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Witnessing his father's brutal death by lung cancer propels the nameless protagonist of Cycholl's novel to reinvent himself as a conman against the backdrop of a national wave of terrorism. After the funeral, the narrator takes to the highways like a postmodern Huck Finn adrift on the Mississippi, navigating the troubled landscape of Middle America. Every chapter, titled with a different place name, breaks the news of a terrorist attack, such as insurrectionists in Montana, religious fundamentalists in Memphis, or an exploding coke machine in an Atlanta newspaper office. Eventually, the fledgling confidence man washes up on the shores of a little nothing town, rents some office space, and hangs a shingle. The year that follows sees him trying to live an authentic life, even as he lies to everyone he meets. He works obsessively at unraveling the complex motivations of those around him as he compromises himself in more and more dangerous ways.
The author takes a deep dive into the American psyche, teasing out connections between ongoing and historic domestic terrorism, such as John Brown in Kansas and Morman militias in Utah. The country, like the narrator, is undergoing a severe identity crisis and is described in vivid metaphors. The language is often playful and irreverent, channeling the rhythms of the Beat Poets or the inscrutability of writers like Thomas Pynchon. As the main character falls down innumerable rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, amateur psychology, literary allusions, historical anecdotes, and red herring tangents, it can seem at times as if the center cannot hold under the weight of it all. Whether the author can somehow pull it off by the end becomes as intriguing a question as any other in the book. Cycholl's challenging novel is a solid addition to the literary mainstream and will undoubtedly be welcomed by history buffs and conspiracy theorists alike.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review