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I balk at giving this novel the full four stars, but i don;t feel that it deserved only three. i think that much of the humor in the book was muddled and mired and played more to an audience of one, the writer himself, than anyone else. most of the time when it was supposed to be comedic it just seemed terribly pathetic (not the writing, but the actual happenings). this book is ridiculously self-indulgent and has none of the poignancy of his other books such as if i die in a combat zone and things we carried. this is however light years beyond his first novel, northern lights. i can see that this is supposed to be more of a black comedy but it comes off as an old man trying to make sense of his midlife crisis in a mocking and terribly self absorbed way. the only thing that really saved it for me and earned the four stars was that the writing, although choppy in its narrative, was perfect and once every hundred pages he floored me with some sentence or other about life or love or women or femenism or what have you.
