Sewer, Gas & Electric by Matt Ruff. I bought this in part because the author used to hang out (and for all I know still does hang out) on the Usenet group rec.arts.sf.written, back when I read the group regularly. He was one of a large cadre of people who would veer off-topic into political threads that generally annoyed me, but he was fairly reasonable about the whole deal (for a person on Usenet, at least), so I bought this book to find out what sort of thing a person like that would write.

It turns out, he'd write stuff like this:

"That's the other member of our team," Hartower told him. "Joan Fine." In a conspirator's tone: "Formerly Joan Gant."

"Gant?"

"Ex-wife of the billionaire," said Prohaska. "She was the chief advertising executive over at Gant Industries, comptroller of public opinion. Once upon a time."

"Not only that," added Hartower, "but she's also the illegitimate test-tube daughter of Sister Ellen Fine, the renegade nun who led the Catholic Womanist Crusade back in the Oughts."

"Womanist Crusade?"

"You know: the lesbian habit-burners who wanted the Pope's permission to be ordained and have babies."

"Oh," said Eddie, who didn't know, actually. "So if her ma was a queer nun and her husband was a billionaire, what's she doing working in the sewers?"

"Penance."

Not really what I would've expected. But fun stuff all the same.

I'm not sure there's a name for it, but this book belongs in the same category of hyperactive satirical fiction as things like Neal Stephenson's The Big U and Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. The world described is almost indescribably daft: you've got a black Amish pacifist eco-pirate roaming off the US coast sinking polluting ships with kosher salami; eccentric billionaire Harry Gant, whose fantastic ability to develop and sell new neat ideas is matched only by his short attention span; mutant great white sharks roaming the sewers of New York City, and a cargo-cult Nazi submarine base under the Statue of Liberty; a 181-year-old one-armed Canadian-born Civil War veteran; the aforementioned Joan Fine, and all the backstory that goes with her; and a holographic simulacrum of Ayn Rand in a hurricane lamp. It doesn't really make any sense, but then it's so ridiculously inventive that it doesn't really have to.