This Ballantine Books edition has appended to it an interesting interview with Chaon. In it, the author confirmed my suspicion: He had no idea what he was doing as he wrote the novel.

Chaon just started typing and thought a novel would pop out, like in kindergarten when you are given a silkworm and it starts spinning its cocoon and the moth naturally follows. This lack of planning required the editor, Smetanka, to get very involved in the novel’s construction; so to be fair, I will marry the two and refer to Chaon-Smetanka as the author. The marriage led to a mid-stream change to the narrative stance, ending up with a series of semi-omniscient third-person narrators that can read character’s thoughts and know some future events, but frustratingly dont know the history of St. Podunk, Nebraska. Usually it’s one narrator per chapter, but in one chapter Chaon-Smetanka daringly switched narrators back and forth, and even had an independent authorial narrator state that the other two narrators had the identical thoughts about a little toddler dying in a freezer, right down to knowing the freezer’s storage capacity to a tenth of a cubic foot. (Before I leave that horrific scene I should say Chaon-Smetanka’s gratuitous killing of little fictional Joshua is cheap, unforgivable manipulation of the reader. The description is only there to make us think, Oh please dont let that happen to little fictional Loomis! In my view an artist would never do that, for an artist would understand that Joshua and his mother’s suffering is just as important, just as terrible, as Loomis‘s.)

The language is bland American. The main characters merely drift along, and Chaon-Smetanka balance the aimless main narrative with equally pointless manufactured drama. Red herrings. The most boring of these red herrings were whether Troy could drive home from work in ten minutes and Jonah asking somebody to move his car.

Oh, sure, there were some decent parts. I especially delighted in Jonah’s doberman being reincarnated to assist the police in chasing and punishing the kidnapper. And there was development of some themes: The unhappy leaves; the gravel; and the curlicue, unraveling, unwinding spiral motif that paralleled Jonah’s predictable unraveling.

In the interview Chaon says the seed of the novel is his wife’s response to his own (and I think, boring) fixation on nature versus nurture---his wife observed “people invent themselves”. That’s a good insight. For example, Nietzsche’s body of work and Proust’s narrator present two celebrated examples of how to invent one’s self----they both propose that a self could be invented through articulate art. It is a very interesting subject; lots of things to mine here.

But development of the “invented self” theme was beyond Chaon-Smetanka. It seems to me the theme could not be explored because Chaon-Smetanka chose to saddle themselves with Jonah and Troy, two dreary, inarticulate, unreflective characters, who the author proceeds to cut off from the world (no father, mother, wife or kid, only the most bleak and undemanding kind of job). The two characters are incapable of action, and without action, as I’ve learned from Nietzsche and Proust, you cannot “become what one is”. Nor are characters that have invented themselves introduced to contrast with Troy and Jonah.

Instead, we are only given a simplistic behaviorist model of the self; in Jonah’s case bad wiring, a lack of maternal love and a loaded dog going off made him into a sociopath, borderline psychopath. There is no interesting psychology (like a Freudian unconscious) to explain why Jonah might act differently than the third-person narrator’s report of his beliefs and desires. The characters are beaten down; Jonah believes he had “not been born significant” and at 36 Troy believes it is “too late to become a different person”. Maybe in Jonah’s notebooks is that invented self, but alas we are given no writing samples. I think Chaon-Smetanka has merely provided us with two examples of how to fail to invent who one is. Failure can be instructive, but given the dismal mental life of these characters, it isnt interesting.

Please authors, do not talk about your work in public! If you are quiet we just may charitably credit the final product with achieving your grand design. ( )

Excellent character development. I felt I knew the characters and cared about them. These are humans I do not often encounter in fiction, and I cared about them and felt that I knew them. Their motivations were real and not limited to these characters. I wondered if the lack of chronology was a device, but I thought it really added to the story. ( )

An excellent first novel, with an ambitious and successfully executed structure that spans thirty years and five points of view. The strong writing and fresh takes on the familiar themes of identity and family relationships made me forgive this book some flaws I probably would have had more serious problems with in any other book. Primarily, I found keeping track of the numerous characters difficult at the beginning and Jonah's character felt too broad at times. I found myself wanting something good to happen to Jonah throughout and it was painful each time he made a stupid mistake. Also, I am sure Chaon didn't intend us to buy the note he sends to Troy at the end and although that is true to Jonah's character it feels a little too tidy.The thoughtful and insightful examination on self invention and personal connections makes this book so worth reading. Beware though the first chapter is a little hard for dog lovers to read and if it weren't for the strong images and provocative first sentence I am not sure I would have read past that. ( )

It is hard to believe that this is the author's first novel. I was engrossed at the very start. And even though I was often confused with the "fractured chronology" in the timeline and had to often flip back to previous chapters to regain a sense of where I was in the story, it still did not interrupt the flow of the story. Each point of view was as interesting as the next. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it as a nice-paced thought provoking read. ( )

One of the most dreary books that I have read in a long while. I didn't think that any of the characters were likable and just found the whole book tiresome. ( )