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Titanic in length, epic in endeavor, and unrelenting in linguistic gymnastics, Limbodeswills Wain is not a novel for everyone. If you’re willing to navigate a jungle of colliding conversations steeped in theoretical concepts, this might be the tome for you. The plot tells the story of a young man’s journey from idealism to a degree of wisdom gained mostly through misadventure. It starts when student Dickey Tonking has the temerity to alter his professor’s dissertation with ideas of his own. The academic is suitably outraged but unfortunately dies in a fire many chalk up to suicide. As his acknowledged protégée, it falls to Dickey to edit the deceased's voluminous works. But before he can do so, he is embroiled in a lovers’ quarrel between a man and woman he’s never met and winds up killing the jealous male. What follows is a liaison with the girl he saved, a flight to South Africa to avoid prosecution, eventual arrest and incarceration, and ultimately the uncovering of information that may free him.
Make no mistake, author Dail is far less interested in the story line than he is in the opportunity it affords to inundate the reader in a tsunami of fevered conversations and soliloquies. These flights of psychedelic fancy go on many pages, exploring various characters’ opinions of philosophy, theology, psychiatry, communism, capitalism, good versus evil, right versus wrong, and more. Other authors have sailed stream-of-consciousness to greatness in such novels as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment, and Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano. Dail has aimed for the company of these immortals and should be lauded for that. Instead this book suffers from excess.