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Book Review: Church of Marvels

This review first appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books on 19 May 2015.

In her richly rendered debut novel, Church of Marvels, Leslie Parry comes close to making her readers’ eyes water from the stench of the outhouses and open-air abattoirs, the crush of livestock and unwashed crowds, and the overall grit and grime of 1895 New York City. Her vivid description of daily life among the underclass and outcasts of the Lower East Side and Blackwell Island’s asylum may make you feel the need for a shower to scrub off the dirt. Oh, but then you’ll be back to soak up more of Parry’s delicious language.

The title refers to a Coney Island sideshow theater run by Friendship Willingbird Church (or Bird), a young woman who has always led an unconventional life. She started early by passing herself off as a boy so she could fight for the Union Army and avenge her brother’s death. Unconventional is definitely the byword in this tale of folks who, at best, are at the very edge of society, if not firmly latched onto its underbelly.

The prologue is delivered by Bird’s daughter Belle, the headliner of the show, loved by the crowds for her beauty, showmanship, and utter fearlessness. We immediately learn from Belle that the theater has burned down, Bird is dead, and that Belle herself has run off to the big city, leaving her twin sister Odile behind. Just in case that isn’t enough mystery to unravel, Belle also mentions she no longer has a tongue: “I’ve stared at it in my own cupped hands, stiff and bloody and fuzzed with white, gruesomely curled as if around a scream.” Finally, she explains that the upcoming story is not about her, but rather about how her actions and decisions have affected other people. She is true to her word: we don’t hear Belle’s voice again until the epilogue.

Instead, the novel follows three primary characters who are not immediately connected to each other, but whose threads become increasingly intertwined as the story unfolds. One, of course, is Odile, whose slight handicap keeps her forever in a supporting role to her star sister. Nevertheless, the two have always been inseparable until Belle runs off (not long after Bird’s death), leaving a two-sentence note on the kitchen table. When an alarming letter finally arrives three months later, Odile decides to make off after Belle, even though she has no clear idea where to look.

The second major player is Sylvan Threadgill, a man whose origin is a mystery even to himself. As a young boy, he was taken in by the family who found him living in their cellar, and years later, when they are all carried off by a citywide wave of consumption, he picks up odd jobs in between underground prize fights. One of those odd jobs is as a night soiler who slops out the street privies. When we meet Sylvan, he has just found a baby abandoned in the muck that he is shoveling.

Alphie, the third character, is the biggest mystery. Who is she? Why has she apparently been hauled off by her mother-in-law and thrown into a women’s asylum? Where is her husband in all of this? And how does she connect to the rest of the story?

There are many questions big and small to be answered throughout the book, and virtually every character has a secret to protect. Parry has woven an inventive and ingenious plot that carries the story along and builds to a fine level of suspense. A few plot points strain credulity, but in the main it hangs together very well.

My only complaint is that at times it felt as though character was being sacrificed to plot. The characters were interesting enough that I, for one, wanted to know them better. Parry does, however, paint an empathetic picture of how difficult life was for those who by nature, choice, or circumstance did not conform to convention in a rigid society.

In the best sense, this book cries out to be made into a movie; the richness of visual and aural detail is practically screen-ready: “Knitting needles tsked from unseen hands,” “a dimpled chin like a pat of butter someone had stuck their thumb in,” “eyes bulging like two boiled eggs from their sockets.”

She describes Odile’s crooked neck and spine, saying, “As a girl, she’d been made to wear a brace, a horrible thing like a metal corset, with a tin collar that trumpeted up her neck and flared beneath her chin. She looked like some kind of Elizabethan monster, clanking down the boardwalk in the ocean fog.”

Parry has fully imagined the Church of Marvels nestled in the quirky seaside carnival that was Coney Island, a world away by ferry from the wretchedness of a city summer. Church of Marvels is just the book to accompany any reader who has plunked down in a beach chair, toes in the sand, ready to be transported to another world.

Book Review: The Other Joseph

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This review was originally published on 23 April 2015 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

It’s hard to imagine two more disparate plot lines than those found in Skip Horack’s two novels. In The Eden Hunter, a pygmy tribesman — and loving husband and father — is captured and sold as a slave in early 19th-century Alabama. In his latest novel, The Other Joseph, a white man in present-day Louisiana works on an offshore oil rig and leads a solitary existence.

Thus, it’s revelatory to understand how similar they are: two stories of genuinely decent men who’ve had their families taken from them through violence and whose journeys — literal journeys in both cases — take them toward some level of peace and possible redemption.

The conceit of The Other Joseph is that its foreword is written by one Joseph, Thomas Muir Joseph, a Navy SEAL who was lost at sea during the first Gulf War, picked up by unfriendly forces, and held anonymously captive for 20 years before being liberated during the Arab Spring uprisings.

Tommy’s foreword introduces a narrative left behind by his younger brother Roy — the other Joseph — when Roy dove from an oil rig off the coast of Nigeria three years before Tommy was freed. So we know before we ever meet Roy that we’re going to lose him. That knowledge does nothing to prevent our emotional involvement in his story.

Roy opens his narrative by describing the day on the Gulf drilling rig that he lost his pinkie finger in an unguarded moment. The distraction partly arises from the fact that he received an email a few days before from someone claiming to be Tommy’s daughter. The rest stems from the sight of two lovely coeds who are pointedly sunning themselves on the bow of a sport fisherman below him; he considers that he used to be someone those girls might have hung out with.

How he goes from dean’s list LSU college student to roughneck oil worker living with his dog Sam in an Airstream trailer is what we learn in the first part of the story. The short answer is that an icy patch on a river bridge claims both his parents when Roy is still a freshman, and — lost and utterly alone in the world, attempting to pick up the pieces — the still-innocent 19-year-old engages in a series of reckless trysts with a 16-year-old neighbor.

The fact of her aborted pregnancy becomes known in the small community, and her shamed parents demand that Roy be prosecuted. The indelible stamp on his driver’s license, the requirement to register his whereabouts with the authorities and inform on himself to his neighbors all ensure Roy’s isolation, even though we understand that this is not the man for whom those laws were written. The scarlet letter is to be expunged after ten clean-living years, a scant three months away when Roy’s dismembered finger drops through the platform grate into the Gulf of Mexico.

The injury buys him time to do some sleuthing into the startling contact from a would-be lone blood relation, a sixteen-year-old girl named Joni, who contacts him without her mother Nancy’s permission. After a phone call from Nancy confirming that this isn’t a scam, but also that no one is inviting him to become Uncle Roy, he decides to pack himself and Sam into the old LeBaron and head cross country to San Francisco to track down his niece.

In Roy, Horack has given us a compelling and observant storyteller. The author effectively juxtaposes Roy’s current life as a roughneck at the margins of society with his middle-class, well-educated upbringing by two teachers, allowing us to believe this gritty man can express himself with such clarity and feeling. Somewhere on his trip, he pulls into a rest stop, “brick restrooms and some picnic tables, and I couldn’t shake the feeling terrible crimes had happened there…It was as if, with no obvious place to visit evil on each other, man had to go blueprint one.”

He decides to stop in and visit the Marine who had spoken to him earnestly but cryptically at Tommy’s memorial service years before. Roy has tracked him down to a place called Battle Mountain, Nevada. (Fans of the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten will already be familiar with the town that he described in 2001 as the “Armpit of America.”)

Roy observes, “On the slope of a faraway hill some irony-deficient crew of civic-proud dolts had spelled BM in enormous block letters fashioned from whitewashed rock. The work that must have gone into that. These are my people, I was thinking. I didn’t know what battle was ever fought atop that brown hill, but if this town held the victors I never wanted to see the place the defeated were sent to live.”

Though the story remains quiet, the possibilities for disaster lurk everywhere: in his side-trip with Marine-turned-hunting-guide Lionel, in his dealings with a Russian marriage broker, and — most dread-inducing of all — in his eventual tailing of Joni through the mean streets of San Francisco.

Every so often, we remind ourselves that we’re pre-ordained to lose Roy, even as we know we get his beloved Tommy back in the bargain, and that it will be Tommy’s voice we’re left with. Finally, the heartbreak is that we understand what Roy’s life might have been like if only he’d known that Tommy was still out there, somewhere in the world. It would have made all the difference.

Book Review: A History of Loneliness

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This review was originally published on 27 February 2015 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Very early in John Boyne’s latest novel, A History of Loneliness, we are given the measure of Father Odran Yates, and it is the man himself who reveals it. His second sentence to us is, “I might start with the evening I showed up at my sister’s home for dinner and she had no recollection of issuing the invitation; I believe that was the night when she first showed signs of losing her mind.”

He describes going to Hannah’s house for dinner almost a year since last being there after her husband Kristian died at only 42. It is just Hannah and her shy, awkward 16-year-old son Jonas there; the angry, older son Aidan has moved to London.

Odran describes the painful evening and how his beloved younger sister moves back and forth between lucidity and confused non sequiturs. And even as Jonas catches him on his way out and tries to articulate his concerns for his mother — during the same instance that Odran has asked whether everything is alright and says he and Jonas should talk more — we see Odran escaping out the door, cutting Jonas off and refusing to acknowledge that anything is amiss: “But I didn’t let him continue…I felt the guilt of it but could do nothing.”

If, at this point, readers are thinking, “How could you?” then they should get used to thinking that consistently throughout this story, with growing urgency and disbelief.

Odran is a middle-aged Irish priest working in a private school for privileged boys, teaching English, celebrating daily Mass, and keeping the library organized. He’s held this position since his ordination in Rome 27 years before, and he is safe and happy here. Not everyone has felt the same, though, because, as it turns out, one of the school’s teachers has recently been sentenced to six years in prison for sexual abuse of minors.

We learn this fact when Odran is summoned to a meeting with his archbishop, which he fears may be an interrogation about what he knew or suspected. Instead, it turns out to be something much worse: The archbishop is yanking him from his cloistered existence and reassigning him to a parish for the first time in his clerical career. The move is at the suggestion of Tom Cardle, the priest whose parish Odran will be taking over.

The reader spends most of the novel understanding far more of what’s going on than Odran, who, like a deliberate Forrest Gump, skates over the surface of his life, innocent and unaware, assiduously avoiding having to put two and two together. In choosing willful ignorance, Odran churns up a wake of pain and devastation, which cuts through his own family, while he plows along, unseeing.

For Boyne, Odran represents an entire denying populace. A History of Loneliness is a horrifying tale primarily for its truth, but it’s at its weakest when Boyne cannot find a way to channel his anger and vents it directly onto the page.

Archbishop Cordington — later made cardinal as a reward from “the Polish pope” for many years of service — embodies all of the brutal inhumanity of the Catholic bureaucracy, and therefore his character is a ridiculous caricature. The back-and-forth arguments and diatribes later in the book seem gratuitous and unnecessary; nothing will convince the church’s protectors that they were wrong, but for the rest of us, Boyne is preaching to the choir.

Odran tells us that he and Tom are best friends, but we never see what bonds them beyond proximity and time, and perhaps that is truly all that is there, and it is Odran who mistakenly equates time with closeness.

Certainly nothing recommends Tom to the reader. No matter how damaged we understand Tom to be — and we are sure to understand far more than Odran does — he is never a particularly sympathetic character. Thus, it seems odd when, later in the story after the extent of the abuse has been revealed, Odran denies knowing Tom three times in a row when he is called out in a hostile public situation, even though he has known Tom since their first day together in seminary.

Boyne uses the same device in The Absolutist, but the Christ/Peter analogy is far more apt in that story. Here, it’s a true head-scratcher as to what he wants the reader to think of his likening an unrepentant serial pedophile to Christ.

Through Odran, Boyne displays real affection for the newly elected Pope John Paul I, whose willingness to question Vatican finances and other apparent church corruption made him dangerous. When we finally learn what failure Odran committed the night the pope died, we are stunned by Boyne’s implication about historical events. Even after this, Boyne’s narrator, in true Odran fashion, retreats into self-absorbed obtuseness, noting that the events result in a black mark against him, effectively eliminating any hope of advancement in the church.

Odran isn’t despicable, and we are pressed to question how well we would do in his stead. In some ways, especially later in the book, I found myself thinking that Boyne might have done better developing a nonfiction treatise on inherent church corruption, and the protectionist attitude that has damaged the institution and all the people the institution betrayed. In particular, he highlights the endemic misogyny of the church to raise a thought that perhaps there’s a connection from that to its rampant pedophilia and tolerance of it.

Finally, Boyne argues that Ireland is particularly vulnerable to this type of abuse because it is so thoroughly Catholic. Indeed, it’s hard to find a parallel example: Italy, in comparison, may love the pope, but only about 10 percent of the population attends Mass. A History of Loneliness highlights the dangers of allowing one institution to wield that much power over a society. Even today, Boyne reminds us, the church runs 90 percent of the schools. It’s a chilling thought.

Book Review: The Stone Wife

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This review was originally published on 3 December 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

What do a cliché-spouting Korean pop star, a love-struck weapons dealer, a brutally vengeful land developer, a haughty-but-position-hungry professor, and a 700-year-old carving of a large woman on a small horse have in common?

They all figure prominently in Peter Lovesey’s The Stone Wife, the 14th installment of his Peter Diamond Investigation series, a dependably popular set of British crime procedurals that debuted in 1991. Lovesey is a prolific crime writer with more than 30 novels and short-story collections to his credit; of his several historical and contemporary series, Diamond is his longest running.

Peter Diamond and his stalwart team of detectives are based in Bath, England. The locale offers a nice selection of plot devices, since the city is on a far more intimate scale than London but still world-renowned, cosmopolitan, and steeped in history. Because each Diamond book stands on its own, a reader new to the series can probably plug in anywhere along the way, though the central characters collect backstory as the series progresses.

All the standard types are here: the gruff and damaged team leader (is there no other way to lend gravitas to all these world-weary cops than to have their loved ones die brutally?); the steady second in command; the ambitious token woman; the irritating know-it-all; the naïve newbie struggling to find his place on the team; and the bureaucratic and political pest of a chief. While not cardboard, none of them are fully realized characters.

The most enjoyable element of a Diamond investigation is not necessarily discovering whodunit — because, frankly, the investigative components are not all that satisfying — but learning which arcane subject we will plunge into during the course of solving the mystery. In installment 13, The Tooth Tattoo, it was the inner workings of a classical music quartet. Here, the subject is Chaucer scholarship. The stone wife of the title refers to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a bit of a local, if aged, celebrity.

In this story, she is carved astride her horse into a hefty block of stone. The coveting of the stone carving, which has a provenance that not only makes it a contemporary of Chaucer’s, but hints that it may have graced a house in which he once lived, drives the action of the story.

If that sounds just a tad too dry, Lovesey does keep the action bouncing along. The murder occurs just a few pages in, at the height of a hard-fought auction of the stone, which is interrupted by its attempted heist. The victim is a Chaucer scholar obsessed with possessing this particular Wife of Bath. He’s so horrified that someone is trying to make off with her that he charges at the thieves, and one of them shoots him.

Heist gone wrong or cleverly planned murder?

The story is peppered with an interesting cast of witnesses and suspects, and includes a dicey undercover stint for Ingeborg, the team’s blonde former investigative journalist who taps her old contacts to get close to the suspected supplier of the murder weapon. She does so by approaching the young Korean pop star under the guise of a journalist wanting to do a day-in-the-life profile of her and her bankrolling sugar daddy, the weapons dealer.

One fascinating point of cultural division: For an American reader, it’s hard to comprehend the team’s single-mindedness in attempting to track down the supplier of the murder weapon, a 50-year-old revolver, or the fact that apparently there is really only one person worth considering as its source. Even more incomprehensible is that the dealer is less a gun seller than a gun renter; guns are so scarce and valuable that criminals return them after use. It seems almost quaint by U.S. standards.

I’ll admit that I’ve only read a few of the later Diamond books, but I wonder if the series isn’t suffering from its longevity. If all the superfluous detective work in The Stone Wife were removed, we’d be left with a not-very-compelling short story. Lovesey fails to sell several plot points, one late in the story involving the weapons dealer that is so inorganic and unresolved that it almost feels as though the author must be planning to carry it forward into Installment 15, except that the stories don’t intertwine that way.

Finally, the willingness of Lovesey’s perpetrators to confess, and the speed with which they do so — of course, over the objections of their solicitor — is worthy of nothing so much as a “CSI: Miami” episode.

Perhaps that’s what these books are: the literary equivalent of an “NCIS” or “Bones” season finale. Both are entertaining and easy to digest, but it’s best not to think about them too hard or ask too many questions.

Book Review: The Dog: A Novel

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This review was originally published 20 November 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Living in a swanky waterfront highrise, cruising in a sweet ride, pulling in big bucks from a cushy (if mind-numbing) job, rubbing elbows with the mega-rich: not hard to take, you say? Then you haven’t read The Dog: A Novel, Joseph O’Neill’s long-awaited follow-up to Netherland. Unfortunately for fans of the lovely, restrained, and insightful writing of O’Neill’s previous novel, The Dog is disappointingly unlovable: a painful, sometimes painfully funny, tortured treatise on the everyday horrors and miseries of modern life, written with such lack of restraint that it feels almost like an endurance test. Do you have what it takes? Are you tough enough to finish this novel? Perhaps that really is what O’Neill is striving for in this cautionary tale that illustrates no matter how bad things are at any given moment, they can always get exponentially worse.

When we meet our almost-nameless hero, X, previously a midlevel corporate attorney, he is several years into living with the aftermath of an imploded long-term relationship; whoever he once was, which perhaps wasn’t all that much to begin with, appears to be permanently unrecoverable. He’s paying dearly, and on many levels, for the crime of having stayed too long and too quietly in a lopsided and suffocating situation, but one that didn’t present a compelling reason to leave until it was just that much too late.

It’s a testament to how bad things are made for him stateside — his bank account drained, his professional reputation in tatters, and his personal Google results sabotaged through “a fiendish new form of defamatory publishing that one might term ‘search libel’” — that X is willing to take a job offer after a chance meeting with an old college chum, Eddie, to be the “family officer” of Eddie’s ultra-rich Lebanese family in Dubai. This even after he is stood up for his surprise interview with Eddie’s irrational brother Sandro in an epic and expensive way.

In this case, “family officer” translates as well-paid errand boy, janitor, and baby sitter, the rubber-stamping drudge whose signature is required on byzantine and highly suspect financial dealings. We see almost immediately how badly this is working out, as X composes mental emails to the two Batros brothers that he knows he will never send. They are pointless; no one listens to him.

So, yes, X works for the Batros family and, yes, we end up meeting Alain, the “Al” in the family — Get it? Al Batros. Albatross. — Sandro’s sullen, obese, badly parented 15-year-old son who portends ill for X.

More than anything, X — who offers that he is the dog, always living in the doghouse — wants simply to be acknowledged as “your presumably decent human being presumably doing a pretty decent job of doing his best to do the right thing in what is, however you look at it, a difficult world.” He expends significant effort attempting to be considerate of others, especially the less fortunate, offering a 10-point treatise (with subclauses) to outline his position on providing charitable donations to help out the foreign workers who toil in near-slavery in the United Arab Emirates, and taking pains to ensure that the women he pays for sex are not victims of trafficking or coercion.

His only comforts in an otherwise intolerable existence are sex with those women, of whom he only requires that they be nice to him; occasional pedicures provided by his diving buddy Ollie; and the use of a state-of-the-art massage chair. He defends his ownership of this chair by saying, “It’s not as if it’s stuffed with miniscule underlings coerced into massaging me.”

If all this screams “first-world problems,” it’s still hard to watch X “dreading the empty and shameful hours and days and weeks and years ahead.” Everyone deserves to be the hero of his own life, but X understands that he has washed out of his: not a has-been, but a never-was.

It is tough to understand what O’Neill is going for in the approach he takes in the novel, making his readers work very hard in puzzling ways. The voice is markedly inconsistent. Sometimes, the story comes almost as one long aside, as though X might be offering all this to some guy he met in a bar, and it is stuffed with pages-long, multi-nested, parenthetical digressions. It’s a gimmicky and aggravating device, with O’Neill insisting you notice how many asides he can nest inside the next and then close them all at once. (The answer is six.)

Then, in huge stretches, X launches into disquisitions on a stunning array of topics, usually in protracted and impenetrable pseudo-legalese. O’Neill dares his readers to slog through it, to read it all. The effect is alienating — perhaps intentionally so, but it’s a perilous tactic.

At times, the prose is engaging, though, and some of the more pithy observations are spot-on. O’Neill adds a new collective noun to the vernacular: “a sadness of masturbators,” for the group of men awaiting their turn with the plastic cup and bad porn in a fertility clinic jerk-off room. He treats with disdain the people who keep score of others’ lives, and notes, “The uncharitable observer — is there another kind?”

As the book nears its close, the reader who has made it this far wonders with increasing urgency how the tale will end, since it does not appear to be working its way toward resolution. O’Neill keeps us anxious to the very last. In a story like this, “happy” is far too much to expect, but the fact that X finally makes one decision for himself is perhaps the closest we can hope to get.

Book Review: The Shimmering Go-Between

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This review was originally published 24 September 2014 in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

By the time a book is in galley form and sent out for review, there is almost always a synopsis on Amazon or Edelweiss that describes the plot. For The Shimmering Go-Between, Lee Klein’s debut novel (Atticus Books, 295 pages), there is nothing. This appears to be intentional, since on the book jacket itself there are two head-scratching statements: “It’s best not to reveal too much”, and “All we can say is: please no spoilers.” This leaves the reviewer in a bit of a bind. One presumes that Klein wants people to read his novel, so how does he suggest enticing them to do so?

The title is from a quote by Vladimir Nabokov: “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall tale, there is a shimmering go-between . . .” Indeed, the book is one long collision between normal, everyday real life—sprinkled as it is with familiar heartache and tragedy—and eye-popping, alternate-universe fairy tale.

We meet Dolores when she is twelve and still undeveloped, but taking advantage of her brother’s pornography collection while she heals from a bad fall from her bike. It’s not a great summer, and it turns worse when she starts feeling oddly nauseated and notices that her stomach is distended. Doctor visits and blood tests reveal the answer: Dolores suffers from parthenogenesis. Perhaps more devastating, she suffers from parents who don’t believe her when she insists that she is truly untouched. After three consecutive, terminated “episodes”, she’s put on birth control and the matter is never discussed again. (Just an FYI to the author: The Immaculate Conception refers not to Mary’s conceiving a child without benefit of insemination, but rather to her own conception free from the stain of original sin. It’s a common—ahem—misconception.)

Yes, perhaps that’s a spoiler, but since all that happens by Page 15, there’s plenty more surprises to come.

Dolores’s condition and history isolate her, and she keeps herself deliberately separate from her peers. She makes it almost through college before finally allowing herself to be wooed by a young politician named Max who has nice eyes and a beard. If Dolores as a virgin is hyper-fertile, Dolores having sex with a bearded man has all sorts of unimaginable outcomes that raise thorny moral issues that reverberate throughout the book, and that Klein and his characters sometimes notice but on which they take no particular position.

The outcome of her and Max’s college affair sets the stage for another long stretch of determined isolation during which Dolores throws herself into her editorial work at National Geriatrics. Eventually, though, she admits to being smitten by her best friend at work, a widower named Wilson whom she describes as tall, kind, and—could it be otherwise?–bearded.

It turns out that Wilson is the heart of the story in many (almost) literal and figurative ways, and on several levels. We get to know both him and his late wife Rue more fully than we do Dolores, who almost becomes a secondary character later in the book. Eight years on, Wilson is still quietly mourning Rue’s sudden death from a collision with a deer; five seconds earlier or later would have made all the difference. But that type of if only . . . randomness is universal. In the sublimely alternate worlds that Dolores, Wilson, and Rue experience, it’s not just that the universe is random, it’s as though any possibility of true choice is removed from the equation. Virtually no consequence is the result of a character’s freely elected choice or action. Wilson’s free will is so compromised that he is controlled by not one but two occupying and competing forces. His one personal choice is to cultivate a unique sexual talent that he shares with paying subscribers through his website; he can hardly be expected to anticipate the consequences when that talent marries up with the product of his blackmail-induced assignation with Dolores. By the time we figure out who is actually narrating the story, the pressure is building toward explosions both personal and widespread.

In a story like this, in which the author introduces multiple levels of reality that demand his readers’ trust and willingness to go along for the ride, it’s imperative that the reality we’re familiar with be utterly believable. Thus, after years of consciously isolating herself for fear of what results from intimate contact, it makes no believable sense that Dolores’s first gambit to re-enter the world is to blackmail her friend, the man she fantasizes about spending a normal life with, into having sex with her. Even more unbelievable, we never hear her consider the probable outcome, based on her past history. He has a beard for heaven’s sake! How can she possibly be caught unawares? There are several such elements that just don’t feel true, when they really need to.

Dialog is not Klein’s strong suit, but his prose is sometimes captivating. Outside of Wilson, Rue, and Dolores—it’s a lovely detail that Wilson surrounds himself with women whose names mean sorrow—the other characters are there merely as plot devices. When Max comes along again late in the novel, it takes a minute to remember that we know him. Klein’s sketches, which are sprinkled throughout to illustrate apparently random story components, have a quirky charm. Klein compares his story to those of George Saunders and Charlie Kaufman, and it’s easy to see the same meta-ness here as in, say, Being John Malkovich. Fans of Saunders’s fiction and Kaufman’s films will probably appreciate this tale that goes between the reality we know and the other ones that just haven’t broken through yet.