty. Walter captures that moment with precision: unintended brilliance is more powerful than calculated wit.

The novel uses comedy as a lens for examining bigotry and identity. Richie is Jewish; Dwight is not. As Richie, Dwight encounters people's assumptions, their jokes, their expectations. Walter doesn't lecture about this. He shows the discomfort, the moment when Dwight realizes he's being included in a joke he doesn't get, or excluded from a moment he should understand. The satire works because Walter doesn't force the politics; he lets them emerge naturally from the situation.

Some characters fade into the background. Their lack of development leaves certain plot threads feeling thin. But that's almost beside the point. Walter isn't interested in a tightly plotted thriller. He's interested in one man's disorientation and evolution. The characters who matter—the ones who teach Dwight something, who challenge him—those are fully realized.

The prose is sharp and witty without being precious. Walter can write a comedic beat and then pull back to something quiet and introspective. The pacing never flags. Even when the surrealism gets disjointed, the book keeps moving, keeps asking its central question: who are you when you stop performing?

The novel's strength is its tonal balance. Walter moves between the absurd and the sincere without letting either overwhelm the other. The satire lands because it's grounded in real emotion. Dwight genuinely cares about being Richie. The audience he's winning genuinely laughs. The moment he realizes he might want to stay in this life is genuinely touching.

*Deadpan* works because Walter trusts his premise and follows it to its logical end. The book is clever and funny, but it's also about something—about the possibility of reinvention, about whether we're ever truly ourselves or just performing the best version we can manage. That's the kind of question that sticks with you.

★★★★☆