With all due respect to the recently departed, I have no idea what this book was about. I don’t know if there was a story at all. I know there was one character who started out as a deep-sea diver who got involved with a suspicious plane crash, but instead of investigating that crash he just seemed to have a bunch of tortured conversations with drunks and other people at the margins of society. Apparently our main character was both a former physics student and a former race-car driver, as unlikely as that seems. I also know that the other main character was his sister, who seemed to be having hallucinatory conversations with an entire carnival in her childhood bedroom. She may or may not have been inappropriately in love with her brother, who may or may not have inappropriately reciprocated.
Oh, and their father apparently worked on the atomic bomb? That came up at sporadic intervals, for reasons surpassing understanding.
Perhaps there were answers and resolutions in the last hundred pages or so, I wouldn’t know. I tried to speed-read those pages in desperation but I can’t actually speed-read so I just looked at each page and pretended I was absorbing the text. This method did not lead to a significant decline in my understanding of the plot.
I apologize to the many people who will think this book is a work of genius. I try to always maintain room for the possibility that I am a moron. I certainly felt like one while reading this book.
