Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino's final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion-an elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters-the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present.
"Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He's learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino's books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light."
