This is a superb psychological novel which takes all the sandcastles of your ego, weighs and measures them, and then lays them out flat on an infinte beach for comparison. Harris's usual beautifully ironic voice presides until the last chapter and a half, when the very gradual landslide of the narrator's degeneration hits its tipping point. Then we get a masterful rendition in the modern-unhinged register of everything that is, and has been for some time, self-deceitful about society/humanity.

The first chapter was published separately as a short story and it shows, but still this is a magnificent novel. Harris dances over issues that betreacle the thighs of others, and he lingers on the things others negligently pass over. A joy to read, a novel as modest (in voice) as it is convincing and self-questioning. ( )