This modern autobiography of a supertramp re-creates in lavish detail the grammar, outlook and economy of the unhoused life as its author, a fortyish hitchhiker, zigzags between Austin, Tex., and Los Angeles. Lars Eighner has a weird prose style, which he uses with deadpan irony; his voice is by turns grandiloquent and simple, and his vision of the world involves abrupt distortions of scale, as people who are all-important at one moment shrink to ciphers in the next. Objects stir him more than human beings; he can rhapsodize over found scraps, like the personal computer, fished out of a Dumpster, on which he wrote this book. Lizbeth is his dog. She shares his wild life, and, while his language about her is often strangely distant, it allows her to become a compelling character in his odyssey -- as strange as any he encounters.

(review from The New York Times) ( )