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Andy Sylvain senses that something is wrong with his life. A wealthy bond trader, he maintains a cordial relationship with his ex-wife, Madeline, a scholar who spent years joyously researching a dissertation on Russian history. He makes excuses to avoid seeing his current girlfriend, Lauren. Over the course of several days, Andy attempts to discern the source of the hollowness at the center of his oysters-and-champagne lifestyle. Leaving the East Coast, he flies to New Mexico to redeem a voucher and spends some time at a meditation resort. Deciding that psychedelics are not for him, he visits Las Vegas and does cocaine with Doug Caldera, a “man about town.” A mandated leave of absence from work leads him to an expensive wellness center and then to a gathering of white nationalists.
This is an extraordinary book, rich in observation and keenly attuned to the inner world of its spiritually impoverished protagonist. The mosaic-like accumulation of physical detail—much attention is paid to food, houses, shoes, and clothes—and the author’s deep understanding of and affection for her wryly comic but wholly credible cast of eccentrics cohere over time into a portrait of a troubled psyche that doubles as an indictment of a troubled nation, one consumed with technology and profits, plagued by demagogues and charlatans, and driving at full speed towards something dark. The final fifty pages—an extended sequence that is at once ominous, dream-like, and achingly sad—is some of the finest writing of the year, calling to mind the films of Martin McDonagh and the Coen Brothers. At once cerebral and melancholy, nimbly balancing metaphysics and the mundane, this is a book to be savored. It is an impressive achievement.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review