My husband told me about this book. He said he had started reading it when he was 16, but after the first chapter he couldn't finish it. Out of curiosity, we ordered it from Amazon and I started reading it. It's uneven. There's some nice writing, but mostly it's just...weird. The dolphin sex thing makes it hard to take seriously. I've only been able to get halfway through it, since it can't really hold my attention. ( )

There's a lot to like about the way this novel chronicles the interpersonal drama among a group of intellectuals and artists. The conversations are stylish, fragmentary, and mediated; the prose is compressed, with a cinematic sense of editing; a quasifuturistic theme (interspecies communication) provides ample opportunity for strange riffs; an atmosphere of geopolitical tension permeates obscurely at all times, threatening, at any moment, to condense into apocalypse—at its best, it recalls the energy and thrust of early DeLillo. At its worst, it reads like high-end erotica posing as lit: Mooney's attention to the sexuality of his [female] protagonist lurches towards the prurient at times (in the first thirty or so pages of the novel, she participates in three sex scenes, including one with a dolphin). ( )